Chapter 2Keeping The Eight Million For Myself

I looked at my daughter.

There was still a dull ache in my chest—a vestigial remain of maternal instinct. This was the girl I had raised. I used to think we were a team.

In my first life, when Richard asked for the divorce, my first thought had been her. She was applying for grad school, and she needed her father’s connections and financial backing. I knew Richard. If I divorced him then, he would have cut her off to spend every cent on his new muse.

So I endured. I stayed in a dead marriage, making myself small and pathetic just to ensure she had a bridge to her future.

And how did she repay me? By leaving me to rot in a rural shack without so much as a bag of rice. By ignoring my calls when I was too sick to stand.

When I finally reached her on the phone, she had said: "Just die already, Mom. People like you don't contribute anything to society anyway. You're just wasting oxygen."

Recalling those words, I smiled thinly at her. "Don't worry, Natalie. I won't fight your father for you. Even if you wanted to come with me, I wouldn't take you."

Her face shifted, the smirk faltering for a microsecond before hardening into a sneer. "Please. As if I’d ever go with you. What could you possibly do for me?"

"Skye is my best friend," she continued, her voice rising in a defensive trill. "When she marries Dad, we’ll be closer than ever. She has a Master’s degree, she’s beautiful, she actually matches Dad’s intellect. When you stand next to him, you look like his housekeeper."

She stuck her tongue out at me, a childish gesture from a twenty-year-old woman. "I’m going to be surrounded by culture and sophistication now. I don't need you."

She threw her fork onto the table and sauntered back to her room.

I looked around the room. I looked at the half-eaten meal I’d cooked, the laundry drying on the balcony that I’d washed, the houseplants I watered because she forgot, the pet turtle she’d cried for and then never fed once.

I had done everything for her. And in her eyes, it was worth nothing because it wasn't 'intellectual.' Her father was a professor, so even when he did nothing, he was a giant. I was a mother, so even when I did everything, I was trash.

Fine. I didn't want this ungrateful ghost of a daughter anymore.