Chapter 3

Mom's smug voice rang in my ears, each word landing like a blow.

So Mom hadn't been tricked into buying that coat. In her eyes, I was only worthy of garbage. For the first time in my 20 years, I truly understood that.

Still, I refused to accept it. I kept going through Mom's phone, hoping to find some proof that she treated Brielle and me the same.

I opened Mom and Brielle's chat. It was clean, filled with nothing but casual small talk. There wasn't a single record of a money transfer. But that was exactly what made it feel off.

I pulled up Mom's transaction history. Sure enough, I saw transfer after transfer sent to Brielle. They ranged from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, sent every single month without fail.

As for me, the moment I turned 18 years old, Mom cut off my allowance under the guise of teaching me to be independent.

I had put myself through college on student loans and part-time jobs. Even when I was at my lowest, I couldn't turn to my parents for money.

I had actually envied Brielle back then for how she managed to keep up with school while still enjoying such a comfortable life.

Every time I asked how she made so much money, she would give me a strange smile. I thought she was simply being stingy and didn't want to tell me. It turned out she had been laughing at me for being completely in the dark.

The most recent transaction was a transfer of 12 thousand dollars to a personal shopper. The note read, "Coat for Brielle—must be the latest style and nicely packaged."

I could no longer hold back my tears.

If Mom could find a coat in the trash and lie to me about it being new, what else had she done?

My mind drifted back to my middle school years, when I was still growing. Every morning and night, Mom would warm up a cup of milk for Brielle and me.

After drinking hers, Brielle would always say it tasted sweet and rich. She looked glowing and healthy from it.

But every time I drank mine, it tasted strange. The milk was slightly sour, with mysterious sediment at the bottom of the cup and sometimes even bits that looked like curd.

At that time, I didn't understand. All I knew was that it tasted awful.

Whenever I told Mom about it, she would glare at me and slam her utensils down on the table. "Brielle drinks hers just fine. Why do you always have to be so difficult? It's only a few dollars a carton. Who do you think you are, having standards? You're just being picky! If you don't want it, then don't drink it!"

Brielle would chime in from the side, smiling as she licked the milk from the corner of her mouth. "Aria, are you pretending to be sick because you don't want to go to school? This milk tastes perfectly fine to me. Mom specifically bought the high-calcium one."

After that, I often suffered from diarrhea. The worst episode left me so dehydrated that I was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night for an IV.

When the doctor asked if I had eaten something bad, Mom spoke up before I could. "Absolutely not! My daughter just has a weak stomach. She wouldn't gain weight even if she ate the finest food in the world. It's just the way she is."

Back then, as I lay in the hospital bed watching Mom bustle around, guilt overwhelmed me. I felt that my poor health was a burden on my family and that I was wasting their money.

But now…

With trembling fingers, I typed the word "milk" into the search bar of Mom and Brielle's chat. The screen shifted, and a flood of results appeared. They spanned several years.

The latest message was from last month.

"I bought another crate of milk from the supermarket clearance section for only ten dollars," Mom wrote. "The ones with red caps are expired—give those to Aria. She can handle it. The blue caps are still good, so keep those for yourself to make yogurt."

My stomach turned as I stared at those words.

It wasn't that I had a weak stomach—my own mom had been feeding me spoiled milk for years.