The Daughter They Didn’t Want Won The Lottery Chapter 17
She was mine. Blood of my blood. And I swore right there, in that delivery room, that everything good in the world was going to be hers.
She would grow up in love. She was never going to kneel in a dark corner picking meat off somebody else’s chicken bones.
On her first birthday we had a small party at the flat. A cake. One candle. Balloons. Presents from friends piled on the coffee table. She sat in her high chair gnawing on a teething biscuit, cheeks streaked with crumbs.
I was leaning over with a napkin, wiping her face, when my phone rang.
An unknown American number. From a town I never wanted to see again.
I hesitated. Then picked up.
A middle-aged woman’s voice. Careful. A little timid.
“Emma? Honey, it’s your Aunt Diane—remember me? Emma, please don’t hang up. Your mom and dad… they’re in a bad way.”
I stood in the middle of streamers and balloons, my daughter laughing behind me, and everything went quiet.
“They’re both sick, honey. Cancer. Both of them. Your sister Chloe—” Her voice tightened. “Chloe cleaned them out. Took everything. They can’t cover the hospital bill. There’s not a dollar left. Aunt Diane and a couple of the others had to chase your number through God knows how many people…”
I listened. Asked a few questions. Ages. Stages. Where they were being treated. Then I hung up.
Ethan came over. Looked at my face. Took our daughter from my arms. “What is it?”
I leaned against the counter and looked out at the blue evening sky. Silent for a long moment.
“My parents both have cancer. Chloe emptied their accounts and disappeared.”
Ethan didn’t say anything at first. Then he just put an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll go with you.”
I didn’t have to think about it long.
For those two people who’d put me on this earth, I couldn’t have told you if I felt more hate or more pity. But I knew one thing—one day my daughter would be old enough to ask about my parents, about my history. And I didn’t want her to hear that her mother was a cold person.
I wasn’t going back for them. I was going back so that, years from now, I could look my daughter in the eye without flinching.
The plane touched down at a small regional airport in Ohio. English on every sign. American voices in every corner. It felt like a country I’d read about in a book a long time ago.
Ethan pulled our suitcase in one hand, held our daughter in the other, and didn’t ask a single question.
We drove to the hospital in a rental car.
The room was small. Two beds pushed close together. A vase of cheap grocery-store carnations on the nightstand.
Mom had lost thirty, forty pounds. Her hair had gone almost completely white. Her cheeks had caved in around her jawbone.
Dad lay in the second bed with an oxygen tube taped under his nose. When I walked in, his cloudy eyes drifted toward the doorway and his mouth trembled at the corner.
I stood in the doorway with a plastic bag of toothpaste and lotion in my hand, and for a second I didn’t know what to say.
Mom spoke first. Her voice was gravel.
“Emma—” the tears came almost at once. “Emma, honey, I’m so sorry.”
She lifted her hand off the sheet. Skin and bone. Blotched purple with old IV bruises. It shook as she reached toward me.
“You—you were the one I owed everything to. And I raised your sister into what she is. That’s on me. That’s on me.”
I walked over. Set the bag on the nightstand.
I did not take her hand.
Later, from Aunt Diane and a couple of the old neighbors, I pieced the rest together.
When they’d come home empty-handed from London, the debts were still there. The corner store bled out year by year, squeezed between Amazon and grocery-delivery apps.
Meanwhile Chloe, at Columbia, had discovered how she wanted to live. This month she needed a designer bag. Next month she was flying to Cabo. The month after that, all her friends had luxury logos and she couldn’t be the odd one out.
Mom, terrified of losing her golden child, kept forking money over. Money that should have gone to the debt. Money that should have gone to anything else.
Then someone at a bar tipped her off about a “guaranteed return” crypto fund. Mom sank the rest of the mortgage money into it.
It was a Ponzi scheme. Six months later it collapsed. The founders went to federal prison. Every dollar gone.
The house went next. They moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in the old part of town. Four hundred square feet. No elevator.
Dad, at sixty-something, took a job with DoorDash. He climbed those stairs day after day until his knees swelled up like softballs.
Mom took a night janitorial job at an office park. Out the door at five a.m. Home at ten p.m.