Chapter 3

Katie was only five when she was "diagnosed" with a terminal illness.

She'd shed the frail, scrawny look now, grown into a slip of a girl just starting to bloom.

But that vivid, healthy child was a fiction I'd wrung out of five years of blood and tears.

For five years, all I got was half an hour a day beside her in the ICU.

That short half hour was the only light in my gray days.

And it was the cruelest torture too.

I even knelt outside those heavy doors, pressing my forehead to the floor, praying.

Take every hardship in the world and give it to me, I begged, just let Katie get well.

But now, at the moment we were finally back together,

what met me wasn't a warm embrace. It was a fist thrown without a second thought.

The dull ache in my chest cut deeper than anything my skin could feel.

Only now did I understand what the nurses' pitying looks had really meant.

That was the sorrow of the helpless, watching one woman get fooled completely.

I wanted to laugh.

But somewhere in the laughing,

the tears came down and I couldn't stop them.

Seeing me cry, Sean's brow knotted.

He looked me over with disgust. "Is it that serious? How hard can a kid's hand even hit?"

"She barely touched you, and you put on a show like this. For whose benefit?"

My mother's face went cold too, her voice impatient. "You see Lydia cry, so you cry."

"Can you stop measuring yourself against her? Lydia lost her parents and got taken in by our family. She's had it hard enough as it is."

"You're the one who cost Lydia ten years with Sean. Fine, you don't know how to step aside, but then you go and act like you're the one who's been so terribly wronged."

My father pursed his lips, every word heavy with reproach.

"You really have let us down."

"Thank goodness Lydia's big enough not to hold it against you. If she had your temper, would you even be standing here in front of us right now?"

Seeing everyone rush to defend her, Lydia grew smugger by the second.

She made a show of wiping away a few tears.

"Don't be so hard on Merry, everyone. Honestly, Merry's not that bad."

"The things I like, she likes too. It just means we have the same taste."

"It's only that sometimes she gets a little possessive."

"Really, I don't mind. If she wants something, I let her have it. It's not the first time anyway. A little grievance like that, I can take it."

Watching Lydia put on her act, my stomach turned over on itself.

She always did it exactly like this, leaving everyone convinced that I was the one always snatching her things, the one who couldn't stand her.

Sean gathered her against him, his face soft with relief.

"Lydia, what am I supposed to say about you? You're just too kind."

"Just like your birth parents. Kind, selfless people, all of you. If it hadn't been for them back then, my mother and I would've been gone long ago."

Inside, I laughed coldly.

Lydia's parents had saved their lives, yes, and been trapped in the flames themselves, never making it out.

But I knew that fire was no accident.

Lydia's father had seen Sean's father come home carrying a bag stuffed full of the day's payment, and greed took him.

They plotted at home to set the Gilbert house on fire and steal the money, and Lydia overheard the whole thing.

One time, drunk, she poured all of it out to me.

If Sean ever learned his father had died in that fire, and that the mountain of debt his family had drowned in was all the Pruitts' doing,

would he still cradle Lydia in the palm of his hand?

Just then Roland Lambert, who'd been hauling the roses with me, came looking for me.

"Meryl, where are we actually unloading these roses? You've been in here a while. Why didn't you say anything?"

That snapped me back.

I hadn't come here to tangle with them. I'd come to work.

If it weren't for scraping together that last bit of Katie's treatment money, I never would have come here.

Never would have stumbled onto the trap they'd built for me so carefully five years ago.

Maybe even heaven couldn't bear to watch me keep being fooled, and laid the truth bare in front of me.

I peeled off my gloves and said to Roland, calm, "I'm not unloading the roses. Call the boss and tell him to find someone else."

Roland's eyes went wide with alarm. "Meryl, you're giving up your pay? What about your daughter?"

"I don't want it. Not now, not ever again. I don't have a daughter anymore."