The administrator’s face turned red. “Sir, you can’t threaten—”
“I’m not threatening. I’m promising.” I pulled out my phone. “I can have fifty brothers here in an hour. A hundred by tonight. We’ll be peaceful. We’ll be quiet. But we’ll be here. And we’ll make sure every news station in the state knows why.”
The administrator looked panicked. “Let me… let me call the director. Please wait here.”
She scurried off. Sarah stared at me with tears streaming down her face. “Why are you doing this? You don’t even know us.”
“Ma’am, I lost my daughter to leukemia twenty-six years ago. She was seven. And the hospital tried to do the same thing to us when our insurance ran out.”
I sat down next to her. “I couldn’t fight back then. I didn’t know how. I was young and scared and I did what they told me. I took my dying daughter home to our tiny apartment where she died three days later in agony because we didn’t have the pain medication she needed.”
My voice broke. “I swore after she died that I’d never let another parent go through what my wife and I went through. Never.”
Aina reached out and touched my hand with her tiny fingers. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” she whispered. “What was her name?”
“Emily,” I said. “And she looked a lot like you. Same hazel eyes.”
“Is she in heaven?” Aina asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Then she’s not in pain anymore,” Aina said simply. “That’s good.”
This six-year-old dying child was comforting me. I had to turn away to wipe my eyes.
Sarah spoke quietly. “We had a house. Had insurance. Had everything. But then my husband died in a construction accident two years ago. The company he worked for wasn’t paying proper insurance. We got nothing. I had to sell everything to pay for Aina’s first round of treatment.”
“Then the cancer came back six months ago. More aggressive. I’ve been working three jobs but it’s not enough. We lost our apartment. We’ve been living in our 2003 Honda Civic. I park behind the hospital most nights so I’m close if Aina needs emergency care.”
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