Chapter 4

Lee got to his feet and came to stand over me, looking down.

"Mabel, do you think I'd joke about something like this?

For a whole week I slept on the bench outside the ICU. Your mother fainted three times. The doctors issued two critical-condition notices."

"I called you a hundred and twenty-five times.

To tell you your father wanted to see you one last time. To tell you the money had run out and someone needed to sign."

"And you? What were you doing?"

Lee's voice was calm. Frighteningly calm.

"The relatives kept asking me where you'd gone, and like an idiot I covered for you. I told them you were working.

Then those lovely photos of yours showed up in the family group chat, and everyone saw them."

"Saw you off somewhere fooling around with another man while your father hung between life and death."

I opened my mouth to defend myself, but my throat was stuffed with cotton and I couldn't get a single word out.

"I... I didn't know... I'd blocked everyone... I thought you were all just trying to trick me into coming back..."

"Didn't know?"

Lee gave a cold laugh.

"You think a 'didn't know' wipes all of it clean?"

He turned, pulled a stack of invoices from the coffee table drawer, and threw them hard in my face.

"Hospital fees, surgery fees, the ICU. Three hundred and eighty thousand.

Plus the project I lost because I had to come back and deal with this. Twenty thousand in penalties.

Four hundred thousand total. Mabel. Pay it back."

Looking at that cold face of his, the guilt in me suddenly curdled into humiliated fury.

"Money? Lee, are you even human? You're talking to me about money now?

My father is sick. You're his son-in-law. What's wrong with putting up some money? We're husband and wife!

And you're keeping accounts this careful with me?"

Lee looked at me, and the last flicker of light in his eyes went out.

"Husband and wife?

The moment you blocked your family and threw everything away for that man, we stopped being husband and wife."

"Mabel, I borrowed this money. I put it on my credit cards. Now it's your turn.

As for what we are, you know perfectly well."

Lee drove me out. Or rather, I no longer had the face to stay in that home.

I rushed to the hospital, and outside the room I saw my father lying in the bed, tubes running into him, gone gaunt and shrunken,

and my mother, looking ten years older.

The instant she saw me, she said nothing and came at me with a slap.

The crack of it left my ear ringing.

"You still have the nerve to come back? Your father nearly died!

If it weren't for Lee, the two of us would've died in this hospital! Get out! I don't have an ungrateful daughter like you!"

The relatives were all there. My cousin, my aunt, my uncle,

every one of them looking at me with that scorn, that disgust, pointing and muttering.

"What an ungrateful wretch." "Ran off to fool around with some man, doesn't even care about her own father"...

The words drove into my ears like needles.