Before betrayal broke us

Chapter 2

Mia was already packing when the call came in, and she hadn't even zipped her bag yet.

Not because she wanted to leave. But every morning she woke up and walked back to that house with Olivia felt like swallowing something that had no business being inside her. She couldn't keep doing it.

Olivia's voice on the other end had nothing in it. No tears. Just empty.

"She fell. My mother. She just went down right there on the floor."

Mia stopped what she was doing, grabbed her bag and left without stopping to think.

The woman was still on the floor when she got there.

Olivia was on her knees next to her, shaking her shoulders and calling her name. The bottle had rolled off to the side. The house smelled like it always smelled. But there was a wrong kind of quiet in the room that hadn't been there before.

"She's been out for ten minutes and I can't get her to respond," Olivia said without looking up from the floor.

"We have to get her to hospital right now, come on," Mia said, already heading for the door.

People outside heard the commotion and came running. Someone went for a vehicle. In minutes there were hands Mia didn't recognise lifting the woman and carrying her outside.

Olivia got in beside her stepmother without anyone telling her to. She held the woman's hand and didn't say a single word the whole ride over. Her lips moved at one point like she was trying to say something but nothing came out.

Mia got in and sat close beside her the whole way.

At the hospital things moved fast at first and then everything slowed right down.

Doctors took the woman behind a set of doors that closed behind them and a nurse put her hand up in front of Mia and Olivia.

"Wait out here," she said firmly before walking away.

The corridor was cold and the plastic chairs along the wall were hard and uncomfortable. A ceiling fan turned overhead doing nothing useful to the thick air.

They sat down and nobody said anything for a long time.

Olivia kept her eyes fixed on the closed doors with her hands in her lap. She had stopped trembling and somehow that was harder to look at than if she was still shaking.

Time moved slowly. Then more slowly.

"She told me I had no future," Olivia said after a while, her voice very low. "Then right after that she just fell. Like her own words knocked her down."

Mia stayed next to her without speaking because there was nothing she could say that would change anything.

The doctor came out just under two hours later.

He was the kind of man who had delivered enough bad news over the years to learn how to keep his face from giving it away too early. He moved carefully and spoke the same way.

"Her organs have taken real damage," he said. "Years of heavy drinking and today made everything worse. Her body is under serious strain right now." He paused before continuing. "She's stable for now but the situation is serious. If there's no improvement in the next forty-eight hours…"

Olivia said it before he could finish.

"She might not pull through."

He nodded carefully. "We'll do everything possible but treatment has to begin straight away." He looked between the two of them. "There's going to be a cost involved."

Costs.

Just one word and it landed in the room like something heavy.

Mia had known that word since she was small enough to sit under the kitchen table listening to her parents argue in low voices about money that wasn't there. Costs meant choices and choices meant someone had to give something up.

"How much?" she asked, keeping her voice steady.

He told them the number and Olivia made a small sharp sound beside her like something had hit her unexpectedly hard in the chest.

Mia stood up and told Olivia she'd be back in a few minutes.

She went straight home to the small tin at the back of her drawer. She had been putting coins into it for months, every bit she earned from errands and early mornings and washing other people's clothes before the sun came up properly. Every time she said no to something small so she could hold onto something that mattered more.

That was her exam registration money sitting in that tin.

She picked it up and headed back to the hospital without counting it.

At the reception desk she placed the envelope down and said, "This is for the woman who just came in. Please start her treatment now."

The receptionist looked at the envelope and then at Mia. "This won't cover everything…"

"I know. Just begin," Mia said quietly.

She turned to go and that was when she noticed the woman sitting in the far corner of the waiting area. Older. Dressed too carefully for a village hospital. Everything about her had the look of someone who had come from somewhere else entirely and hadn't quite settled into where she had landed.

She was watching Mia with a particular kind of attention that wasn't boredom or curiosity. Something more deliberate than both.

Their eyes met for less than a second before the woman looked elsewhere and Mia walked back upstairs telling herself it probably meant nothing.

Olivia found her outside sitting on the concrete step near the entrance with her hands empty in her lap and her eyes on the ground. The evening air was warm but Mia felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

"Mia." Olivia's voice broke on that single word. "That was your exam money."

"I know."

"You saved that for months."

"I know that too."

Olivia lowered herself down next to her slowly. Eyes red and swollen. Dust still on her face from earlier in the day. She looked like someone who had aged years in a single afternoon.

For just a brief moment something moved across her face that wasn't quite grief. Something quieter and harder to name. Something that looked almost like relief.

Then it was gone and her eyes filled up again.

"Why?" she asked, the word coming out broken.

Mia looked at her. "Because you'd have done the same thing for me."

Olivia opened her mouth then closed it then pressed both her hands over her face and cried the deep kind, the kind that comes from somewhere a person has kept shut for far too long.

Mia put her arm around her and said nothing because some moments don't need talking. They just need someone who stays.

The days that came after were hard in ways that didn't announce themselves.

They fell into a routine without planning one. Mornings at the hospital before visiting hours started. Evenings leaving only after the lights in the corridor went dim. In between they worked.

Mia picked up extra laundry from three households across the village. She woke before sunrise and worked until her arms gave out and the skin on her hands cracked from the soap and cold water. She stopped feeling the pain around the third day.

Olivia took on dishes at a small food shop near the market from midday until closing every day. She came home each evening smelling of pepper soup and palm oil with sore feet and a stiff back and never complained once about any of it.

Whatever they earned they put together without discussion. Every coin. Every note. And every few days they walked back to the hospital and dropped off whatever they had at the reception desk.

Inside the ward Olivia's stepmother lay connected to machines that kept up their slow steady beeping.

She looked smaller in the hospital bed. All that anger that had once made her seem to take up so much space was completely gone now. Her chest moved up and down and her hands lay open at her sides.

Olivia was there for every single visiting hour without missing one.

One afternoon Mia stood in the doorway and watched her reach over and rest her fingers gently on her stepmother's hand. Just that quiet touch. Like she was afraid even something that small might not be welcome.

It wasn't simple love. It was the kind that had been knocked down over and over and kept finding its way back regardless. The most exhausting kind there is. The kind that asks for nothing in return.

Olivia is going to get hurt again, Mia thought to herself, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. But she said nothing out loud because some things people have to walk through on their own no matter how much you want to carry it for them.

She turned and walked back down the corridor.

Two weeks went by before the doctor called them into his office.

This time he sat behind his desk instead of meeting them in the hallway and Mia noticed that immediately. She took the chair across from him and folded her hands in her lap.

"Her body is responding," he began. "Slowly but it is responding. The worst of the immediate crisis has passed."

Olivia let out a long slow breath beside her like she had been holding it in for days.

"However," he continued, sliding a paper across the desk toward them, "the liver damage is more extensive than we first assessed. She'll need to stay on and continue treatment and the cost of that continued care…"

Mia looked at the number on the paper. This one felt heavier than the ones before it. The kind that sits there and stares back at you.

Olivia picked up the paper, read it and set it down without changing her expression. "We'll find it," she said.

"I want to be straight with you," the doctor said. "Even with continued treatment nothing is guaranteed. Her body has been through a great deal. You should prepare yourselves for the possibility that…"

"We will find the money," Olivia said again, firm and certain, like the decision had already been made somewhere before this conversation started.

The doctor nodded slowly and said nothing more.

Outside in the corridor they stood side by side without speaking.

Mia thought about her exam results sitting somewhere in a system under her name. About the sketches she made in quiet moments just to keep the dream from going dark. About everything she had handed over to be standing in this hallway right now.

Then she looked at Olivia beside her. Still holding on for a woman who had spent years telling her she had no future.

She turned back to face forward and told herself they would find the money.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket and when she pulled it out there was a message waiting from a number she didn't have saved.

Four words.

Your results are out.

Mia stared at the screen for a long moment.

The fashion exams. The ones she had been saving months to register for. The same money she had placed in an envelope at that reception desk just hours ago.

But she had never registered because she had given the money away before she could.

So how did the results have her name attached to them at all?

Her hands went still and her chest tightened. Someone had registered her without telling her. Someone had believed in her dream when she couldn't hold onto it herself.

She read the message one more time and then another one came through before she could think straight.

I knew you would choose her.

Her breath caught in her throat.

The number still wasn't saved in her phone but the words felt too close and too certain about her to be from a stranger.

Like this wasn't help at all.

Like it was something else entirely.