I said no.
And my mother said — in front of my father, my husband, and a woman from next door who had come for coffee —
“You’re so selfish, Isadora. You’re bitter because your sister’s got a child and you haven’t. What do you want property for? Who are you going to leave it to?”
I am not going to describe what that did. I will say that I have had four sessions about that one sentence and that we are not finished with it.
Kester put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t make a scene.”
I took his hand off my shoulder and said no again.
And my father hit the table and said that if I would not help my sister then I should not count on this family for anything, ever.
And I got up and left, and I want to be honest that I was shaking so badly in the hall that I could not get my keys out of my bag.
And in the driveway I met Tomas.
Tomas Reyes is a cardiac nurse. He is thirty-three and he had been doing double shifts since June to pay for a private maternity suite my sister demanded.
He looked like a man who had not slept in a month, because he had not.
And he was embarrassed. He actually apologised before he said anything.
He handed me a folded stack of paper and said:
“Iz. Something’s wrong with Tavi’s medical bills. I sold the bike to cover the interest and the numbers don’t work. You do this for a living. Can you look.”
I looked at the top sheet in a driveway.
They were not hospital bills.
They were invoices from something called Corran Wellness Group. Laid out to look like hospital statements — same font, a plausible logo, line items with what looked like billing codes.
They are not billing codes. They are made up. Four of them are just repeated with different suffixes.
Eleven months of them. Thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars.
And when I looked up what the codes actually corresponded to on the underlying merchant records — which took me about two hours that night — they were laser treatments, a course of body contouring, and, on three occasions, handbags.
