It cost her nearly everything.

And it worked.

Chapter 2 — For Months

My mother lived alone in a cozy little house in a quiet neighborhood in Miami, surrounded by the bougainvillea she had planted decades ago, with a small statue of Saint Jude standing beside the television and a pot of chicken soup on the stove that seemed as though it would never, in all the years of the world, run out.

But for the past several weeks, she had not been herself.

She would take two bites of dinner and push the plate quietly away.