“No.”
Her voice was firm. Sharp.
“You were a child. You trusted the adults in your life to protect you. This is not your fault.”
But it felt like my fault. It felt like I should have known. Should have fought harder. Should have demanded answers instead of accepting their dismissals.
“We’ll start aggressive treatment immediately,” Dr. Chin continued. “Medication twice daily, weekly monitoring, and you need to avoid stress and overexertion.”
She looked at me carefully.
“Is there someone who can support you through this? Family, friends?”
I thought about my parents, about Ava, about the fact that the people who should have been my support system were the ones who’d caused this.
“I’ll figure it out,” I whispered.
After the appointment, I sat in my car in the parking lot and cried, not the angry crying from before, just exhausted, griefstricken sobbing that came from somewhere deep and broken inside me. An elderly woman tapped on my window. I looked up, embarrassed, and she gestured for me to roll it down.
“You okay, dear?”
“I thank you.”
She handed me a tissue through the window.
“I saw you coming out of neurology. I had my appointment today, too.”
She smiled sadly.
“Family doesn’t always mean they protect you, dear. Sometimes we have to protect ourselves.”
Those words hit harder than any diagnosis. When I finally checked my phone, there were seven missed calls from my father and one long voicemail. I listened to it.
“Lena, you need to stop talking to doctors about family matters. This is between us. We’ll handle the medical bills. We’ll handle everything, but you need to stop making us look like monsters. Call me back. We need to discuss this privately.”
I texted him back.
“You don’t get to decide anything about my health anymore.”
His response was immediate.
“You’re being dramatic. This is exactly why we didn’t tell you. You overreact.”
I stared at that text for a long time. Then I blocked his number.
My phone rang again. Aunt Linda. I heard about the appointment. She said,
“How are you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Your mother called me. She’s devastated.”
“Good.”
“Lena, she had years to be devastated at Linda. Years to tell me the truth. Years to fight for me. She chose not to.”
Silence. Then,
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I just I wanted you to know that she does love you. She just loves badly sometimes.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know.”
After we hung up, I took my first dose of medication and thought about all the doses I should have taken over the years. All the doctor’s appointments I should have had. All the monitoring that never happened. My phone buzzed. A voicemail from Aunt Linda.
“I need to tell you something about your father. About the year you first fainted. It wasn’t just about money, Lena. There’s more to the story. Call me when you’re ready.”
My hands started shaking again, but this time from fear. I drove to Aunt Linda’s house that evening. She opened the door with red eyes like she’d been crying.
“I should have told you this years ago,” she said.
We sat at her kitchen table. She made tea neither of us drank.
“The year you first collapsed,” she began. “Your father was in serious financial trouble, gambling debts. He’d been hiding it from everyone, even your mother. When your medical bills came, he panicked.”
“Gambling?”
I’d never seen my father gamble. Not once.
“Online poker, sports betting. It started small, then spiraled. By the time you needed treatment, he owed more than $50,000 to some very serious people.”
The room tilted slightly.
“He gambled away my treatment money.”
“The treatment fund was the last liquid asset he had. If he used it, the bank would have seized the house. We would have lost everything.”
She looked at me with devastation in her eyes.
“He chose the house. He chose protecting his image. He chose anything except you.”
