The mall's PA system was blaring a jewelry store theft alarm, and I was clutching my phone, sprinting for the exit.

"Mom, there's an emergency at the hospital. I have to go NOW!"

My mother grabbed my arm and her voice shot up an octave:

"Sweetheart, you're in such a rush. Don't tell me YOU'RE the one who stole that gold?"

The words barely left her mouth before security closed in around us.

My brain whited out.

Back in the ER, a teenage boy's trachea had been severed by a sheet of glass that fell from a high floor. His oxygen saturation had plummeted to sixty percent. Severe subcutaneous emphysema covered his entire body.

Without surgery in the next fifteen minutes, he would suffocate to death.

And right now, my mother was staring at me with that look, the one that said she was disappointed but not surprised, sighing like I'd let her down again:

"We may be poor, but that's no excuse to do something this shameful."

To find gold that never existed, I was strip-searched, force-fed laxatives, and locked in a back room.

I dropped to my knees and begged them to let me go save my patient first.

It wasn't until I tried to escape through a window and my mother caught me, slamming me down so hard my arm snapped, ensuring I would never hold a scalpel again.

Only then did she get the phone call. The boy hanging between life and death, the one waiting to be saved, was her son.

——

"Mom, what are you TALKING about?"

I was frantic, prying at her fingers with both hands.

"I'm a doctor! There's a patient in the ER right now, and they will die without me!"

She didn't let go. Her grip only tightened.

She turned toward a security guard patrolling nearby and raised her voice for maximum carry:

"Sir, I am NOT making this up!"

"My daughter has been acting suspicious since the moment we walked in. She kept glancing toward the jewelry store..."

She clapped a hand over her mouth and sucked in a sharp breath, as though she'd just cracked some grand conspiracy.

"Oh my God. You don't think she actually..."

Before she even finished, mall security swarmed in.

The security captain was a heavyset man in his forties with a hard face and a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. His eyes had already changed.

"Ma'am, you need to cooperate with an inspection."

Blood roared in my ears.

"Inspect WHAT? I didn't steal anything! I'm a surgeon at Riverdale City First Hospital!"

"There's a teenager in the ER with a severed trachea. If I don't operate, he dies!"

I pulled out my phone and shoved the screen in his face, showing him the message from the department chief.

Captain Paulson glanced at it. His frown deepened, and for a second he wavered.

My mother's voice curled with mock sympathy: "Those messages are so easy to fake. That doesn't prove a thing..."

Greg Paulson's expression hardened immediately:

"She's right. If you've got nothing to hide, a quick pat-down shouldn't be a problem."

My fists clenched so tight I nearly cracked the phone screen.

"How long will the search take?"

"Five minutes, if we're quick."

Five minutes. Plus the three already wasted. Eight minutes total.

Still enough time.

I ground my teeth until I tasted iron, threw my bag on the floor, and spread my arms wide.

"Search me. Do it fast."

Two female guards stepped forward and patted me down head to toe.

Jacket pockets. Pants pockets. Every compartment of my bag. They even pulled out my insoles.

Nothing.

I bent down to grab my bag and turned to run for the exit.

My mother screamed: "WAIT!"

She looked like she'd been possessed by Sherlock Holmes himself, eyes bulging, finger trembling as she pointed at me.

"I figured it out! No WONDER they couldn't find anything!"

She lunged forward and seized my arm, terrified I'd bolt:

"At lunch! You INSISTED on ordering that soup dumpling!"

"I thought it was strange. You never eat pork, but today you were scarfing it down like your life depended on it!"

She whipped around to face the guards, her voice piercing:

"She must have hidden the gold inside the dumpling and swallowed it!"

"The gold from the jewelry store is in her stomach right now. I'm sure of it!"

I froze where I stood.

Twenty minutes earlier, my mother had insisted on dragging me to the food court, claiming she was too hungry to walk another step.

I couldn't win the argument, so I bought two baskets of soup dumplings. She ate one. I ate three.

The whole time we were eating, she kept stealing guilty glances at me.

Only at the very end did she wipe her eyes and speak up. "Your Uncle Dwight Mercer owes money again. Dora, please, help him out. Just this once..."

I'd already bailed my uncle out of his gambling debts three times. Seventy-five thousand dollars, all of it thrown down a hole.

I knew he'd never change.

So this time, I said no.

The look on my mother's face. I thought it was disappointment.

Now I realized it wasn't disappointment. It was hatred.

When I stayed silent, my mother seemed almost pleased with herself. "Officer, she says there's a patient at the hospital, but she's just making excuses to run!"

"No one knows a daughter better than her mother. Mine's had sticky fingers since she was little. You'd better search her thoroughly!"

The way Captain Paulson looked at me had already shifted from suspicion to certainty.

After all, no mother would deliberately frame her own daughter.

I was shaking with rage.

When my mother said I had sticky fingers, she was talking about the time I took money from the house to buy medicine as a child.

I'd had a fever so high I could barely stand.

All I took was ten dollars for fever reducers, and she'd held it over my head for more than a decade.

Now she was framing me on purpose, all to punish me for refusing to pay off my uncle's gambling debts.

Any other day, I might have let it go.

But right now, there was an eighteen-year-old boy in the ER waiting for me to save his life.

"I didn't swallow any gold!"

"Mom, do you even hear what you're saying?"

"There's a patient at the hospital with a severed trachea! If he doesn't get surgery now, he will die!"

My mother stepped back half a pace, hiding behind the security guards, looking at me like I was a stranger.

"Dora, I'm doing this for your own good."

"Stealing is a crime. If you hand it over now, they might go easy on you..."

"I didn't steal anything!"

The scream ripped from my throat so hard my vision blurred. I cursed myself for taking the day off to bring my mother to the mall.

Three layers of onlookers had closed in around us. Some were livestreaming. Some were snapping photos. Others whispered behind their hands.

"I heard she's a doctor?"

"A doctor who steals? Guess you really can't judge a book by its cover..."

"Her own mother reported her. You think she'd lie about that?"

Captain Paulson raised his walkie-talkie. "Jewelry store, can you confirm what's missing?"

"Three gold necklaces, fifty grams total. Worth about eighty thousand dollars."

"Copy that."

He lowered the walkie-talkie and turned to me, his tone leaving no room for argument.

"Ms. Fox, since your mother has accused you of concealing stolen goods inside your body, we need you to cooperate. Take the laxatives and submit to an examination of the results."

The words hit me like a bolt of lightning. I lunged forward and grabbed his wrist. "You can't! That boy doesn't have time!"

"He was cut by glass on a construction site. His trachea is completely severed. His oxygen saturation has dropped below sixty percent!"

"My colleagues are bagging him by hand, but the air keeps leaking through the wound into the tissue. His entire neck and chest are swelling up!"

"I'm the only surgeon who can do this operation!"

The words tumbled out of me, incoherent, tears smearing across my face.

"Please. Let me go back to the hospital first. Once the surgery is done, I'll come back and you can do whatever you want with me."

Captain Paulson pulled his wrist free. His expression didn't change.

"Rules are rules."

"If you run, who takes the fall for that?"

He waved his hand, and two guards seized me by the arms, one on each side.

"Take her to the medical office. Give her the laxatives."

I was dragged toward the security office.

As I passed my mother, she didn't look at me. She smoothed the hem of her blouse, the corner of her mouth curled upward.

"If only you'd listened before, we wouldn't be here now..."

So this really was retaliation.

Inside the security office, someone held out a cup of cloudy liquid.

"Drink it. Should take about half an hour to kick in."

I stepped back until my spine hit the wall. "I'm not drinking that!"

Two guards moved in, flanking me on either side.

"Ms. Fox, don't make us do this the hard way."

"You wouldn't dare!"

The two guards closed in and seized my arms, one on each side.

I thrashed against their grip.

That was when my phone rang. A colleague from the hospital.

"Let me answer it! That child might not make it..."

The guards hesitated.

My mother lunged forward, pinning my hand down, and killed the call. "Answer what? Trying to call someone to bail you out?"

"Don't pull that crap with me!"

But I'd already wrenched one hand free and snatched the phone back.

The screen lit up with a photo from Dr. James.

I tapped it open, and everything inside me went still.

The person lying on the operating table, waiting to die, was my brother.

I turned around and dropped to my knees. The impact jolted through my bones.

"Mom! The patient, it's Hal Fox!"

It hit me then. That morning at breakfast, my brother had told me something.

He was going to spend the weekend hauling bricks at a construction site so he could buy Mom a birthday present. He'd made me promise not to tell.

And the hospital had said the boy was injured at a construction site.

The age matched too.

My mother blinked, then her brow furrowed.

"What did you just say?"

I held the phone up to her face.

"The hospital sent this photo. The person whose trachea was severed by falling glass at the construction site, the one waiting for me to operate, it's Hal!"

She glanced down at the screen, then slapped the phone out of my hand.

"Bullshit! Your brother's at home playing video games! I saw him this morning!"

"You faked this photo!"

"Mom, just call him! Please, I'm begging you!"

I was on my knees, fists clenched around the fabric of her pants.

"Hal is really hurt! I have to get to the hospital in fifteen minutes! Any later and it'll be too late!"

"Get off me!" She kicked my hands away.

"You'd curse your own brother just to wriggle out of this? Are you even human?!"

"Mom! I'm not lying!"

Tears blurred my vision, streaking hot down my face. "Let me go to the hospital! You'll see for yourself when we get there! If Hal's fine, you can drag me back and do whatever you want to me!"

A few bystanders nearby started whispering among themselves.

"That girl's crying for real..."

"What if it actually is her brother?"

My mother's expression shifted. She whipped around and pointed at them. "What do you people know? This girl's been a liar since she was little!"

"Now she's cursing her own brother just to get away! I've been too soft on her!"

She turned and glared at the guards.

"What are you standing around for? Take her to drink the medicine! If the gold doesn't come out, that's on you!"

Captain Paulson waved his hand.

"Take her."

Two guards hauled me up off the floor.

I twisted around, straining against them.

"Mom! I'm begging you! You're going to get him killed!"

My mother stood where she was, arms folded across her chest, eyes cold as glass.

"Go on. Keep acting. Let's see how long you can keep this up."

The guards shoved me into a chair and pushed the cup in front of me.

"Quit stalling. You drinking it yourself, or are we pouring it down your throat?"

I drew a long breath.

"Do you have any idea that if that patient dies, you'll be held responsible? What you're doing right now is killing someone."