“Ma.” Miriam looked at her mother with mingled affection and exasperation. “It’s not that easy. I think The Weatherman’s owners are deeply involved in something illegal. Money laundering. Dirty money. Insider trading too, probably. I’d like to nail them, but they’re going to play dirty if I try. It took them about five minutes to come up with cause for dismissal, and they said they wouldn’t press charges if I kept my mouth shut.”

“What kind of charges?” Iris demanded.

“They say they’ve got logfiles to prove I was net-surfing pornography at work. They…they—” Miriam found she was unable to go on speaking.

“So were you?” Iris asked quietly.

“No!” Miriam startled herself with her vehemence. She caught Iris’s sly glance and felt sheepish. “Sorry. No, I wasn’t. It’s a setup. But it’s so easy to claim—and virtually impossible to disprove.”

“Are you going to be able to get another job?” Iris prodded.

“Yes.” Miriam fell silent.

“Then it’s all right. I really couldn’t do with my daughter expecting me to wash her underwear after all these years.”

“Mother!” Then Miriam spotted the sardonic grin.

“Tell me about it. I mean, everything. Warm a mother’s heart, spill the beans on the assholes who took her daughter’s job away.”

Miriam flopped down on the big overstuffed sofa. “It’s either a very long story or a very short one,” she confessed. “I got interested in a couple of biotech companies that looked just a little bit odd. Did some digging, got Paulette involved—she digs like a drilling platform—and we came up with some dirt. A couple of big companies are being used as targets for money laundering.

“Turns out that The Weatherman’s parent company is into them, deep. They decided it would be easier to fire us and threaten us than to run the story and take their losses. I’m probably going to get home and find a SLAPP lawsuit sitting in my mailbox.”

“So. What are you going to do about it?”

Miriam met her mother’s penetrating stare. “Ma, I spent three years there. And they fired me cold, without even trying to get me to shut up, at the first inconvenience. Do you really think I’m going to let them get away with that if I can help it?”

“What about loyalty?” Iris asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I gave them mine.” Miriam shrugged. “That’s part of why this hurts. You earn loyalty by giving it.”

“You’d have made a good feudal noble. They were big on loyalty, too. And blind obedience, in return.”

“Wrong century, wrong side of the Atlantic, in case you hadn’t noticed.”