The voices reached me before consciousness fully returned—my children’s voices, filtering through the hospital room door that someone had left carelessly ajar. They spoke in hushed tones that carried the particular quality of people dividing spoils while trying to appear respectful.
“The beach house should easily fetch two million in this market,” Daniel said, his voice carrying that calculating precision I’d heard him use with clients at his investment firm. “Maybe more if we list it aggressively.”
“What about Mom’s jewelry?” Vanessa’s voice, once so tender when she was young, now had edges sharp enough to cut. “That sapphire set Dad gave her for their thirtieth anniversary must be worth at least fifty thousand.”
“I’ve already contacted a buyer for the art collection,” Robert added, my youngest, always following his siblings’ lead. “We should move quickly before the market shifts.”
I lay motionless in the hospital bed, my eyelids heavy as lead, but something deep inside me was screaming. The steady beeping of monitors confirmed I was alive, though my children apparently hadn’t bothered to confirm this with my doctors. The last thing I remembered clearly was reaching for my reading glasses at the kitchen table, then a crushing pressure in my chest, the world tilting sideways, and then darkness.
Now I existed in this strange liminal space—awake enough to hear, aware enough to understand, but trapped in a body that wouldn’t respond to my commands. A stroke, the doctors had explained during one of their examinations when they thought I was unconscious. Significant, but with hopeful signs of recovery if I could just fight through the initial trauma.
“What about her personal things?” Vanessa continued. “The photo albums, Dad’s old letters?”
“Storage unit,” Daniel dismissed. “We can sort through it later if anyone wants sentimental stuff. Most of it’s just junk nobody needs.”
Junk. Sixty-eight years of memories, of love letters from Richard before we married, of baby photos and wedding albums and the carefully preserved记录s of a life fully lived—all reduced to junk by my own son.
A nurse entered then, her scrubs rustling softly as she checked the monitors beside my bed. She glanced toward the door where my children stood in the hallway, still plotting.
The story doesn’t end here –
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