Page 47 of Scarlet Thorns
“He’s been under a lot of pressure for a long time,” Mom continues. “There were signs that not everything was okay around him. He started having secrets. He put a huge mortgage on our house without telling me about it.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“When I found out, I went crazy. We had several arguments.” Her voice is barely audible now, like confession spoken in the dark. “But he was being secretive about his dealings, obviously hiding things from me. I kept asking what was wrong, but he wouldn’t explain. Just kept saying everything would be fine, that he was handling it.”
The hospital room tilts sideways. Dad— my anchor, my hero, the man I trusted above everyone else— had been… lying. Not just to me, but to Mom too. Building walls of deception around problems I never even knew existed.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mom?” The question comes out edged with hurt and confusion.
She winces like I’ve slapped her. “I didn’t want to burden you with our problems, darling. You were dealing with your own health issues, that situation with Stanley… I never thought it would lead to this.”
The guilt in her voice mirrors the guilt clawing at my own chest. We were all protecting each other from truths that might have saved us if we’d been brave enough to speak them aloud.
“I spoke to the bank just before your father died,” Mom says, her voice so low I have to lean closer to catch every word. “They said your father had secured an independent loan for twenty million dollars.”
Twenty million??
The number doesn’t compute, doesn’t fit with anything I know about our family’s financial situation. Dad made good money as a doctor, but twenty million dollars is generational wealth, the kind of debt that doesn’t come from medical school loans or routine expenses.
“I will never be able to pay it off on my own,” she continues, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “Maybe that’s why he killed himself, because he couldn’t either. We will have to sell the house so I can pay off your father’s debt.”
The house. The beautiful colonial where I grew up, where Christmas mornings happened and birthday parties and all the mundane moments that built a childhood. Where Dad’s study still smells like his cologne and coffee, where Mom’s garden blooms with flowers she’s tended for twenty years.
Gone. All of it gone because of debts we didn’t know existed, problems Dad carried alone until they buried him.
This is too much.
This is all too much.
“But… but… to take his own life,” I sob, the words torn from somewhere deep in my chest. “He wouldn’t just abandon us. He wouldn’t leave us to handle this mess alone.”
Mom nods, but her eyes are distant, lost in memories of arguments and secrets and the slow dissolution of trust between two people who once shared everything.
We sit in broken silence, holding hands across the space between her hospital bed and my uncomfortable chair. Outside, Boston moves through another ordinary day— people going to work, children walking to school, life continuing like the world didn’t just lose one of the good ones.
After a while, the medication pulls Mom back under. Her breathing deepens, her grip on my hand loosens, and I watch her face relax into something resembling peace. Sleep is a mercy I can’t access, my mind too wired with questions and grief to shut down.
When I’m sure she’s truly asleep, I carefully extract my hand from hers and stand on legs that feel like they belong to someone else. Sixteen hours in this chair have left me stiff and sore, but the physical discomfort is nothing compared to the ache in my chest that seems to grow bigger with each breath.
I gather my purse and jacket with movements that feel automatic, disconnected from conscious thought. The hallway stretches before me like a tunnel, fluorescent lights creating pools of harsh brightness that hurt my exhausted eyes.
The elevator carries me down through floors of other people’s emergencies and tragedies, other families keeping vigil beside hospital beds. The thought should comfort me— proof that I’m not alone in this kind of pain— but instead it just makes everything feel heavier. All this suffering, all these broken hearts, and the world keeps turning anyway.
The automatic doors release me into afternoon sunlight that feels obscene in its normalcy. Cars pass on the street, pedestrians walk by talking on phones, the city pulses with energy that has nothing to do with the destruction of my family.
I stand on the sidewalk for a moment, disoriented by the simple act of being outside, of existing in a world that doesn’t know my father is dead. The air tastes different somehow—sharper, less breathable. Like the atmosphere itself has changed in response to this new reality.
My phone buzzes in my purse, probably Jason checking on me, maybe Stanley sending another abusive message I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with right now. But I don’t check. Can’t handle any more information, any more complexity added to a situation that’s already beyond my ability to process.
The walk to my car passes in a fog of numbness punctuated by sharp stabs of memory. Dad teaching me to drive in a similar parking lot when I was sixteen, his patient voice guiding me through three-point turns and parallel parking. Dad at my college graduation, his face glowing with pride as he took picture after picture. Dad just last week, being the shoulder I needed to cry on.
How many times did he think about saying goodbye? How many conversations did we have where he was already gone, just going through the motions of being alive?
I slide behind the wheel and sit in silence. The grief hits in waves— sometimes manageable, sometimes drowning. Right now, it’s the drowning kind, filling my lungs until I can’t breathe around the weight of it.
Dad is gone. Really, truly gone in a way that can’t be fixed or explained or reasoned away. And with him went all the answers to questions I never thought to ask, all the conversations we’ll never have, all the moments he’ll miss and I’ll have to navigate alone.
The woman I was yesterday— the one who complained about endometriosis and relationship drama and medical bills— feels like a stranger. Those problems belong to someone whose father was still alive, whose family was still intact, whose biggest concern was whether she’d see some masked stranger again.
