Chapter 5

The next day, the livestream equipment Ethan had ordered for Sandra arrived at the house.

I looked at the boxes stacked in the entryway and felt nothing but a cold, hollow amusement.

He was still dreaming about being her hero, paving her road to the top. He had no idea that the person climbing onto that table wouldn't be me.

I thought about my mother-in-law's face at dinner — how a few careless words about smell had nearly reduced her to tears. I sighed. A last flicker of pity moved through me.

I pulled Ethan away from the equipment he was fussing with.

"Ethan. I'm saying this one more time. Livestreaming a surgery without the patient's consent is a serious violation of privacy. It's illegal. You will ruin someone's life."

He shook me off with barely disguised annoyance.

"Privacy? What law? I'm the family member giving consent — that's all that matters. Why are you always so dramatic?"

"And can you stop projecting your own twisted thinking onto everyone else? Normal people don't sit around imagining the worst."

While we argued, his mother wandered in. She hadn't caught the specifics, just saw me grabbing at Ethan while he was trying to work. She dug her fingers into my arm and shrieked.

"Summer! What do you know about any of this? Ethan handles his own business. Stop throwing tantrums every five minutes!"

Her nails left marks on my wrist. I looked at her face — that absolute, unthinking certainty that she was right — and the last trace of hesitation left me. Some people really can't be warned.

The following morning, under Ethan's repeated reminders to hurry up, I brought my mother-in-law to the hospital early.

Ethan and Sandra were busy setting up the stream. Neither of them came by the room once to check on the patient.

On my way out, I stopped by the nurses' station with a quiet request.

"My mother-in-law is a very private person. She gets embarrassed easily. Could you make sure her face is covered during the procedure? Just to keep her comfortable. Thank you."

Then I slipped out of the ward and found an empty waiting room down the hall.

The stream went live.

At first, it was a quiet, niche medical channel. The viewer count barely moved — until Sandra pulled back the surgical drape without warning, exposing my mother-in-law fully under the HD camera. The numbers exploded.

The comment section became a blur of motion. Messages scrolled too fast to read. Crude jokes, disgusting symbols, mockery — it filled the screen in waves.

And somewhere in the middle of it, Ethan's anonymous account was in there too, leading the charge.

"Holy — how is it even like that? That's disgusting."

"Lol, clearly been through a lot. No wonder she has that problem."

"Someone tell me what this woman does for a living that would do that kind of damage."

Ethan stared at the screen. Some small, nagging unease flickered at the edge of his mind — something about what he was seeing didn't quite match what he'd expected. But the live viewer count was going up by the thousands, and that drowned everything else out. He told himself it was the lighting. And then he went back to work stoking the comments.

Behind her surgical mask, Sandra was watching the numbers climb. Her smile had gone wide. The promotion felt like a sure thing.

Riding the momentum, she made her move. She turned away toward the instrument table as if to grab something — and as she turned back, her foot drifted toward the head of the table. Her hand caught the covering over my mother-in-law's face.

She pulled it away.

My mother-in-law's face, unobstructed, filled the camera.

Sandra's eyes went wide. A startled cry escaped her. The instrument in her hand clattered to the floor.

At the same moment, on the other side of the screen, the grin froze on Ethan's face.

"That's — that's my mother."