There was my mother-in-law, dressed in soft gray, dabbing at dry eyes, telling a sympathetic reporter that she had taken her poor widowed daughter-in-law into her home out of pure Christian charity — had given me a roof, had fed my children — and that I had repaid her by stealing from her foundation and running off to seduce a billionaire.

She was very good. She had always been very good. By the time she finished, she had the reporter nodding.

By the next morning, the internet had decided who I was. Gold digger. Grifter. A maid who’d trapped a lonely rich man with someone else’s tears.

The videos multiplied, cut with dramatic music, and strangers who had never met me wrote things about me and my children that I will not repeat.

Olivia found one of them. She was eight, and clever, and she picked up a tablet that someone had left on a counter, and she saw her mother’s face with cruel words stamped across it.

“Are they going to make us go back to the laundry room?” she asked me.