“I agree,” Ellie said through her sniffles as she crammed another Oreo into her mouth.

“Whitney,” Claire said, clearheaded and ready for action, “you should post something about it on your Instagram. Blow the whole thing wide-open. Because they’ve got to be taking advantage of other moms too, right?”

“Yes! Whitney, you should,” Gwen said, nodding. “You have so many followers. It would definitely get the word out.” They all looked at Whitney, who hadn’t moved from her strange, inward stillness on the couch.

“Maybe,” Whitney said at last, her eyes still unfocused, her hands still clenched in her lap, pressing the nail of her right thumb, hard, into the flesh of her left palm.

“‘Maybe’?” Claire asked, bouncing Charlie in her arms.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?” Amara asked. “This is serious, Whitney.”

“I know that,” Whitney said, and for the first time on this uncommon day, she looked at them straight on. “So think about the consequences. Yes, I have a lot of followers. And they love me—they love us. But they hate us a little bit too, because we show them the life they want and will probably never have. If we tell them about TrueMommy, that all this perfection we’ve been selling them is a lie, imagine how gleefully they’ll rip us apart. They’ll think we knew exactly what we were doing. This is what scandals are made of. It’ll be goodbye to the coffee-table book, and hello to a whole different kind of fame: the Pill-Popping Playgroup, the Stay-at-Home Junkies.”

“Please tell me that this isn’t about the fucking coffee-table book,” Amara hissed, her hands clenching into fists.

“It’s not,” Whitney said. “It’s about the fact that once we go public, we could have people—reporters, tabloids—invading every aspect of our lives. They’ll follow us around, sticking cameras into our babies’ faces. They’ll interview people from our past, asking if they ever could have known we’d turn out like this. They’ll try to dig up other unsavory things we may have done. We’ll be marked forever as bad mothers. I don’t want this to be the first thing that someone sees when they google Hope twenty years from now, but it might be. Our children will get dragged into this.”

“Wait,” Gwen said, shaking a bit and cradling Reagan in her lap. “No one would call Child Protective Services on us, right? They couldn’t— I mean, we didn’t know.”

“Oh, God. We all kind of did, though,” Amara said, sinking down onto the floor, her face naked and vulnerable. She reached out to take Charlie from Claire and held him close against her chest. “Right? I mean, none of us has been shouting from the mountaintops that we were taking this supplement. On some level, we knew something was off about it. It was too good to be true—the energy it gave us, the way it was finally easy to lose weight. How could we not know?” The other women’s eyes grew guilty. Gwen began to silently cry, large droplets streaming down her cheeks as Amara went on. “They’ll ask me why I was paying for it out of my private banking account, why I didn’t talk about such a big monthly purchase with my husband. They’ll ask Whitney why she didn’t write long, glowing posts about it online.”

The mothers all clutched their children and looked at one another with a growing certainty. Claire sensed a seismic shift, a planet stopping its spin mid-orbit and heading the other way, the wrong way.

“Don’t post about it, Whitney,” Ellie said.

“No,” Claire said. “Come on. I think people will think that you’re brave for coming forward.”

“And I think that you’re vastly overestimating the generosity of human nature,” Amara said.

“Then I could tell people,” Claire said. “I could try to spread the word.”

“We’re your only playgroup. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how you knew about it. With all due respect, Claire,” Whitney said, “this isn’t your decision to make. You’re not the one who will suffer.”

“I could look into filing an anonymous complaint with the Better Business Bureau,” Gwen said. “Then at least we’ll have done something.”

“That’s a really good idea, Gwen,” Whitney said. “And when TrueMommy contacts me about the next shipment, I can tell them that we know what they’re up to and threaten to go public if they don’t stop what they’re doing. They don’t need to know that we don’t mean it. Maybe that will be a deterrent.”

“So we don’t spread the word,” Amara said. “But is there some way under the radar that we can figure out what the fuck is going on with these monsters?”

“A private investigator,” Gwen said haltingly. She cleared her throat. “It’s embarrassing, but I was doing research on them anyway, because of the Christopher . . . thing. I found some guys online who seemed like they might be good. I could hire one of them for both—”

Whitney inhaled sharply. “You want to entrust this information to a stranger from the Internet who seems like he might be good?” she asked, her eyes blazing. “You want a private investigator—not exactly known to be the most honorable guys on the planet—poking around in your life, having dirt on you, the kind of dirt that could impact your child’s well-being?”

“I–I—” Gwen stuttered, then shook her head.

“The more people who know about this, the greater chance it has of coming out, of destroying everything,” Whitney said. She took a deep breath and looked them each in the eye. “No. I vote that we don’t tell anyone about this. No friends, no husbands. We keep going about our lives as normally as we can. We help one another get through this, like we’ve helped one another before. We do our best to move forward. I know we want to destroy TrueMommy—believe me, I’d like nothing more than to burn them to the ground—but we’ve got to think of our families. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Ellie and Meredith said in unison.

Vicki nodded.

“I . . . I guess so,” Gwen said.

They all looked at Amara. “Yeah,” she said, and then let out a long, low sigh. “Shit. Yeah.”

Whitney fixed her gaze on Claire, and the other mothers followed suit. “Claire,” she said, “we need to know that you understand and that you’re with us on this.”

“I . . . ,” Claire said, shifting uncomfortably. “I mean, I’m not going to tell people if you don’t want me to.”

“We need your word,” Whitney said. “No getting drunk with your friends and bringing it up as a fun, crazy anecdote, even with our names removed. You can’t ever say anything about this.”