Chapter 6: The Waiting Room

I took a cab to St. Agnes and walked into the emergency waiting room twenty minutes later.

My mother sat in a plastic chair with a wad of tissues in her fist.

Cora sat beside her in the yellow cardigan, with Reed standing guard at her shoulder.

All three of them looked up when I came through the doors.

Nobody said hello.

"Is he awake?" I asked.

"Don't you speak to her," Reed said to my mother. "Not today."

"I'm talking to my mother."

"You did this," he said.

"Did what?"

"Your father got a letter from the bank this afternoon. The payment didn't go through. He read it standing in the kitchen, and then he went down."

"A letter about a payment I stopped," I said.

"That you stopped. Yes."

"That I stopped because he told me I was not his daughter."

"He was upset!" my mother cried. "People say things!"

Two people across the room looked at us and then, politely, at their phones.

Cora laid a hand on my mother's arm.

"Mom, please. Don't. Cosima's here now."

She said it so softly, and she looked so fragile in that cardigan.

I felt every person in the room decide who the villain was.

"I can't pay it forever," I said. "I never said I would."

"You said it for two years," my mother said.

"I paid it for two years. Twenty-four payments. It's fifty thousand four hundred dollars, Mom."

"Family doesn't count."

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