Chapter 2

The nurse kept pushing me for an answer. I clenched my fists so hard I bit my lip open.

"I'm not going through with the treatment. Please help me check out."

The nurse froze, her eyes full of disbelief.

"You have a shattered leg! If you leave now and the bone slips out of place and gets infected, this leg is finished for good!"

I lowered my eyes and said, hollow with despair,

"Thank you, but I have no money left. I have to go home and get some."

The nurse shook her head. "Fine, miss."

Then I peeled off the hospital gown and put on my own clothes.

Every movement of getting dressed came with a pain that bored straight through me.

I signed the papers, finished the discharge, and could only drag my casted leg along, one hand against the wall, inching my way out of the room.

No wheelchair. No crutches. No family arm to lean on.

The other patients and their families in the corridor turned to look at me, startled and pitying.

"How is that girl leaving like this?"

"Mom, where's her family? She looks so pitiful."

"Ah, whose daughter is this..."

I kept my head down, listening to all of it, fighting to keep the tears from falling.

By the time I finally made it out through the hospital lobby, the sky had opened up into heavy, feathering snow.

The cold shot straight to the marrow in an instant.

My rented place, an old crumbling walk-up, was a full three miles from here.

Three miles. For a normal person, barely half an hour on foot.

But for me right now, it was like climbing over a mountain.

Then my foot slipped.

With a heavy thud, I crashed down onto the snow.

"Ahh—"

The wound on my right leg struck the edge of the curb, and the pain drove through me so sharply I screamed.

I nearly blacked out from it.

Snow mixed with mud poured into my mouth, cold and bitter.

I lay sprawled on the ground, gasping in ragged breaths, without even the strength to get up.

In that haze, my mind went back to the year I was twelve.

That day, the snow had come down just like this.

My eight-year-old brother had been building a snowman in the yard when he took a spill, scraping a layer of skin off his knee, a thin line of blood welling up.

He bawled his eyes out.

My mother was scared out of her wits. She rushed over and scooped him up.

"Hubert! My precious baby, don't do this to Mommy!"

Her voice went raw from crying.

My father's eyes went red with panic too. He shoved me aside from where I stood in the doorway and snarled, "Get out of the way, you worthless girl! Can't you see your brother's badly hurt?"

That night, they paid a steep two hundred for an unlicensed car and rushed my brother across town to the best hospital, in the dead of night.

The doctor told them, helplessly, that a moment later and the scrape would have closed on its own. A skinned knee was perfectly normal for a child.

But they still weren't reassured. They insisted on admitting him for three days, three days of IV drips.

And that night, I was burning with a fever of a hundred and two.

Alone at home, I lay there a full day and night, without so much as a cup of warm water.

Sprawled in that freezing pit of snow, I finally broke and sobbed.

I don't know how long I lay there in the snow.

Only that it was long enough for my right leg to go numb with pain, long enough that the blood in my body felt frozen solid.

I wiped at my tears. No. I couldn't die here.

I still had a savings book hidden in an iron box under my bed, one that only I knew about.