Although it’s taken her something like three decades to discern her mother’s true intentions, Camille has been instinctively resisting Adora’s efforts to dope her up on hand-mixed medicine since childhood. This probably explains why Adora could never love her oldest child. The problem isn’t that Camille is cold, or even that she was the product of a bad relationship; it’s that Camille didn’t let Adora express her love in one particular, potentially lethal way.

As Willis questions Marian’s former nurse, Beverly, and digs through both of Camille’s sisters’ medical charts, it becomes clear that neither girl was ever actually sick. While she won’t say it outright, Beverly strongly suggests that some “mothers who need to be worshiped,” like Adora, have Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a rare mental illness in which a caregiver invents or induces medical conditions for their dependent. Beverly, who was fired from the local hospital after asking too many questions about Marian, also reveals that the girl saw an unfamiliar doctor shortly before her death.

Amma is cannier than Marian, or even Camille, was at her age. She lets Adora spoon-feed her “the blue” because, she tells her sister, Adora wants her to be incapacitated. Suddenly, Amma’s speech about boys at the end of last week’s episode takes on a new meaning. “When you let them do it to you, you’re really doing it to them,” she said. “You have the control.” The same clearly goes for her mother: As long as Amma allows Adora to care for her — to play with her like a doll — Adora will pretend her baby isn’t breaking curfew to skate around town looking for boys and drugs. Amma has gotten so invested in this game that she has begun to do Adora’s job for her, manufacturing nasty hangovers for her mom to cure.

Adora may have met her match in Amma, but it’s a different girl with an “A” name who most resembles the Crellin matriarch. Ashley is another self-styled caretaker who, in her thirst for attention, only causes harm. When Vickery appears at her house in search of John, she worries that betraying him would make her look bad. It only takes a minute for the chief to convince her that helping him catch the killer would surely get her face on TV. “Something about the women down here,” Vickery muses to Willis. “They’ll climb over anybody to get their name in print. God forbid you should be ordinary.”

Last week’s episode made it clear that, if the women of Wind Gap are desperate, calculating creatures, then it’s the predatory and aloof men of Wind Gap who are to blame. It’s just a shame the chief is too infatuated with Adora to see how she fits into this narrative. She and Vickery are obviously in cahoots; it’s breathtaking how quickly he admits to Willis that he falsified the Mexican farmworker’s identification of John in order to get a search warrant. But the way he repeats the word to himself after Amma’s friends tell him she’s “sick,” near the end of the episode, suggests that the reasons behind Adora’s interest in the murders are just dawning on him.