The walls of Room 314 spun, the edges of my vision going black as the truth of what my father had done dragged me under.

Chapter 2 — The Yacht

I didn’t cry that first night. The shock was a leaden blanket that smothered everything else.

I lay still, staring at the ceiling, counting the little perforated dots until they blurred.

The next morning the nausea hit. The poison meant to kill the cancer felt like it was killing me first, and I spent hours bent over a plastic basin.

That afternoon, a young nurse left her iPad on the tray table by my bed, the screen glowing, open to Facebook.

Some masochistic part of my thirteen-year-old brain needed to know what my family was doing while I drowned.