Chapter 1

Terminal stomach cancer brought searing pain, like fire consuming my insides. Just as death approached, a WhatsApp notification lit up my screen. My son, Yale Strong, had messaged: [If you're going to die, just die. Why make trouble for us?]

Gone was the darkness. It was September 30th, the year Yale started high school. Voices drifted from the living room. Yale, my husband, and his parents were discussing their emigration to Amerelia. My name never came up.

I wasted no time. The education savings for Yale were cashed out. The divorce papers were signed. My number changed. Just like that, I stepped into a new life of freedom.

Years later, outside a bustling mall, a balloon seller caught my eye. It was Yale. Tears streamed down his face as he rushed over. "Mom, I was wrong!"

Those words meant nothing. I would never again clean up the mess of an ungrateful brat.

I took the hand of my daughter, Molly Harper, the one who gave me love and warmth, and walked right past him.

*****

I died from unendurable pain, a victim of late-stage stomach cancer.

On the day of my diagnosis, the doctor lifted his head and asked, "Where is your family?"

No answer came to my lips.

My son Yale resided in Amerelia, and my husband Stephen Strong had settled there alongside his parents. The ocean did not just separate us geographically. It severed any bond that could be called family, if such a thing had ever truly existed.

On the eleventh day of unrelenting pain, I lacked the strength to make a sound.

The thin walls of my run-down apartment in a low-income neighborhood offered no privacy; a TV broadcast blared next door, the host declaring solemnly that "freedom unites us all."

Curled up in damp bedding, I curled into a tight ball, yet the agony remained unchanged.

A fog clouded my mind as memories flooded in, unbidden.

The entire Strong family, including Yale, Stephen, his parents Sally and Vincent Strong, his sister Sarah Strong, and Sarah's daughter, Mia Wesley, filled my thoughts. For years, my alarm jolted me awake at 5:40 every morning.

I prepared breakfast and packed lunches, cooked for Stephen's parents, and supervised Yale's studies. Between ironing dress shirts, sorting Sally's medication into doses, and tutoring Sarah's daughter for math, I washed mountains of laundry and mopped every inch of the floor.

I functioned like a perpetual machine, wired to endless tasks, operating at maximum capacity with no reprieve.

Suddenly, a glow lit up my phone screen.

With great effort, I turned my head and fumbled to unlock it.

A message from Yale had arrived, a reply to my WhatsApp sent three days prior: [If you're going to die, just die. Why make trouble for us?]

I stared at the words for a long while, no tears falling. They had dried up long ago.

After high school graduation, Yale moved to Amerelia for college, landed a job at a major tech firm, and gained permanent residency. He then brought Stephen, Sally, and Vincent to settle there, a decade that left me behind entirely.

He claimed his rented apartment was too small to accommodate me, and before leaving, the family sold the apartment we had lived in for twenty years, insisting the money was needed to cover living costs in Amerelia. No one spared a thought for my future.

The phone slipped from my grasp. I had stared at the cracks on the ceiling for three years, memorizing every length and fork in them. The broadcast continued next door, and my thoughts wandered further.

I pictured the university seal on my master's admission letter when I was twenty-two.

At twenty-five, I married Stephen, and Sally had sneered that I was lucky to marry into their family as a small-town girl.

At twenty-six, I gave birth to Yale, and Vincent declared that the boy would bear the Strong name as his grandson.

To get Yale into an elite elementary school, I quit my job in international trade and took a low-paying position at a small tutoring center, solely for its proximity to home. Stephen had told me plainly, "A mother's priority must always be her children."

When Yale announced his dream of studying in Amerelia, I took on freelance work, translating documents until 3 a.m. for 30 dollars per thousand words.

I picked up children from school and supervised them until their parents returned, earning 250 dollars monthly. I tutored a child whose father worked abroad and whose mother lacked education, bringing in 400 dollars each month.

When Vincent suffered a stroke and was hospitalized, Sally told Sarah that caring for the elderly was my duty as a wife. I took half-days off work every day for a month to nurse him.

When I was forty-five, Yale's acceptance letter to an Amerelian university arrived. His seven-year education cost over 100 thousand dollars annually, pushing me to take on more part-time jobs while maintaining all my household chores.

When he graduated with a master's degree and joined a major firm, the family celebrated plans to buy a house in Amerelia. Faced with the enormous expense, I finally borrowed my parents' retirement savings and sent it all to Yale.

Later, I discovered my name was absent from Yale's immigration application. I only learned our twenty-year home had been sold when the new owners arrived with a renovation team.

I stayed in a motel for over a week with an old suitcase, realizing every penny beyond my meager monthly salary had gone to my son. I rented a tiny studio apartment in the low-income neighborhood and lived there for a decade.

Three years prior, the stomach pain became unbearable, and a diagnosis of stomach cancer followed. Even with health insurance, I could not afford surgery, so I chose palliative care. By my final days, painkillers held no effect.

Slowly, the noise faded, my memories vanished, and the agony in my abdomen disappeared.