Then he handed me a referral card.
“I’m marking this as urgent.”
“How urgent?”
“I’m noting on your file that you should be seen within 72 hours. If they can’t accommodate that, call me directly.”
He wrote his cell number on the back of the card. Doctors don’t give out their cell numbers for minor issues. I walked out of the clinic with prescriptions clutched in my hand, and got them filled at the 24-hour pharmacy next door. I stood there under the harsh lights watching the pharmacist count out pills into an orange bottle, and felt something fundamental shift inside me. This was real. This was happening. And for some reason I didn’t understand yet, someone had tried to hide it from me.
My phone had been buzzing non-stop. I finally looked at it while waiting for my prescription. 17 missed calls. 32 text messages. Most were from my mom.
“Please call us. We’re worried. Come home so we can talk. Don’t be upset. We can fix this.”
A few from my dad.
“This is ridiculous. Stop overreacting. Call your mother.”
And one from Ava.
“Why are you being like this? It’s just a phone.”
I stared at that last one for a long moment. Then I opened a new message to my mom.
“I’m not coming home tonight.”
Her response was immediate.
“Where are you? We need to talk.”
“I’m getting my medication. The medication you were supposed to get for me.”
“Lena, please come home. We need to talk about something important.”
My fingers hesitated over the keyboard. Something important. What could possibly be more important than the fact that they’d prioritized a phone over medication their daughter desperately needed?
“I’m not ready to talk to you.”
I typed back. My dad’s text came through seconds later.
“Please don’t involve outsiders in family business.”
Outsiders. He meant doctors, medical professionals who were actually taking my condition seriously. I didn’t respond to that one. I picked up my medication, took the first dose right there in the pharmacy, and drove to the one person I thought might actually tell me the truth. My aunt Linda, my mom’s older sister. She lived about 20 minutes from campus in a small ranch house with a garden that always smelled like lavender. She opened the door in her bathrobe, took one look at my face, and pulled me inside without a word.
“I’ll make tea,” she said.
We sat at her kitchen table, her in her bathrobe, me still in the clothes I’d worn to Sunday lunch that now felt like a lifetime ago. She set a mug of chamomile in front of me and waited. I told her everything. The fainting spell, the campus doctor, the prescription my parents never filled, the urgent care visit, the missing medical records. She didn’t look surprised. That’s what got me. The complete lack of surprise on her face.
“You knew,” I said flatly. “You knew something was wrong.”
Aunt Linda wrapped her hands around her own mug and sighed.
“I didn’t know about the current medication. Your mother hasn’t told me much lately, but—”
She paused, seeming to wrestle with something.
“Lena, there are things about your family’s finances that you don’t know.”
“What things?”
“Do you remember when Ava started at that expensive music academy when she was 14?”
“Yeah. Mom and Dad said it was an investment in her future.”
“It was, but that money had to come from somewhere.”
Aunt Linda looked at me steadily.
“It came from medical savings they’d set aside for you.”
