Seventeen seconds after I arrived home in my Army uniform, my mother called the police—and seventeen minutes later, she was begging them to stop asking questions.

The Cullman County Detention Center was a concrete bunker set amid flat pastures thirty miles south of Cedar Ridge.

The visiting room was small, partitioned down the middle by thick, scratched Plexiglas that smelled of industrial floor cleaner and stale sweat.

I sat on the cold steel stool, still wearing my uniform. I hadn't washed the blood from my lip, and I hadn't changed into civilian clothes. If she was going to face me, she was going to face the reality of what I had become.

The heavy steel door on the opposite side of the glass buzzed open.

Elaine Cole shuffled into the room.

The transformation was horrific. The pastel cardigan and pearls were gone, replaced by a drab orange jumpsuit that hung off her narrow shoulders like a sack. Her hair, which she had spent two hours styling every morning of my life, was greasy, unwashed, and pinned back with a cheap plastic clip.

Without her makeup, the lines around her mouth were deep and bitter, pulling her face down into a permanent scowl.

She sat down on the stool across from me, her wrists shackled to a chain around her waist. She looked at the telephone handset on her side of the glass, then looked at me.

For thirty seconds, neither of us touched the phones.

Finally, she picked up the receiver with trembling fingers. I lifted mine to my ear.

"Are you satisfied?" she asked.

Her voice wasn't weak. It was shrill, bitter, dripping with the poison that had festered inside her for decades.

"Satisfied with what, Mom?"

"You destroyed this family," she hissed, leaning as close to the Plexiglas as the waist chain would allow. "You brought those federal thugs into our home. You humiliated your father. You threw Daniel into a cage like an animal. For what? For your pride? Because you were too high and mighty to be the wife of a Mercer?"

I stared at her through the scratched plastic.

"Daniel Mercer tried to kill me three hours ago, Mom."

Elaine didn't blink. Not a single muscle in her face twitched with concern.

"He was protecting his family," she said, her voice dropping into a venomous whisper. "He was protecting everything we sacrificed to build. You think you're holy because you put on that green suit? You're nothing! You were always selfish! From the day you were born, you took and you took, and when it was time for you to give back—when it was time to save your father's business—you ran away like a thief in the night!"

"I gave you four years of my life," I said, my voice steady, completely devoid of the tears that had threatened to choke me earlier. "I spent four years in the dirt, sending money back to an account I thought Dad was using to pay off his debts. But you took it, didn't you? You took every dollar the Army paid me and used it to buy jewelry."

Elaine let out a short, ugly laugh. "You owed us! We fed you! We clothed you! We put you through school! And you humiliated me in front of the entire church! Do you know what Mrs. Dalton said to me when you didn't show up for the rehearsal dinner? Do you have any idea the shame I had to carry?"

"So you made me a convict," I said.

"It was better than the truth," Elaine snarled, her knuckles whitening against the receiver. "A bad daughter who went to prison is a tragedy. A daughter who walks away because she thinks she’s better than her own blood is an insult! I told them you were a criminal because that’s what you are! You stole our peace! You stole our reputation!"

I looked at the woman on the other side of the glass.

I looked at the wrinkles around her eyes, the thin, bloodless line of her lips, the manic gleam of self-delusion in her stare.

And suddenly, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

There had never been a mother here. There had only been an architect of appearances, a woman who lived in terror of what the neighbors whispered behind the church pews, willing to sacrifice her own child on the altar of small-town respectability.

"You told Hannah I was dead," I said.

Elaine sneered. "Hannah was weak. She cried for you every night. She wouldn't listen to Daniel. She wouldn't cooperate. I had to end it. Once you were dead, she stopped asking questions."

I slowly lowered the telephone receiver from my ear.

Elaine began tapping furiously on the glass with her handcuffed knuckles, her voice muffled into incoherent squawks through the thick plastic. *"Rebecca! Don't you hang up on me! Pick up that phone! Rebecca!"*

I didn't pick it up.

I stood up from the stool. I adjusted my patrol cap, pulling the brim down until it sat two fingers above the bridge of my nose.

I looked through the glass one last time.

"Goodbye, Elaine," I said.

She couldn't hear me through the plastic, but she read my lips.

Her face contorted in a scream of absolute, impotent rage, her hands slamming against the Plexiglas until the guard behind her grabbed her shoulders and forced her back toward the heavy steel door.