POV: Jasmine
My phone rang at 2 AM—unknown number, and I knew before answering that my mother was dying.
The certainty settled into my bones like ice water. No one called at this hour with good news. No one from my past reached out unless something had finally, irreversibly broken.
I stared at the screen for three rings. Four. My thumb hovered over the decline button, ready to send her back into the silence where she'd kept herself for fifteen years.
Then I answered.
"Jasmine?" Her voice was a rasp, barely recognizable as the woman who'd sung me lullabies before the drugs took everything. "I'm at St. Vincent's Hospital. Can you come? Please. I don't have much time left."
I should ignore it. Should let the woman who abandoned her children die alone, the way she'd left us alone in that apartment for days while she chased her next high. Should give her exactly the consideration she'd given us when CPS came knocking and she didn't even fight to keep us.
But something made me get dressed. Something made me grab my keys, slip out of the villa without waking anyone, drive through empty streets toward a reckoning I'd been avoiding for fifteen years.
Maybe it was closure. Maybe it was masochism. Maybe it was the stubborn part of me that still remembered her before—the mother who braided my hair and called me her sunshine, before heroin became her only child.
I texted Leo from the hospital parking lot: Mom's in the hospital. Dying. We need to talk urgently.
His response came an hour later, while I sat in the waiting room watching nurses move through fluorescent corridors like ghosts: I'll be there.
Not "Is she okay?" Not "What happened?" Just confirmation that he'd come.
He texted that he'd stay at our old apartment. Not with me at the villa. Not with us. The distinction was deliberate—a line drawn in digital ink. He was coming for our mother, not for me. Whatever fragile reconciliation we'd built on Martha and Frank's farm had cracked under the weight of everything that came after.
I arrived at the hospital first. Room 412. Fourth floor. Oncology ward.
I pushed through the door and found a stranger wearing my mother's face.
She looked worse than the last time I'd seen her—skeletal now, skin stretched tight over bones that seemed ready to pierce through. Pale as the sheets she lay on. Oxygen tubes snaked into her nose, monitors beeped their steady countdown, and the smell of antiseptic couldn't quite mask the sweetness of decay underneath.
Forty-eight years old. She looked seventy. Cancer eating her from the inside out, finishing the job the drugs had started decades ago.
"Jasmine." Her eyes found me, clouded with morphine but still holding that desperate hope I remembered from childhood. The hope that this time would be different. That this promise would be kept.
She tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. "You look beautiful. Successful. I always knew you'd be something special."
"You didn't know anything about me." The words came out flat, factual. "You stopped knowing me when I was eleven."
The silence stretched between us, filled only by the rhythmic beep of machines keeping her alive. I sat in the chair beside her bed, not touching her, not offering comfort. Just present. Bearing witness to the end of something that had died long before her body caught up.
Twenty minutes later, Leo appeared in the doorway.
He stood frozen, one hand gripping the doorframe like he might collapse without its support. I watched my brother look at the woman who'd birthed us and broken us in equal measure—watched the war play across his features as he processed the wreckage in that hospital bed.
"Leo." Our mother's voice cracked on his name. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, cutting tracks through papery skin. "My baby boy. You came."
"I came for Jasmine." His voice was flat. Dead. "Not for you."
"Please." She tried to reach for him, but her arms were too weak to lift from the mattress. "Please, just let me explain—"
"Explain what?" Leo stepped into the room, and the rage radiating off him was almost visible. "Explain why you chose heroin over your children? Explain why you let strangers raise us while you shot poison into your veins? Explain why the only time you ever reached out was when you needed money?"
"I was sick. I am sick. Addiction is—"
"Addiction is a choice you made every single day." Leo's hands curled into fists at his sides. "Every time you picked up that needle, you chose it over us. Every time you disappeared for weeks, you chose it. Every time Jasmine had to steal food because you spent the grocery money on your dealer, you chose it."
"I tried to get clean—"
"You tried nothing." He was shaking now, fifteen years of suppressed fury finally finding its outlet. "You let us go into foster care without fighting. You never showed up to visitation. You never wrote, never called, never did a single goddamn thing to prove we mattered more than your next fix."
Our mother was sobbing now, great heaving gasps that the oxygen couldn't support. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I know I failed you—"
"No." Leo laughed, and the sound was broken glass. "You didn't fail us. Failing implies you tried. You just... abandoned us. Like we were nothing. Like we were trash you could throw away when we became inconvenient."
I watched my brother's face as he unleashed years of pain on the dying woman who'd caused it. Watched the rage and the grief tangled together, inseparable. Because underneath the anger was something else—something I recognized because I felt it too.
Mourning. Not for the mother dying in this bed, but for the mother we'd never had. For the childhood we couldn't escape. For the family that existed only in fantasy, in those brief moments before the drugs when she'd been ours and we'd been hers and love hadn't come with conditions.
Leo had carried this wound just as long as I had. Had built his own walls, made his own desperate choices, nearly destroyed himself trying to save a woman who'd never tried to save us.
We were both orphans. Had been orphans since we were children, long before death made it official.
Our mother's hand shot out with surprising strength, fingers closing around my wrist like a vice. Her eyes locked onto mine, wild with desperation and something that might have been genuine regret.
"Forgive me." Her voice was barely audible, a whisper fighting through damaged lungs. "Please forgive me."
I looked at her—really looked. At the track marks still visible on her arms beneath the IV lines. At the hollowed cheeks and yellow skin. At the woman who'd given me life and then spent the next fifteen years proving that life meant nothing to her.
"God forgives you," I said quietly. "Not me."