"The gold from the jewelry store is in her stomach right now. I'm sure of it!"
I froze where I stood.
Twenty minutes earlier, my mother had insisted on dragging me to the food court, claiming she was too hungry to walk another step.
I couldn't win the argument, so I bought two baskets of soup dumplings. She ate one. I ate three.
The whole time we were eating, she kept stealing guilty glances at me.
Only at the very end did she wipe her eyes and speak up. "Your Uncle Dwight Mercer owes money again. Dora, please, help him out. Just this once..."
I'd already bailed my uncle out of his gambling debts three times. Seventy-five thousand dollars, all of it thrown down a hole.
I knew he'd never change.
So this time, I said no.
The look on my mother's face. I thought it was disappointment.
Now I realized it wasn't disappointment. It was hatred.
When I stayed silent, my mother seemed almost pleased with herself. "Officer, she says there's a patient at the hospital, but she's just making excuses to run!"
"No one knows a daughter better than her mother. Mine's had sticky fingers since she was little. You'd better search her thoroughly!"
The way Captain Paulson looked at me had already shifted from suspicion to certainty.
After all, no mother would deliberately frame her own daughter.
I was shaking with rage.
When my mother said I had sticky fingers, she was talking about the time I took money from the house to buy medicine as a child.
I'd had a fever so high I could barely stand.
All I took was ten dollars for fever reducers, and she'd held it over my head for more than a decade.
Now she was framing me on purpose, all to punish me for refusing to pay off my uncle's gambling debts.
Any other day, I might have let it go.
But right now, there was an eighteen-year-old boy in the ER waiting for me to save his life.
"I didn't swallow any gold!"
"Mom, do you even hear what you're saying?"
"There's a patient at the hospital with a severed trachea! If he doesn't get surgery now, he will die!"
My mother stepped back half a pace, hiding behind the security guards, looking at me like I was a stranger.
"Dora, I'm doing this for your own good."
"Stealing is a crime. If you hand it over now, they might go easy on you..."
"I didn't steal anything!"
The scream ripped from my throat so hard my vision blurred. I cursed myself for taking the day off to bring my mother to the mall.
Three layers of onlookers had closed in around us. Some were livestreaming. Some were snapping photos. Others whispered behind their hands.
"I heard she's a doctor?"
"A doctor who steals? Guess you really can't judge a book by its cover..."
"Her own mother reported her. You think she'd lie about that?"
Captain Paulson raised his walkie-talkie. "Jewelry store, can you confirm what's missing?"
"Three gold necklaces, fifty grams total. Worth about eighty thousand dollars."
"Copy that."
He lowered the walkie-talkie and turned to me, his tone leaving no room for argument.
"Ms. Fox, since your mother has accused you of concealing stolen goods inside your body, we need you to cooperate. Take the laxatives and submit to an examination of the results."
The words hit me like a bolt of lightning. I lunged forward and grabbed his wrist. "You can't! That boy doesn't have time!"
"He was cut by glass on a construction site. His trachea is completely severed. His oxygen saturation has dropped below sixty percent!"
"My colleagues are bagging him by hand, but the air keeps leaking through the wound into the tissue. His entire neck and chest are swelling up!"
"I'm the only surgeon who can do this operation!"
The words tumbled out of me, incoherent, tears smearing across my face.
"Please. Let me go back to the hospital first. Once the surgery is done, I'll come back and you can do whatever you want with me."
Captain Paulson pulled his wrist free. His expression didn't change.
"Rules are rules."
"If you run, who takes the fall for that?"
He waved his hand, and two guards seized me by the arms, one on each side.
"Take her to the medical office. Give her the laxatives."
I was dragged toward the security office.
