Chapter 10 - The Price of a Good Daughter
Nina came to my house two days later with a legal pad and no appetite for revenge speeches. She reviewed the medical records, the video, my lost assignment, and the card dispute. She explained that proof of wrongdoing and proof of financial loss weren't the same thing.
“Your anticipated commission may matter,” she said, “but we need contracts, your prior compensation, and evidence of what would probably have been paid. Nobody gets sixty-five thousand dollars merely because it was on a calendar.”
I appreciated that she wouldn't sell me a fantasy.
She also warned me not to talk publicly about the case. A criminal investigation, any civil claim, and an employer's internal review could all be affected by careless statements.
An hour after she left, a courier delivered flowers from Blythe. The envelope contained no note about my surgery. Instead, there was a typed list of family expenses: tuition help, summer camp, birthday gifts, even the piano lessons I'd quit at eleven.
Total: $27,840.
At the bottom, my mother had written: Before you say we never did anything for you.
I spread the pages on the coffee table and laughed once, a sound I didn't recognize.
She'd found a way to send me an invoice for being her child.
I photographed the pages for Nina, then put them in a drawer. They didn't establish a legal debt. They established something harder to ignore: my mother could account for everything she'd spent on me, but not one minute of the night she'd left me injured on the floor.
When she called, I answered.
“Did you receive the flowers?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps you'll consider what your sister is going through.”
May you like
I looked at the brace resting across my sofa.
“I am considering it,” I said. “From now on, she will have to live with what she did.”
