She yanked me aside, her voice a furious hiss. "What is wrong with you? Why can't you just want what's best for your brother?"
"Are you not going to stop until you've driven him into a divorce?"
Then she swiped at her tears. "I'm going to be living with your brother when I'm old. This one time I need you to take care of me, and you can't even do that?"
"Your father's health is bad. I had no other choice but to ask you."
"No, that's not it!" I cut her off. "Mom, I can't terminate this pregnancy. The baby can—"
Before I could finish, Daisy rolled her eyes and let out a laugh. "A married-off daughter who comes back here every chance she gets to mooch off the family."
"Now the second someone asks her to pitch in and look after her own mother, suddenly she's not interested."
"Wants everything, gives nothing. How shameless can you get?"
Shameless.
The word landed in my ears, and something inside me surged upward, hot and violent.
I thought of the night six months ago when Mom had come home with that diagnosis report.
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.
But instead, she turned around and lectured me. "Daisy's not doing anything wrong. I can't stand the taste of that stuff anyway. Might as well trade it for a little cash."