“You’ve always tried to turn her against me.”
“No,” he said.
“I’ve spent years watching her rescue you.”
That landed harder than shouting would have.
Mom took one step toward him.
“I am her mother.”
“And she is your daughter,” he replied.
“Not your account.”
My eyes filled before I could stop them.
I turned my head toward the monitor.
The baby’s heartbeat continued beneath the argument, quick and insistent, and suddenly the entire fight seemed smaller than the life I had nearly lost that morning.
The doctor had already told me the ultrasound was reassuring.
They wanted continued monitoring because of the crash, but there was no sign at that moment that the baby had been harmed.
I had never heard anything as beautiful as cautious medical language.
Stable.
Reassuring.
Monitoring.
Those words mattered.
First class did not.
Mom moved closer to my bed.
“Harie.
Enough.
Restore the card and we’ll discuss this later.”
There it was.
Not an apology.
Not relief that I was alive.
An order.
I shook my head.
Pain pulled across my ribs.
“No.”
Her expression sharpened.
“You’re medicated.”
“I revoked it before the morphine.”
Her lawyer looked at me, then at her.
That detail mattered to him.
Mom realized it too.
“So that’s what this is?” she asked.
“You almost get yourself killed and suddenly decide I’m the enemy?”
I felt Grandpa tense, but I lifted my hand a few inches from the blanket.
I wanted to answer for myself.
“This started before the crash.”
She frowned.
“I just didn’t admit it before the crash.”
Her face changed—not softer, exactly, but uncertain.
I continued.
“Every time you needed money, it became an emergency.
Every time I said no, you reminded me what you spent raising me.
Every time I helped once, it became something you expected the next month.”
“You offered.”
“Sometimes I did.”
“Exactly.”
“But offering once isn’t promising forever.”
The lawyer gave the smallest nod.
Mom saw it.
“Whose side are you on?” she snapped.
He closed his leather folder.
