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Thank God, I don’t have a knife in my hand.

Thank God, I’m not the woman I was mere weeks before.

“Mother,” I say coldly, dumping the floured board into the sink and reaching for the vegetables I’ve already prewashed.

Fuck it, I’m employing my knife skills.

“I repeat,” she snaps. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Why don’t you start by telling me what it is you think I’m doing?”

“Dylan says?—”

“I’m not using again,” I growl, lining up green beans and efficiently trimming their ends.

Thank God, I played a chef once on a short-lived TV series.

Even with my blood pressure soaring and new rage filling me—my mother is calling me now? After everything?—I’m fairly confident that I’ll keep all my fingers.

Even when she scoffs and says, “Once an addict, always an addict.”

Same shit, different day.

I exhale, reach for my patience, but I don’t manage to grasp it, my tone sharp when I ask, “How’d you get this number?”

“You know there’s any number of ways to open up all sorts of doors.”

In other words, she bribed someone to get it—or Dylan did.

Ugh.

“What do you need, Mom?” I say on a sigh, making a mental note to pass this information along to Hudson. “More money?”

There’s a long moment of tense silence. “You have a lot of nerve, girl.”

“I have a lot of nerve?” I ask, and it’s like now that I’ve begun, I can’t stop. All of the little injustices are flashing through my mind, one after another like a fucked-up slideshow. “Have I misremembered and you’re the one who paid for your house? And that last cruise you took? And the new car you got last year?”

My mom has her problems, but I’ve always supported her.

And I never was resentful of it.

Or was never aware of that resentment.

Because it’s sure as fuck blaring to the forefront of my consciousness right here and now.

“That’s beside the point,” she says. “We need to talk about poor Dylan about what you’re doing to him.”

“Poor Dylan?” I grit out, my anger reaching volcanic proportions. “Poor Dylan?”

I set the knife down.

And look at that, I’ve rage-finished the green beans in record time.

“Yes, poor Dylan,” she snaps.

I reach for the peeler, dump the tiny organic carrots I’ve left the stems on onto the cutting board, and start sheering off their tough exteriors. “Tell me how the man who has financially and physically abused me over the last years deserves any amount of sympathy.”

There’s the barest moment of silence, as though I’ve taken her by surprise.