When my mother called, I was still strapped to the trauma board.

The ceiling lights blurred above me as the gurney rushed through the hospital corridor. My ribs burned with every breath, my shoulder throbbed, and one side of my hair was sticky with blood. I forced my toes to move, terrified they wouldn’t.

They moved.

I was alive.

Broken, frightened, but alive.

A paramedic named Sarah leaned over me, her voice calm.

“You’re at County, Harie. We’ve got you.”

But I could only think of one thing.

My baby.

“The baby—” I rasped.

“We know,” Sarah said, squeezing my hand. “They’ll check as soon as you’re stable.”

Then my phone rang.

Sarah glanced at the screen.

“It says Mom. Do you want me to answer?”

Of course it was my mother. Pamela Miller had been listed as my emergency contact for years because that was what mothers were supposed to be—the person called when everything went wrong.

Except mine didn’t comfort emergencies.

She created them.

“Put it on speaker,” I whispered.

Sarah hesitated, then answered.

The sound of blow dryers and salon chatter exploded through the phone. Then my mother’s sharp voice cut in.

“Harie, don’t be dramatic. If you’re going to be incapacitated, transfer the forty-two hundred right now. I can’t have my card declined in first class.”

Those were the first words she said while I lay in a trauma bay after a car accident.

She didn’t ask if I was alive.

She didn’t ask about the baby.

She didn’t ask what happened.

She only cared about money.