I knew he'd never change.
So this time, I said no.
The look on my mother's face. I thought it was disappointment.
Now I realized it wasn't disappointment. It was hatred.
When I stayed silent, my mother seemed almost pleased with herself. "Officer, she says there's a patient at the hospital, but she's just making excuses to run!"
"No one knows a daughter better than her mother. Mine's had sticky fingers since she was little. You'd better search her thoroughly!"
The way Captain Paulson looked at me had already shifted from suspicion to certainty.
After all, no mother would deliberately frame her own daughter.
I was shaking with rage.
When my mother said I had sticky fingers, she was talking about the time I took money from the house to buy medicine as a child.
I'd had a fever so high I could barely stand.
All I took was ten dollars for fever reducers, and she'd held it over my head for more than a decade.
Now she was framing me on purpose, all to punish me for refusing to pay off my uncle's gambling debts.
Any other day, I might have let it go.
But right now, there was an eighteen-year-old boy in the ER waiting for me to save his life.
"I didn't swallow any gold!"