Chapter 3

The next morning, Austin came to visit me at the hospital first.

He wore a Patagonia down jacket, the one I bought for him last year while it was on sale, and sat down next to my bed. The first thing he said was, "Aiden, since you're not going to be using your Tesla anymore, you can consider transferring the ownership to me first. I need it to go to work."

"Who told you to come here?" I asked.

"Mom did. She said it's a waste to just let the car sit there anyway."

He then scrolled on his phone for a while afterward before asking me, "By the way, is your job position available now? I just connected with your HR manager on LinkedIn. Help me put in a good word on my behalf."

"What job position?"

"Your backend architecture job. You're not going back to work anymore, are you?"

I didn't say anything and just stared at him for a long time. He continued scrolling on his phone again as he said nonchalantly, "Also, you're not using your stock account anymore, so just send me your password later. I'll help you take care of it."

I lifted my phone and took a photo of him. Then, I added a footnote that said, "Austin Carroll. Came to visit me and demanded my Tesla, a job referral, and my stock account password. Mom told him to come."

Austin didn't even stick around for more than ten minutes. He left soon after, citing that he was meeting up with a friend for lunch.

Sometime in the afternoon, Aunt Ruth arrived at my room. She brought a bag of apples with her, and I saw that she hadn't snipped off the "on sale" tag that was still attached to it.

She set down the apples by my bedside and made small chats for about 15 minutes. Finally, she got to the point.

"Aiden, Theodore wants to start a business of his own, but he needs another 100 thousand dollars as capital. Since you're in this condition now… Can you lend him some of your money?"

I didn't answer her.

It was bad enough that they spread rumors about me having stage-four cancer and yet never asked me if I had enough money for my treatment. And now, she was trying to borrow money from me instead because she thought she wouldn't need to return it after I was "gone".

"It's not that I'm trying to make it sound bad," Aunt Ruth said, explaining herself. "But you probably won't be able to recover from stage-four cancer. You should use the remaining time you still have on earth to help out your relatives while you still can."

I pushed the apples back toward her.

"I need to rest now, Aunt Ruth."

She was stunned for a moment. Then, she got to her feet and left without the apples.

I snapped a photo of the apples and made another footnote.

"Aunt Ruth visited me with apples that were on sale. She told me that I wouldn't recover and should help out my relatives before I died. But she tried to cheat me out of 100 thousand dollars."

There were no more new guests after that until night.

I flipped through my photo gallery and footnotes. It had only been three days, but I'd already amassed seven photos and screenshots.

At 8:00 pm that night, the door opened again. I thought it was another one of my relatives trying to covet some other thing of mine, but to my surprise, I saw Brenda Chavez standing there instead.

She was my first love and also my ex-girlfriend. We'd broken up in our final year of college over a bowl of spicy crawfish boil.

I hadn't seen her in more than a decade, and she'd gotten a lot slimmer. Her eyes were also red and puffy.

She entered my room with a thermal flask, a bag of fresh fruits, and another bag of stuff from the pharmacy. There were painkillers, protein powder, and other various supplements inside.

"You… What are you doing here?" I asked in surprise.

"I saw Lexie's Instagram story. She said you had stage-four cancer," Brenda replied, sitting down next to me and opening her thermal flask. A delicious smell wafted into the air at once.

It was the warm, comforting aroma of my favorite beef stew.

"I asked for the hospital and searched for you all day," she said.

I stared at the stew in her hand and felt a lump in my throat.

Wait. Did Brenda just say that Lexie Carroll, another one of my cousins, had posted about me on her Instagram stories?

I suddenly remembered someone—Wanda Osbourne, my current girlfriend.

I'd been hospitalized for three days, but she never called, never texted, and never even contacted me anywhere.

I quickly took out my phone and texted her, "I've been hospitalized."

However, I noticed that the message just wouldn't go through, and I correctly guessed that she'd blocked my number and all of my socials.

I then hurriedly tapped into the home surveillance application on my phone and saw that the living room was empty, the dressing table was empty, and the closet doors were also left wide open.

I watched the surveillance footage from a few days ago and saw that she'd moved out in the afternoon two days ago, bringing two men into the house to move her things out.

Wanda left a note on the coffee table telling me that she was breaking up with me. She'd also taken the gold and my savings in the safe with her, citing them as her share of the breakup fee.

I turned off my phone with trembling fingers.

Brenda looked at me. "What's the matter?"

"I'm fine."

She handed the stew to me. "Eat this."

Then, she took out a bank card from her purse and stuffed it under my pillow.

"What's that?"

"300 thousand dollars," she replied. "They're from my savings and my mom's budget for my future wedding gift. I know it's not much, but maybe it's good for one or two sessions of chemotherapy?"

I looked at her card, her stew, and then her.

My own mother had brought a document to waive me from my own assets. Lana tried to get me to write off 180 thousand dollars. Uncle James wanted my Tesla. Aunt Jessica wanted my Bitcoins.

Aunt Sandy wanted my Alienware laptop. Aunt Ruth wanted to borrow 100 thousand dollars. Austin wanted my house, my car, my job, and my stocks. Wanda took my gold and savings and ran off.

And then, Brenda, my ex-girlfriend whom I hadn't seen in over ten years, traveled two hours by bus to visit me in her discounted TJ Maxx shirt and gave me 300 thousand dollars in a bank card stuffed under my pillow, saying they were her and her mom's savings.

"Brenda."

"Yeah?"

I took out my phone, tapped into my bank account, and showed her my screen that displayed, "Balance: 20,000,000.00 dollars."

She dropped the spoon to the floor.

"You—"

"I don't have cancer. I just hit the jackpot. 20 million dollars," I explained. "But I never told anyone about it. The show's only just begun."