What Mother Knows

Part 1 - Chapters 1 to 5

Lauren Snow stands at the edge of the dock with the gun still in her hand and the problem of it plain in front of her. If the police walk in and find her holding the weapon that killed her husband, no story she tells will matter. So she throws it. The gun arcs out over Lake Austin and disappears into the water, and with it goes the only hard proof of what happened in that house. She has bought herself time, the minutes before anyone official arrives, and she spends them making herself into something else.

By the time the police come, she is a distraught wife, collapsed in grief, and playing the part wears her down. She commits to it fully, and every tear she manufactures locks her deeper into the lie. She is no longer a woman who might explain herself. She is a woman who has already decided what she will be seen as, and she will have to be that for as long as this lasts.

Josh on the Field

Miles away, Josh King is supposed to be thinking about softball. The game is in front of him, the field is under him, and his mind keeps sliding away to Kinsey. He is worried about her, guilty about her, a man who left his little sister behind in Texas and cannot stop turning the leaving over in his head. The worry sits under everything, even here, even in the middle of a game that is supposed to be an escape.

The guilt has a history. Josh has spent years trying to get Kinsey to come to Denver, asking her again and again to leave Texas and start something with him. She refuses every time, and she refuses for their mother. Her loyalty to Lauren holds her in place, and Josh cannot argue her out of it. Every invitation he makes and she turns down leaves him more frustrated, more certain that the woman he is trying to protect her from is the one she will not abandon.

His reasons go back further than Kinsey knows. Josh grew up under Edward Tower's roof, and the stepfather's cruelty finally pushed him into fighting back. He broke Edward's jaw, and the family answered by sending him away to boarding school. The punishment became the thing that saved him. From there Josh worked his way through Clemson and then law school without a cent of Tower's money, and the poverty of those years was the price of never owing that man anything. He came out of it free, and he has kept that freedom ever since.

Nine Missed Calls

Then he checks his phone. Nine missed calls from Kinsey, and a text that makes the field and the game fall away. Tower is dead. Murdered. Kinsey is asking him to come home, and the request pulls at the exact thing Josh swore off, the family he walked away from.

When he calls her, she is pleading. She needs him back, and she needs him for more than the funeral. Kinsey is fighting to stay sober, and Josh's presence is part of what holds her together. She asks him to come, and Josh says yes. He books the next flight. The decision commits him to walking back into the house and facing his mother, and he makes it anyway, for Kinsey.

But there is a line he will not cross yet. Kinsey wants him to speak with their mother, and Josh refuses. Not now. The refusal keeps his distance intact, holds the confrontation off, and lets him get on the plane without having decided what he will say to Lauren when he sees her.

Relief

In the quiet before the flight, Josh turns the news over and finds the feeling underneath it is not grief. He thinks about the last words Tower ever said to him, cruel words, meant to wound, and he understands that what he feels is relief. The man who said those things is gone.

He knows what waits for him in Austin, an emotional reunion with a mother he has spent years avoiding, and he decides not to have it. He will put his arms around his sister and let that be the reunion, and he will push everything else about his mother aside.

The family history sits under all of it. Josh raised Kinsey. He remembers his father's death, remembers stepping into the space a father should have filled, and the memory sharpens his sense of duty toward her. She is not just his sister. She is the person he brought up, and she is in that house.

The Phone in the Cushions

In Austin, Lauren is still building her story, and one piece of it is unfinished. Tower's 911 call is still live. She ends it and hides the phone, destroying the record of whatever he said before he died. The evidence goes into the cushions, out of sight, and the risk goes up with it. If anyone finds that phone, the call log will tell a story she cannot control.

Then she hears it. A muffled voice somewhere in the house, and the question of whether someone else is in there with her. She goes to investigate, and what she finds is Tower's phone, the one she thought she had dealt with, and the voice on it is a dispatcher. The police are already coming. Her hiding of the phone did not buy her what she thought it did. The call went through, and the response is already in motion.

The Flight to Austin

Josh spends the flight trying to sleep and failing. The hours pass with him uneasy, turning the reunion over, and by the time the plane lands in Austin he is locked up, his body braced for a house he swore he would never enter again. He does not know how he will face his mother. He only knows Kinsey is waiting, and that is enough to keep him walking off the plane.

His mother remarried Tower Snow soon after his father's death, chasing security and opportunity, and the speed of it shocked Josh and wounded Kinsey. Tower treated both children as nuisances, wanting distance from them, and that coldness hardened Josh's resolve to protect his sister. Kinsey snuck into Josh's room at night wanting comfort, and the two drew closer in the unfamiliar house. Then Josh left for boarding school, following the expected path, and the departure crushed Kinsey, who felt abandoned. Without him she fell apart, wanting her brother's protection, and Josh's guilt grew alongside his helplessness. He confronted his mother, asking her to be more engaged and to help Kinsey, but met hostility and remained unable to rescue her.

Return to Austin

Josh lands in Austin and takes an Uber to the Four Seasons, wanting to reach his family while dreading being pulled back into old pain. He checks in for three nights, limiting his stay as he weighs Kinsey's stability against his Denver litigation case. In the hotel bar he sees his mother on television and realizes the murder is a major media story, and he worries reporters may identify him as the mayor's son, raising the risk of a media confrontation. Kinsey texts him asking if he has arrived, wanting him to come up, and directs him to the Congressional Suite. Josh checks his tired reflection and his nerves, steadying himself, then decides to face his mother for Kinsey's sake. He rides the elevator to the top floor, wanting to confront his family, and arrives at their door with his heart in his throat.

Part 2 - Chapters 6 to 8

Josh arrives at the Congressional Suite and is admitted by Tower's bodyguard, deciding to face his family despite his reluctance. He has been avoiding this moment, and the hesitation shows in the beat before he knocks, but he chooses to walk through the door anyway. Crossing that threshold commits him to whatever the family has become in the wake of Tower's death. The reluctance is not casual. It is the accumulated weight of everything that has kept him away from the suite and from the people inside it, and the knock is the first admission that avoidance is no longer possible. Once the door opens and he steps through, there is no retreat available to him. He has tied his own hands by entering, and whatever the family has become since Tower died is now something he has to live inside rather than observe from a distance.

Kinsey embraces Josh and shows him her pregnancy, renewing his commitment to support her. The news lands as both a shock and an anchor, and whatever distance has grown between them is now bound tighter than before. He accepts the responsibility without argument, understanding that his sister needs him in a way she has not before. The shock comes first because he did not see it coming, and the anchor follows because a pregnancy is a fact that cannot be argued with or postponed. The distance between them, whatever it has been and whatever caused it, is pulled closed by the sheer weight of the news. He does not negotiate the responsibility or ask for time to think. He takes it on immediately, because the embrace and the announcement together make clear that Kinsey is asking him to be present in a way she has never asked before, and he understands that refusing would be a kind of abandonment he is not willing to commit.

Josh enters the living room and greets his mother, who hugs him before dismissing him to strategize with her staff for a press conference. The embrace is warm but brief, and then she is gone, swallowed by the machinery of damage control. Josh is left standing in the suite with the sense that the family's grief is being managed like a media event. The warmth of the hug is real enough, but it lasts only a moment before the demands of her office pull her away. She does not linger, and she does not ask him how he is. She moves directly into the work of shaping what the public will see, and Josh is left in the room she vacated, holding the distinct impression that whatever the family is feeling is being processed as a communications problem rather than a human one. The grief is not absent. It is being packaged, and he can feel the difference.

Josh and Kinsey go to the hotel restaurant, where Kinsey reveals Tower's affairs and physical abuse of their mother. This is the heart of the section, the confession Kinsey has been carrying alone, and she tells him what their mother endured behind the closed doors of the marriage. The revelation reframes everything Josh thought he understood about the family and about the man his mother married. The affairs are one thing, a betrayal that might be absorbed into the general story of a powerful man's weaknesses, but the physical abuse is another entirely. Kinsey has been holding this knowledge by herself, and the telling of it changes the shape of the past. What Josh believed about the marriage, about his mother's choices, about the man Tower was behind the public face, all of it has to be reassembled around this new information. The confession does not just add a fact. It reorganizes everything that came before it.

Kinsey admits she hid the abuse from Josh, and Josh apologizes for cutting Tower out of their conversations and leaving her to carry the burden alone. The apology is an admission of his own failure, a recognition that his silence and distance made Kinsey the sole keeper of a terrible secret. The dynamic between them shifts here, the old ease replaced by something rawer and more honest. Kinsey's admission is that she made a choice to keep him out of it, and Josh's apology is that he made that choice easier by refusing to engage with Tower at all. His silence was not neutral. It placed the entire weight of the secret on his sister, and he recognizes that now. The old ease between them, the shorthand and the unspoken understanding, is gone. What replaces it is more exposed and more truthful, and neither of them can go back to the way it was.

Josh asks Kinsey whether their mother could have shot Tower, and Kinsey insists their mother is incapable of it, though Josh remains unsure. Kinsey's certainty is absolute, but Josh cannot match it, and the question hangs between them unanswered. His doubt becomes the first crack in the family's defense, a possibility he cannot quite dismiss. Kinsey does not hesitate. She declares their mother incapable of the act, and her certainty is total. But Josh cannot get there with her. The question does not resolve. It sits between them, and his inability to answer it the way she wants him to is itself a kind of statement. The doubt is not something he chose. It arrived on its own, and once it is there he cannot pretend it is not. It becomes the first fracture in the family's unified front, a possibility he cannot set aside no matter how much he might want to.

Kinsey asks Josh to retrieve items from the pool house, and he reluctantly returns to the estate, facing reporters and police at the gate. He does not want to go back, but Kinsey needs him to, and so he goes. He walks into the gauntlet of cameras and officers that now surround the family home, the estate transformed into a spectacle. The reluctance is real, and he does not hide it from himself, but Kinsey's need outweighs it. He goes because she asked, and the going means passing through the gate where reporters and police have gathered, where the family home has become something to be photographed and investigated rather than lived in. The estate is no longer private. It is a scene, and he has to walk through it to do what his sister asked.

Josh walks the estate driveway, recalling childhood memories with Kinsey before spotting his stepbrothers' matching Porsches. The familiar ground stirs old recollections of growing up here with his sister, and then the cars bring him back to the present. The stepbrothers have arrived, and the sight of them is a cold reminder of everything that has changed. The driveway carries him back to childhood, to the years he and Kinsey spent on this ground, and for a moment the past is more present than the investigation. Then the matching Porsches appear, and the present returns with a jolt. The stepbrothers are here, and their arrival is a reminder that the estate is not only a crime scene and a media spectacle. It is also a place where the family's divisions are about to be made plain.

Edward and Stephen confront Josh, insult Kinsey and accuse him of sniffing after Tower's money, and Josh trades barbs before they leave. The stepbrothers waste no time, aiming their contempt at Kinsey and their suspicion at Josh, framing him as a fortune hunter circling the estate. Josh gives as good as he gets, and the exchange ends with them walking away, but the hostility lingers. Edward and Stephen do not bother with grief or with any pretense of family feeling. They go straight to insult, directing their contempt at Kinsey and their accusation at Josh, casting him as a man circling the estate in search of Tower's money. Josh does not absorb it passively. He fires back, and the exchange is sharp on both sides. They walk away, but the hostility does not walk away with them. It stays in the air after they are gone, and Josh is left with the clear sense that the stepbrothers are not allies in any of this.

Josh wonders whether his stepbrothers could be involved in the murder given their lack of grief. Their coldness unsettles him, because where he would expect shock or sorrow he finds only sneering and accusation. The question takes root: if they feel nothing for their father's death, what else might they be capable of? The lack of grief is what does it. He would expect shock, or sorrow, or some sign that the death of their father has landed on them at all. Instead there is only sneering and accusation, and the absence of feeling is more unsettling than any display of it could be. The question forms on its own. If they feel nothing, then what else might they be capable of? He does not answer it, but it takes root, and it stays with him as he continues toward the pool house.

A police officer directs Josh around the house to the pool house, and Josh notices a silver-haired man in a leather jacket staring at him. The man's gaze is fixed and deliberate, an unknown figure watching from the edges of the investigation. Josh registers him before moving on, unsettled by the attention. The officer's direction sends him around the house rather than through it, and on the way he becomes aware of being watched. The man is silver-haired, in a leather jacket, and his gaze is not casual. It is fixed and deliberate, the look of someone who has chosen to watch Josh specifically. Josh notices him, registers the attention, and moves on, but the unsettled feeling goes with him. The man is unknown, and he is watching from the edges of the investigation, and that is enough to stay in Josh's mind.

Josh walks the side path past the garden and koi pond, observing detectives and scuba divers searching the lake for evidence. The estate has become a crime scene, the familiar landscape of his childhood now combed by investigators. The water itself is being dredged for what the killer left behind, and Josh passes through it all as a stranger in his own history. The side path takes him past the garden and the koi pond, and everywhere there are investigators. Detectives work the grounds, and scuba divers search the lake, dredging the water for whatever the killer might have left behind. The landscape of his childhood has been converted into a crime scene, and he moves through it as an outsider. The places he remembers are now evidence, and he is a stranger in his own history, passing through ground that belongs to the investigation rather than to him.

Josh enters the pool house and finds Kinsey's photographs on the refrigerator, including one of them with their father. The small domestic detail stops him, a picture of the two of them with the man who is now dead, pinned to a fridge in the building where the family kept its ordinary life. He has come to collect what Kinsey asked for, but the photograph holds him in place, a reminder of the father he is still trying to understand. The photograph is a small thing, pinned to a refrigerator in a pool house, and it stops him completely. It shows him and Kinsey with their father, the man who is now dead, and it belongs to the ordinary life the family kept in this building. He came to collect what Kinsey asked for, but the photograph holds him where he stands. It is a reminder of the father he is still trying to understand, and the understanding does not come. He is left looking at the picture, suspended between the errand and the man.

Josh sets out to distract Kinsey from the family crisis by spending the day running errands with her. The errands change nothing about the situation, but the shared hours deepen his protective bond with her. Kinsey, for her part, wants to escape the fallout, and she repeatedly refuses Josh's offer to take her to Denver. Her refusals keep her trapped in the middle of the scandal rather than away from it. The errands are not a solution. They change nothing about the arrest or the investigation or the family's exposure, but the hours spent together do something else. They deepen the protective bond between Josh and Kinsey, and that bond is the point. Kinsey wants to escape the fallout, and Josh offers to take her to Denver, but she refuses, again and again. The refusals are hers to make, and she makes them, and the effect is that she stays in the middle of the scandal rather than away from it. She chooses to remain where the damage is, and Josh can only stay with her.

Josh wants to avoid his mother, so he spends no time with her and instead watches her press conference. Seeing her perform leaves him nauseated by her political theatrics. Wanting to clear his head, he goes running along Lady Bird Lake and watches the bats emerge, and the sight shifts him into memories of his father. He does not want to see his mother, so he does not see her. Instead he watches her press conference, and watching her perform leaves him sickened by the political theatrics of it. The performance is what gets to him, the way she turns the moment into something staged. He goes running along Lady Bird Lake to clear his head, and he watches the bats emerge, and the sight of them carries him into memories of his father.

Part 3 - Chapters 9 to 12

Josh is still in the hotel suite with Kinsey when his phone rings, and the caller is Samer Zabaneh. Whatever plans Josh had to stay with Kinsey dissolve the moment he learns why Samer is calling: his mother wants to see him at the jail. The call costs him the time he wanted with Kinsey, and he leaves her alone in the suite to head for the criminal justice center.

The Jail

Getting inside is its own ordeal. Josh has to pass through a media mob gathered outside the criminal justice center, a wall of cameras and reporters standing between him and his mother. He meets Samer, who escorts him into a private room, and there Josh sees Lauren for the first time in a jail jumpsuit. The sight of her in custody frames everything that follows.

Lauren asks Josh to believe she did not kill Tower. She wants his trust, and she wants it despite the evidence pointing at her, the evidence of her gun. Josh does not simply accept her word. He confronts her about the murder weapon directly, and Lauren admits the gun was accessible in her nightstand. The admission does not clear her; it confirms the weapon was within her reach, and Josh has to weigh her claim of innocence against that fact.

Then Lauren asks the thing that shocks and angers him: she wants Josh to represent her. She wants a tight circle of trust around her defense, and she is asking her own son to stand inside it. The request lands badly. Josh is shocked and angry, and the scene turns on that anger, on a son being pulled into defending a mother accused of murder with her own gun.

Lauren does not stop at asking for a lawyer. She claims Tower's death may be part of a political conspiracy, an argument meant to justify her distrust of her own law firm. She is trying to explain why she cannot rely on the people who would normally defend her, and why she needs Josh instead. Josh refuses to commit. He leaves the jail without agreeing to represent her, intending to return to Denver and put the case behind him.

The Silver-Haired Man

Outside, Josh spots the silver-haired man watching him again. He chases him, but the man escapes. The pursuit settles nothing and deepens the mystery, leaving Josh with the knowledge that someone is tracking him and no answer as to why.

The Hotel Room and the Television

Back at the hotel, Josh sees television coverage naming him as his mother's lawyer. The report alarms him because it is false, and because it has already gone out into the world. He tells Kinsey the report is false, but then he admits the rest: Lauren asked him to represent her, and he plans to leave. He urges Kinsey to come to Denver with him, and she refuses. She will not leave their mother. The refusal puts the siblings on opposite sides of the same decision, Kinsey staying close to Lauren while Josh tries to go.

Josh packs and heads to the airport, trying to escape the case and the media attention. At the gate, Kinsey texts him lovingly, and the message weakens his resolve. He decides not to board. He tells the ticket agent to close the door, and he turns back toward the case.

Before the Arraignment

Josh wakes early before the arraignment and talks himself into representing Lauren. He arranges support from his firm, and the decision is made: he will stand with his mother after all.

The Arraignment

Josh stands in Kinsey’s borrowed suit, the Dallas Cowboys tie a small act of loyalty against his better judgment, and feels the weight of the decision settle over him. He does not want to commit to defending his mother, but the clothes and the tie push him toward agreement, and he consents provisionally. The choice costs him something immediate and real: the freedom to walk away cleanly, to say later that he never really signed on.

He wants to slip into the courthouse unnoticed, but the reporters recognize him and Kinsey, and the two of them are mobbed. The cameras and shouted questions close in, and Josh has to shove through the crowd, the low profile he wanted stripped away before he even reaches the doors.

At the defense table, his presence does the work he dreaded. The courtroom reads his arrival as confirmation that he will represent his mother, and the stakes rise with every glance in his direction. His nerves rise with them.

He tries to size up the prosecution and instead finds Sophie Bertram sitting at the DA’s table. The discovery shakes him emotionally and scatters his focus, complicating the calm he was trying to assemble.

He looks for his family’s support and finds none of it: no grandparents, no aunt, no uncle, no stepbrothers. The empty seats sharpen his suspicion of Edward and Stephen, and the absence sits with him as the proceedings begin.

Judge Marvis moves to arraign the defendant, reading the first-degree murder charge against Mayor Snow and formally opening the case. The charge lands in the room with the full weight of the law behind it.

Mayor Snow declares her innocence, pleading not guilty and calling the case a farce. She glares at DA Parmer as she says it, and the outburst costs her the judge’s warning about extra comments.

Judge Marvis sets the conditions: bail at $2 million, with a hearing in two weeks. The case transforms from a shock into a scheduled legal fight with a date attached.

Mayor Snow turns to Josh for reassurance, telling him she knew he would come. The words bind him further to her defense, whether or not he is ready to carry it.

Carson Parmer asserts dominance, welcoming Josh to “the big show,” mocking his tie, and revealing his own Cowboys past. The needling provokes Josh’s anger and marks the prosecutor as a man who intends to enjoy this.

Sophie acknowledges Josh without prolonging the scene, speaking briefly before walking off. She leaves him rattled and aware of the onlookers who watched the exchange.

Josh chooses avoidance over confrontation, grabbing Kinsey to find a back way out and escape the media waiting for him.

Part 4 - Chapters 13 to 15

Josh sits with the discovery file spread out before him and makes his first hard call: Kinsey stays out of it. He reviews the material alone and decides she cannot be part of the case, a choice that costs her the role she wanted in his work. Whatever partnership they had built is set aside before the file is even fully read, and Josh takes on the weight of the evidence by himself.

Then he presses play on the 911 call. Tower's voice comes through the recording, ambiguous to the last: "She... I'm shot." Josh listens more than once, trying to hear something that will settle the question. The words refuse to resolve into a clean story. They could mean his mother pulled the trigger, or they could mean something else entirely, and the doubt lodges itself in him and stays.

The police report gives him his mother's version of the night. She told the responding officers she saw a hooded intruder flee through the back patio door. If true, the story explains everything, and Josh reads it knowing exactly how much weight it will have to bear. He sets the report down and understands that the defense may rest on that single claim.

The estate's security cameras were off that night. All of them. Josh checks the records and finds the same answer everywhere: no footage, no timeline, nothing to corroborate or contradict anyone's account. When his mother is asked about it, she denies knowing how to operate the system at all. The gap sits there in the file, and the longer Josh stares at it, the less it looks like bad luck.

He turns to the crime-scene photographs. Tower died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. The images are clinical and final, and they close off any hope that the death was something other than what the charge says it is. Josh studies them until there is nothing left to learn, then closes the folder.

The dive team pulled the murder weapon out of Lake Austin. The registration traces back to Lauren, and her fingerprints are on it. Josh reads the ballistics and registration paperwork and understands that the physical evidence is no longer circumstantial. The gun ties his mother to the shooting in the most direct way evidence can, and there is no version of the story in which that fact disappears.

Restaurant eyewitnesses supply the final piece. Two hours before the shooting, multiple people heard Lauren threaten to kill Tower. Not a heated remark misremembered, not a tone misread: a threat, repeated by witnesses who have no reason to invent it. Josh sets the statements down and reaches the conclusion the file has been building toward since the first page. The case is nearly unwinnable. Motive, means, and opportunity, all of it documented, all of it pointing one direction.

In the middle of the worst of it, his phone lights up. Sophie texts him, asking to meet. Josh agrees, and the connection that has been dormant between them comes back to life, however briefly, in the middle of a murder case that involves his own mother. He tells himself it is only lunch, but he knows better.

They meet for lunch, and Josh does not hedge. He admits he has thought about her constantly for years. It is a plain, unguarded confession, the kind he has not allowed himself anywhere else in this investigation. Sophie listens without looking away, and for a moment the case is not the only thing in the room.

Sophie answers with her own honesty. She tells him she nearly reached out to him in Denver a year ago, and then chose not to. The admission lands with the weight of all the time that decision cost them both. Josh starts to say something about what might have been, and she lets him finish before she speaks again.

Then she makes the call that ends it. They cannot see each other again while the case is ongoing. She says it plainly, protecting her position, and the reunion closes as quickly as it opened. Josh walks away from the lunch with the one thing he wanted outside the courtroom taken off the table by the case itself.

Word comes that his mother has been released from county jail. Josh goes to her and finds her suite full of staff working around her as though nothing has happened. He confronts them directly and threatens to quit as her lawyer unless she clears the room. The threat works. Lauren dismisses her staff and agrees to sit down with Josh and Kinsey to discuss the case.

Josh walks his mother through the police timeline. She confirms it is accurate, with one objection: she disputes being described as hysterical. That single correction matters to her more than the rest of it, and she makes sure it is on the record between them. Josh notes it and moves on, because the timeline itself is not in dispute.

Then she gives ground on the facts. She bought the gun after receiving death threats as mayor, and she kept it unlocked in her nightstand. Josh writes it down without comment, because comment will not help her now.

She does not stop there. Lauren admits she threatened to kill Tower at dinner. But she insists the details matter, and that the reports are exaggerated. She is not denying the words. She is telling Josh that the story the file tells is not the whole story, and that somewhere in the details is the version that could save her. Josh closes his notebook and looks at his mother, and for the first time since the file opened, he allows himself to believe there might be something in it worth finding.

Josh presses his mother to explain her threat against Tower, and she reveals the argument was over investor Jack Brewster, costing her control of damaging information. When Josh wants to defend her, she reluctantly names Jack Brewster of Expedite Holdings as the investor, revealing he uses spies and shady tactics. Josh wants to understand the leverage, and his mother admits she blackmailed Brewster and had worked out a peace offering that Tower refused to support.

Josh asks about the marriage, and his mother concedes she lost her temper at Tower in the restaurant but insists their fights were normal. When Josh pushes toward building a defense, she redirects him from attacking the DA's evidence toward finding who is really behind the murder. Josh asks about the household staff, and she casts doubt on them while flagging driver Jeff, who was pulled from his son's birthday by Tower.

Josh probes for business motives, and his mother offers a list of twenty people Tower had screwed over but names no recent one. He asks about the stepbrothers, and she says Tower called Edward and Stephen useless, naming Edward as capable of snapping while dismissing Stephen as a coward. Josh privately doubts both stepbrothers could act against a father they feared, recalling Tower nearly slapped him once.

Finally, Josh asks to hear her theory, and his mother insists they discuss her conspiracy theory about who would kill to stop her becoming governor.