3: 3

I looked down at the needle marks on the back of my hand, where they'd drawn my blood, and the tears just kept falling.

Even dead, when I remembered that thick needle, I was still so afraid.

Mom stood beside the bed, and when she couldn't get me to stir no matter how she pushed, her temper flared.

She slapped the blanket hard.

"To think I gave birth to a curse like you! Sabrina's got one foot through death's door and you're still lying there playing dead!"

I kept crying, looking up at her.

I wasn't playing dead. I really was dead.

But Mom couldn't hear me. She deliberately took out my favorite gelatin cup.

"Since you don't want it, I'll just give it to Sabrina."

I still didn't move, and in her fury Mom kicked the bed.

My pale little hand, stained red with blood, slipped out from under the blanket, but she didn't see it at all.

Instead she turned and peeled open my favorite gelatin cup for Sabrina.

Sabrina made loud smacking sounds on purpose, eating and talking at the same time.

"Dr. Fox, you really are the best mom in the whole world. You even carry big sister Norma's favorite gelatin cups around with you. I wish you were my mom."

Then Sabrina suddenly burst into tears. "Sabrina never had a mom. Daddy's always so busy with work he ignores me, there's only Grandma. I really do envy big sister Norma."

Mom held her close, her heart aching. "I wish you were my daughter too."

Sabrina looked up at her, eyes glimmering. "You don't mind that Sabrina has a heart condition...?"

Mom smiled softly. "Then it must be fate that brought us together. I can be the one to treat you."

"You're smart and pretty, lively and sweet. A well-behaved daughter like you is exactly what I'd want."

Sabrina threw her arms around her. "Can I call you Mommy?"

Mom froze for a second. "You can."

"Mommy!"

"Mm."

"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

Sabrina called out over and over, and Mom answered every single time, not missing one.

That shrill little voice stabbed straight into my heart.

I was already dead, and yet I clutched my chest in pain, the tears never stopping.

So Mom really didn't love me. She loved Sabrina.

When Sabrina finished the gelatin, she sweetly told Mom she could go to the bathroom by herself.

Mom smiled, comforted, then turned her head and saw the mound of my blanket, and all her anger came rushing back.

"Norma! How long are you going to keep giving me the silent treatment!"

I didn't answer, and her voice went low with disgust and held-back rage.

"If you weren't my own child, I really wouldn't want to be dragging a simpleton around for the rest of my life."

The moment she said it, Mom went stiff.

Then she laughed again.

"You're a simpleton. You can't even understand what I'm saying."

"Everyone calls me a genius, and I've always been healthy, and yet I gave birth to a sickly child like you."

"If all you had was a heart condition, I could treat you."

"But you're a simpleton! What am I supposed to do with that!"

Mom's eyes were red, utterly hopeless.

She was crying.

The scalding tears fell onto the white blanket.

I reached out to catch them, and I found that they tasted bitter.

Mom once told me a fairy tale, that if a person is happy, her tears are sweet.

But Mom's tears were bitter.

I had made her sad.

4: 4

Before Sabrina came back, my mother wiped her tears dry.

She slipped back into the cold, elegant composure of a doctor, her voice flat.

"Fake it all you want. Either way, Sabrina's transplant is happening tonight."

The clock on the wall read July 15, 2026.

I remembered, all at once, that half a year ago my mother had said I could hold on four more months at most.

That was why she'd quit her old job and come to this hospital, for me.

I smiled and said to her, "I lasted two whole months longer than you guessed, Mommy. Aren't I amazing?"

She didn't hear a word of it. She turned and walked out of the ward.

The moment she was gone, Sabrina came back in, my Baba plush hugged in her arms. She'd been hiding behind the door.

That cute little face twisted.

She flung my precious Baba to the floor and stomped on it, hard, over and over.

"A simpleton like you. What makes you good enough to be Dr. Fox's daughter?"

Seeing the ward empty, Sabrina scrambled up onto the bed and beat me the way she always had, throwing her whole weight into it.

I couldn't feel any of it, but her twisted, snarling face frightened me until I cried.

She used to beat me like this before too. I told my mother.

But my mother said Sabrina had heart failure and was a year younger than me, that there was no way she could hurt me, that it was just ordinary roughhousing.

I showed the bruises on my body. The nurse said I was the most rambunctious of them all, that cuts and marks on me were nothing unusual.

All Sabrina had to do was lower her head and sigh. "Big sister Norma isn't stupid, her memory's just bad. She probably remembered wrong. I'm happy to apologize."

And when she said that, my mother would always look at her with such tenderness.

I cried and made a scene, trying to make my mother believe me.

Only when I cried myself all the way into the emergency room did my mother finally make Sabrina apologize to me.

But when Sabrina apologized, her eyes were smiling, curved like orange segments.

After enough times, I stopped daring to tell my mother anything. All I could do was kneel and beg Sabrina to leave me alone.

She'd grin and yank my hair and kick me in the stomach.

I wasn't allowed to cry. I wasn't allowed to make a sound.

Or she'd tell my mother that I was the one bullying her.

So now, even with Sabrina straddling me and kicking as hard as she could, I made no sound at all, and she noticed nothing wrong.

If anything, she was smug. "You little brat. Why are you so obedient today?"

"Is it because your mom doesn't want you anymore, so you're too scared to cry?"

"Dr. Fox is going to be my mommy soon. A simpleton like you only deserves to be an orphan!"

She pulled out a discarded needle she'd fished from the trash. "This one's the biggest, thickest one there is. If you can hold it in and not make a sound, I'll let you off."

"No!"

Even though I couldn't feel the pain anymore, I still shook all over with fear.

The clean white blanket was thrown back, and Sabrina drove the needle into my head, my body, my arms, again and again.

In an instant my body was full of little pits of blood, and still I made not a single sound.

Then all at once she went rigid and snatched the blanket back up.

She lay back down in her own bed without a flicker on her face.

Footsteps came from the hall, and Sabrina kept pretending to sleep.

Until my mother said, "Sabrina, open your eyes now. It's time to get ready for the operating room."

Nurse Chavez, who'd been shadowing my mother, turned her head and saw that my blanket was still pulled all the way up.

"Dr. Fox, is Norma still sulking at you?"

My mother's face went cold at once.

"Sulking won't get her anywhere. In this hospital I'm a doctor, not somebody's mother. I can't hand her special privileges!"

"I've lived my whole life aboveboard, always the best at what I do. How did I ever raise a low, ill-natured simpleton like that."

The angrier she got, the uglier her words. "Just like that scumbag father of hers who divorced me for his mistress. Selfishness runs in her blood!"

I looked at my mother, the tears not stopping.

I wasn't sulking. I was really, truly dead.

Nurse Chavez knew there was no talking my mother out of it, so she only shook her head and stepped forward.

"All right, Norma, if you sleep with the blanket over your face like this you won't be able to breathe. Once the right donor heart comes—"

The blanket lifted, and Nurse Chavez's words cut off. She shook, unable to force out a single word.

It was a long moment before she turned stiffly around. "Something's wrong. Dr. Fox....."