Instead, I swiped.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Rachel said.
Her voice sounded older, raspier, like she hadn’t slept in months.
“I’m at Mom’s new place. She’s not great.”
“I read the updates,” I said. “I’m sure this is hard.”
“We lost the house,” she blurted. “I dropped out to work full-time. Mom can’t handle more than a few hours a week. Dad’s exhausted. You got what you wanted.”
There was no venom in her tone.
Just bone-deep exhaustion.
For a second, empathy warred with the memory of her thumb hovering over 911.
I could have said, “I’m sorry.”
I could have told her I hadn’t wanted any of this.
But that would have been a lie.
“You know what’s funny?” I said instead. “When I was eighteen and sleeping on a friend’s couch because your mother threw me out, nobody asked if you were happy with my suffering. Nobody lost sleep over my future. Now that you’re the one sacrificing for her, suddenly it’s a tragedy.”
“I was just a kid back then,” she protested weakly.
“So was I,” I said. “But you picked up that phone anyway.”
Silence stretched thin between us.
Then she said, “I found something.”
“What?”
“Mom’s old diary. From before I was born. Before all of this.”
She hesitated.
“You should see it.”
I almost laughed.
“Why? So I can read about how hard it was to raise an ungrateful future surgeon?”
“No,” Rachel said quietly. “So you can see what she did before you came along, and why she hated your white coat so much.”
That hooked me in a way no guilt ever could.
We agreed to meet at a coffee shop halfway between the hospital and my mother’s cramped apartment.
When I arrived, Rachel was already there, hunched over a worn notebook.
She looked different.
No perfectly filtered makeup.
No soft aesthetic lighting.
Just dark circles under her eyes and tension in her shoulders that hadn’t been there when she was the cushioned younger child.
She slid the diary across the table.
“Page fifty,” she said. “Just read.”
The entry was written in my mother’s looping, impatient handwriting.
“Got written up at the hospital again,” it began. “They’re saying I messed up the dosage. But the doctor signed off, too. Why is it always the nurses who get blamed? If they fire me over this, I swear this place doesn’t deserve me.”
A few pages later:
“They fired me. They said I endangered a patient. That doctor threw me under the bus. I gave years of my life to that place. Now what? David says we’ll manage. He doesn’t get it. I was supposed to be someone. I was supposed to wear the white coat one day, not fetch things for people who do.”
The entries grew darker.
Bitterness hardened into something jagged.
“Saw a med student today,” one read. “Stupid little girl walking around like she owns the ward because she can answer a few questions. I could have done that if I’d had the chances she has. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”
Later, during her pregnancy with me:
“Doctor said the baby’s strong, maybe too strong. Sick of being tired, sick of this body betraying me. If this kid doesn’t amount to something, what was the point of all this?”
I closed the diary, stomach twisting.
“She wanted to be a doctor,” I said slowly. “She wanted everything I have.”
Rachel nodded.
“There’s more,” she said. “After you got your Harvard letter, she wrote about it.”
“Cassie got into Harvard. Of course she did. She got everything I didn’t. If she leaves, what will I have left? Just Rachel, who can’t even get through a semester without falling apart. Maybe it’s better if Cassie stays local. Maybe that’s what’s best for the family. She owes us.”