PART 1
“If my mom thinks I am dying, she will give me every last penny she has.”
Ruby Nickerson froze directly in front of room twenty-two at the Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. Inside her brown purse rested a winning lottery ticket worth twenty million dollars. She had arrived fully determined to transform the life of Mason, her only son, but that single sentence pierced her heart before she could even knock on the door.
A seasonal draft coming from the hallway made the wooden door stay slightly ajar. Mason was talking on the phone with a young woman and had put the call on speakerphone.
“Does not your conscience bother you at all?” the woman asked over the speaker.
“Sometimes,” Mason Nickerson replied, letting out a short and cold laugh. “But my mom loves feeling indispensable, so I do not even need to ask her directly for anything. I just tell her I am worried, and she always finds a way to pay me back.”
Ruby tightened her fingers around the strap of her leather bag while her hands began to tremble uncontrollably. For many long months she had sold her golden jewelry, pawned her grandmother’s antique sewing machine, and taken out multiple personal loans to pay for private medical specialists, endless lab tests, and expensive medications. The doctors repeatedly assured her that Mason could make a full recovery, yet each sudden relapse seemed to dig a massive new hole in her fragile personal finances.
That very morning, as she double checked the winning numbers on the ticket for the fifth time, she had vividly imagined telling him the great news right by his bedside. She had desperately wanted to whisper, “You will never have to worry about money anymore, my son.”
Now she stood frozen in the quiet corridor, forced to hear him planning how to spend a vast fortune whose existence he was still completely unaware of.
“When I finally get out of this hospital,” Mason continued cheerfully, “I will tell her I need to save my commercial sign printing shop, and she will definitely pay the shop rent, buy another industrial printer, and settle all my maxed out credit cards because she always ends up solving every problem for me.”
“What if her good news has absolutely nothing to do with you?” the woman on the line asked.
Mason laughed out loud once again. “Everything in her world ends up having to do with me.”
Ruby felt as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, so she leaned her shoulder heavily against the cold wall to keep from falling to the floor. At sixty years old, she was suddenly discovering that the son for whom she had sacrificed her entire adult life did not view her devotion as love, but rather as an open bank account without a password.
A young nurse walked down the hallway carrying a thick blue medical folder in her arms.
“Mrs. Nickerson, are you not going inside?” the nurse asked softly with a warm smile. “Your son has been asking for you for quite some time now.”
Ruby forced her trembling lips into a completely calm smile. “I accidentally left some crucial documents in my vehicle, dear, so I will be right back in a few minutes.”
She walked straight toward the elevator without turning her head back a single time. When she reached the dimly lit parking garage, she climbed into her old blue sedan, pulled out the printed ticket, and carefully rechecked every single digit.
There was absolutely no mistake about the numbers. She held enough wealth to buy multiple suburban houses, establish thriving businesses, and secure comfortable lifestyles for several generations.
Her cell phone suddenly vibrated inside her coat pocket.
Mason sent a short text: “Where are you right now? You said you had great news for me.”
Ruby slowly typed her response: “There is heavy traffic on the main road, so we will have to talk later.”
She then turned off her mobile device completely. For the first time in thirty-four long years, she did not immediately run when her son called out for her.
Instead of returning to the noisy hospital, she drove directly back to her small modest house located in the Pinecrest neighborhood. She placed the glossy lottery ticket onto the rustic wooden kitchen table where she had spent countless late nights counting tiny coins to cover Mason’s growing debts.
She knew she could simply claim the grand prize money, hand him a generous share, and pretend she had never overheard that painful phone conversation. That quiet submission was precisely what the old Ruby would have chosen to do.
However, a vital piece of her spirit had shattered beyond repair behind that hospital door.
She opened a clean blank notebook and slowly wrote down three serious questions. How much has he actually lied to me over these past years? How much money did he truly take from me under false pretenses? How far would I be willing to go if I knew I had won this fortune?
Before she could finish writing out the third sentence, her phone chimed with an incoming text from an unfamiliar telephone number.
“Mrs. Nickerson, please do not tell Mason about your lottery prize yet because there is something far worse that you urgently need to know.”
The name signed at the bottom of the message read: Serena.
Ruby instantly understood that the shocking hospital conversation had merely opened the very first crack in the hidden reality of her life.
