“Yes,” I rasped, holding the papers in my trembling hands. “It means Omma did something she’s never done in the eighteen years I lived in her house. She... admitted she was wrong.” I raised my head, gazing at her for the first proper time since she walked into my life. “And not even your lies, schemes, or tricks could ever get her to do that.
“She really is dying.”
She nodded. “So... will you come?”
My grip tightened on the will, crumpling the paper between my fingertips. “Why now?”
“She’s on hospice. The doctors have her on so many meds to stop the pain, they’re making her loopy and confused. Some days she doesn’t know what year it is or even who she is,” she said. “She’ll ask where you are, forgetting that she sent you away, and then when she remembers... she cries.” Sue looked away, her jaw clenching tight. “She’s just reliving one of the worst days of her life over and over and over, and it’s hell.
“Omma is already in enough pain. She doesn’t need to carry the regret of never making it right with you to the grave as well.” Sue snapped back to me, glaring. “I know you think I’m some kind of monster, but not even I can watch my own mother suffer like this. I can’t do anything to help her, except bring her you. So,” she barked, making me stiffen. “Are you coming or not?”
I stared at her—my expression blank but my mind racing.
Why should I go with her? My own mother didn’t believe me when I told her through snot-covered lips that I wasn’t some psychopath who left innocent people paralyzed for life. She threw me out onto the street with nothing, ignored my calls and letters, hasn’t spoken to me in ten years, and now that she wants to make up, instead of reaching out herself, she sends the last person on earth I’d ever want to see to be her message girl.
I owed Omma nothing. Less than nothing. I played the good, dutiful daughter for eighteen years, and it didn’t save me from living under the constant cloud of her disappointment and its acid rain of her impossible expectations. The truth was, Ha-eun Kim was never anything approaching a good mother. I gave up on her long before she gave up on me.
“Yes,” I said, turning off the stove. “I’m coming.”
Chapter Two
“Are you done now?”
Her superior tone clenched my jaw.
“How much more time are you going to waste?”
“I’m not wasting time,” I snapped over the wheezing engine. “I’m trying to get my car to start!”
Sue stood outside my window, hands on hips and tapping her Gucci boots. She watched me try, and fail, to start my car with a mixture of annoyance and amusement.
“Come on, baby,” I whispered. “Don’t give up on me now.”
“I told you I’d drive you.”
“And I toldyou, there’s no way I’m getting in a car with you.”
Sue rolled her eyes. “Okay, then drive out of the parking lot. I’ll follow behind you.”
The taunt cut particularly well since my engine chose that particular moment to hack up an ear-splitting cough, and then die completely.
Sue smiled at me. “Shotgun?”
Swearing, I shoved out of the car, snatched my bag from the backseat, and stormed over to the only Porsche parked in the lot. “No,” I said, covertly reaching into my bag and turning my phone recorder back on. “I’m driving.”
“Suit yourself.”
She handed over the keys without issue, which was good because I would’ve fought her for them.
For as long as I was forced to endure Sue’s presence, not only would I record everything she said and did, but I wouldn’t put myself at her mercy in any way, shape, or form—and that included being her passenger. She might drive me home, or she might drive me across the border to the sex traffickers she sold me to for the low, low price of twelve bucks.
This was the same person who almost killed an innocent eighteen-year-old boy, and her only response was to laugh over getting away with it.
I’d put nothing past her.
Pulling out of the parking lot, I stopped just short of the street, and leaned out. “Nicky?”
The kid stopped faking like he was texting and looked up.
