This same living room. I'd sat here the entire night without eating or drinking, scrolling through my phone until the screen burned my fingers, searching for any treatment, any path forward for a rare blood disease.
Cornelius had glanced at the report and said, light as air, that if it couldn't be cured, then don't bother trying.
I was the one who fought him. Screamed myself hoarse saying no.
And I was the one who, every two or three days after that, made the trip back here, never once walking through that door with less than five hundred dollars' worth of fruit and supplements in my hands.
I kept telling myself that if Mom could absorb even a little more nutrition, if her body could feel even the slightest bit better, it would all be worth it.
Until one day, I saw the photos in a secondhand marketplace.
Bird's nest supplements that retailed for three or four hundred dollars, listed at eighty. Unopened imported protein powder, listed at fifty. Daisy was the one selling them.
I didn't make a scene. I just went to my mother and told her she should keep those things for herself.