The Daughter They Didn’t Want Won The Lottery Chapter 12
Meanwhile, across the ocean, they weren’t done with me.
It took Mom a long time to accept I was really gone. She went back to Ms. Hayes’ office.
“Ms. Hayes—she’s a nineteen-year-old girl with a fortune in her account, all alone in a foreign country. What if someone takes advantage of her? We’re her parents. We have to be able to reach her.”
Ms. Hayes looked at the woman across from her for a long moment. Then, carefully, gave her the essentials—country, program type, roughly how long. “If you want to visit, you’ll need to apply for a visa. It’s a process. You’ll need financial documentation.”
Mom went home and did the math.
Their savings weren’t remotely close to two international tickets, hotels, and passports they’d never bothered to get. So Mom took a second mortgage on the house they’d lived in for fifteen years and made Dad sell the ten-year-old Camry.
Dad clung to the keys. Muttered he wouldn’t have anything to drive.
Mom snapped, “Robert. You want to worry about a Camry? When we get Emma back, that’s half a million dollars. You can drive whatever car you want.”
Dad caved. He always caved.
Their first visa application got denied.
The consular officer asked their purpose. Mom, plain and blunt, said they were going to see their daughter, who was studying abroad. He shook his head.
Mom stormed out of the visa center. “On what grounds? My daughter’s over there! I want to see her! What’s illegal about that?”
They hired a visa consultant. Refilled the forms. Called it a tourist trip. Booked hotel nights they’d never use. Six months later, they finally got their visas.
By then Chloe was already at Columbia, deep in sorority rush, refusing to miss classes. Liam was there too, and had made it very quietly, very clearly known he wasn’t going.
So it was just the two of them.
Two middle-aged Americans who’d never flown further than Florida, dragging suitcases through Heathrow with their phones on airplane mode and their high school English fifteen years out of practice.
They fell apart within an hour.
The signs were in English. The accents weren’t. Dad wandered around the ticket machines for twenty minutes with a phone map. Mom stopped a bus driver for directions and couldn’t understand a word he said back.
Then the jet lag hit. And something they’d eaten on the plane hit worse. Dad went yellow around the mouth. Mom threw up in a rubbish bin outside the Underground and sat down on the curb, one hand pressed to her stomach. Someone called an ambulance.
The NHS took them in.
The bill came in pounds.
Mom went through her wallet, counted twice, and realized she couldn’t cover a third of it.
Lying on her cot in the observation ward, she suddenly remembered I existed.
She grabbed a nurse’s sleeve. “My daughter—my daughter is here. She’s a student in London. Emma Carter. Please, please find her—”
The hospital contacted my university. The university had my flat’s landline as emergency contact.
The call came at seven in the evening.
“Ms. Carter? We’ve received a request from a hospital regarding two patients who’ve listed you as next of kin. They’re unable to settle their bill and would like you to assist.”
I stood in my kitchen holding the receiver. Watched the tea keep steaming.
“There’s a mistake,” I said. “I don’t have any family in this country.”
A pause on the line.
“Ma’am, they’ve provided your full name and university—”
“I don’t know these people.”
I hung up.
She found my address the next day. I’ll never know how.
Just past six in the evening, my buzzer rang. I got up and looked through the peephole.
My stomach turned.
Mom in the corridor, hollow-cheeked, hair matted flat to her forehead. Dad slumped against the wall behind her, thinner than I’d ever seen him, eyes sunk deep.
I stared at their warped shapes through the peephole and felt bile rise in my throat.
Then I opened the door.
The second she saw me, Mom burst into tears and grabbed my wrist.
“Emma! Do you have any idea what we went through to find you? Look at this apartment—is this where all that money went?! Where’s the rest of it? You give it back. Right now.”
I twisted my wrist free and stepped back.
“Not happening. That money is mine. It has nothing to do with either of you.”
She dropped to her knees on the doormat, wailing.
“I brought you into this world! I raised you for nineteen years! And this is how you thank me? You keep every penny of half a million dollars for yourself? Do you have any heart at all?”
I stood in the entryway of my own flat and looked down at the woman on her knees on my doormat, and it was like watching a stranger.