“The appeals process takes months, Laura,” Dr. Lawson said gently. “Emily doesn’t have months. The blast cells are multiplying rapidly. She needs the first infusion by next week.”
I pulled my hand away from Laura’s. I felt completely hollow. “I’m not doing it,” I said, my voice eerily calm.
“Emily, don’t you dare—” Laura started.
“Mom, look at me!” I yelled, tears finally spilling over my cheeks. “You don’t have that kind of money! We can’t do this. I am not going to let you destroy your life for me. I’ve had three wonderful years with you. That’s enough.”
Laura grabbed my face with both hands. Her eyes were ferocious, blazing with a terrifying kind of love. “You listen to me, Emily Davidson. You are my daughter. You are my entire world. I would burn this whole city to the ground to keep you breathing. Do you understand me? We are doing this.”
For the next four days, Laura was a ghost. She worked her shifts, came home, made a barrage of phone calls behind closed doors, and barely slept. I was growing weaker by the hour, the fatigue settling into my bones like lead. I prepared myself for the end.
On Friday afternoon, Laura walked into my bedroom. She held a single piece of paper. She looked ten years older, but there was a fierce, triumphant smile on her face.
“We’re starting treatment on Monday,” she said.
“How?” I gasped, sitting up. “Mom, how did you get the money? Did the state approve it?”
“No,” she said softly. She sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed my hair back. “I found a cash buyer. An investor who flips properties.”
My heart stopped. “What?”
“I sold the house, Emily. The closing is expedited. The funds wire to the hospital on Monday morning.”
“No!” I screamed, horrified. This house was her sanctuary. It was the only thing she owned. She had spent years tending to the little garden out front, painting the walls, making it a home. “You can’t do that! Where are we going to live?”
“We are moving into the Oak Street Apartments,” she said calmly, referencing a rundown complex near the hospital. “It’s small, but it’s close to your treatment. Emily, bricks and wood mean absolutely nothing to me if you aren’t inside them. You are my home. The house is just a building.”
I cried until I choked. I cried for her sacrifice, for the monumental, crushing weight of a mother’s true love. While my biological family wouldn’t spare a dime of their luxury to save me, this woman gave up everything she had in the world to buy me a tomorrow.
The treatment was brutal. We moved into a cramped, noisy, two-bedroom apartment that smelled of stale cigarettes and damp plaster. Laura worked double shifts to pay the rent while I lay in agony, fighting the war inside my cells.
But the drug worked.
By my eighteenth birthday, I was completely cancer-free.
I promised myself two things. First, I would become a doctor. I would become the best oncologist in the state. I would save lives the way Dr. Lawson and Laura had saved mine.
Second, I would make sure the world knew exactly who the Higgins family really was.
Ten years later. I was twenty-six, a week away from graduating as the Valedictorian of my medical school class at a prestigious university. I had secured a highly competitive residency. My life was finally coming together.
I was sitting in the campus library, finalizing my valedictory speech, when my phone buzzed. It was an email from an unknown sender. The subject line made my blood run cold.
Subject: So proud of you, Emily. Let’s talk. – Dad.
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred. Dad. The audacity of the word made me physically nauseous.
I opened the email. It was a perfectly crafted, slickly worded message from Thomas Higgins. He mentioned how he had “followed my career from afar,” how “incredibly proud” he and Karen were of my impending graduation, and how he desperately wanted to meet for coffee to “bridge the gap that time and unfortunate circumstances had created.”
I was about to delete it when I did a quick Google search on his name.
