I wonder how long it will be before I can even comfortably be present in the same room with my mother again. This morning, before she left the hotel, I thought about calling her out. And then, while Abby and Afton and I were having breakfast, Mom texted me asking about what we were planning on doing today (she didn’t read the folder, either, apparently), and I was so tempted to text her back, Oh, nothing, just hanging out in the room. Or do you and whoever-it-was need it again? It seemed like you were pretty busy in there yesterday.

And then I imagined Mom staring down at her phone, horrified, almost as shocked as I was yesterday, sick with knowing that she’s caught. Terrified that I know who she really is now. Dreading that she’s going to have to look me in the face at some point and finally tell me the truth.

That might make me feel somewhat better. If she could feel just a little bit of what I am feeling. If she would fess up to it. If she’d say she’s sorry. If she promised not to do it again.

But if we all put our cards on the table, I can still only see one probable outcome: divorce—a word I associate with a few hazy memories of voices screaming at each other from behind closed doors and the silhouette of a man holding a suitcase. And this time the man with the suitcase will be Pop. My jaw clenches at the thought. I’ll be damned—yes, damned, I decide, which feels like an older person’s word, but I embrace it—I’ll be damned if I lose Pop because my mother is a selfish slut.

There it is. The word. I mean it this time. We aren’t supposed to use the word slut because that’s what men used to call women who dared to have sex outside of their control. There are a lot of words for it: strumpet, hussy, tramp, skank, ho. Any woman who might possibly enjoy sex and actually want to participate in the act, who hooked up with more than one partner—there must be something wrong with a woman like that. She should be punished. Slut.

But I can’t think of another word. My mother has betrayed us with sex.

And why? Why would she do it? It isn’t like she’s sex starved. She and Pop have sex. She isn’t one of those repressed and lonely housewives from the fifties who never really had a choice but to get married to the first available beefcake and have babies and do her marital duty. Mom is a modern woman. A freaking surgeon. She cuts people open and takes them apart and then puts them back together. My mother is a titan. She’s a badass.