I WOKE UP in the hospital with my evil stepmother Lucinda by my bed.

And you know it was bad if Lucinda showed up.

I opened my eyes, and I saw one of my least favorite people on the planet leaning forward, elbows on knees, peering over the bed rail, flaring her nostrils and staring at me like she’d never seen me before.

“What happened?” was all I could think of to say.

At that, Lucinda went into full gossip mode, filling me in on the details as if she were talking to a random neighbor—and I can’t tell you how weird it was to be getting the story of my life from the person who had ruined it.

Anyhoo.

Apparently, I’d had what they call a nonconvulsive seizure, right there in the middle of the crosswalk in front of my building. I froze into an empty stare in the street and was almost mowed down by a Volkswagen Beetle before a mysterious Good Samaritan shoved me to the curb at the last second and saved my life.

Next, after not getting run over, I passed out on the sidewalk in front of my building.

The Good Samaritan then called 911 and handed me off to the paramedics when they arrived. According to the nurse at the hospital, I was semiconscious when they wheeled me in and was asking everyone to find my father—though that’s another thing I don’t remember.

I really must have been out of it to ask for my dad. Of all people. A person I would never voluntarily turn to in need.

But over and over, apparently, I asked for him, saying his name. Which the nurses recognized. Because my dad was, to be honest, a bit of a celebrity surgeon.

The staff called his office, according to that same nurse, but he was “unavailable.”

Which is how Lucinda wound up here.

She was absolutely the last person I’d want at my bedside—besides perhaps her daughter. Honestly, I’d rather have woken up to Miranda Priestly. Or Mommie Dearest. Or Ursula from The Little Mermaid.

And from the looks of those nostrils of hers, Lucinda wasn’t too thrilled to be seeing me, either.

Still, she kind of liked the drama.

Her tone was a little bit incredulous as she brought me up to speed, like how I could’ve chosen the crosswalk of a busy street, of all places, to have that nonconvulsive seizure was beyond her. “If that Good Samaritan hadn’t saved you, you’d be flat as a pancake right now.” She paused and tilted her head, like she might be picturing that. “I was at my Whining & Wine-ing group when they called, but it’s okay. It’s fine. Of course I dropped everything and came here right away.”

Her tone made me wonder if that was true. Like maybe she’d tossed back one last glass of chardonnay.

I shook my baffled head again, like, Wait. “What happened?”

She leaned in a little, like I hadn’t been paying attention. “You almost died in the road.”

“But what caused the seizure?” I asked at last, my wits starting to come back.

“They don’t know. Could even just be dehydration. But they want to do an MRI before they release you. Looks like you’ll have to stay overnight.”

And then, quickly, to snuff out even the possibility that I might ask her to stay—which I would absolutely never do—she added, “I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

I waited for it all to sink in while Lucinda checked her texts and then gathered up her things.

She was one of those put-together ladies who always matched her shoes to her purse. She kept her hair no-nonsense and short, but she always had a full face of makeup. I’d always suspected she focused hard on her surface because there wasn’t much underneath. But I really didn’t know her that well. Even after all these years.

I did not anticipate, for example, that when her daughter, Parker, also known as my evil stepsister, FaceTimed her right then, Lucinda would answer the call. Or that she’d proceed to fill Parker in on everything that had just happened like she was relating the hottest of hot-off-the-press gossip. And then, when Parker said, “Let me see,” that Lucinda would turn the phone around and train it on me.

I frowned at Lucinda and shook my head. But it was too late.

There was Parker’s catlike face—as scary at iPhone size as it was in real life.

How long had it been since I’d seen her? Years.

I could go my whole life, and it wouldn’t be too long.

“Oh my god!” Parker shrieked. “I can’t believe you almost got killed by a Volkswagen Beetle! I mean, at least pick something cool, like a Tesla.”

“Noted,” I said.

It was strange to see her again. She’d highlighted the hell out of her hair. And she’d really taken a deep dive into the world of eye shadow. She had better style than she had in high school—in a newscaster-ish way. The sight of her kind of stung my eyes. But I couldn’t deny that technically— and I say this as a professional in the industry—she had a pretty face.

Too bad she ruined it by being … pure evil.

“You look terrible,” Parker said, squinting in faux sympathy. “Did you land on your face?”

I looked at Lucinda, like, Seriously?

But Lucinda just smiled and gestured for me to answer, like she thought this might be a nice conversation.

I sighed and shifted my eyes back to the screen. “I did not land on my face,” I answered robotically.

“You just look so bloated,” she went on. “I’m fine.”

“Did they have to pump you full of saline or something?” “What? No.”

“You just kind of look like James Gandolfini right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

Okay. We were done here.

“Hoo-boy,” I said, checking the nonexistent watch on my wrist. “Look at the time.”

Then I rolled over to face the wall.

“Is she pouting?” Parker demanded as Lucinda took the phone back. “You’d be fussy, too, if it had happened to you.”

“But it would never happen to me. If I ever get run over, it’ll be by an Aston Martin.”

A thousand years later, after Lucinda finally hung up and was ready to go, she paused by my bed, looking me over as if she couldn’t begin to fathom my life choices.

“I hope the Betty Ford Center isn’t next for you,” she said then, shaking her head like I was an unsolvable mystery. “They said you showed up in the ER positively dripping in red wine.”

At the words, I sucked in a breath. “Where’s the dress?” “What dress?”

“The one I was wearing. When I got here.”

“Oh,” Lucinda said, shaking her head with disgust. “It’s in the trash.” “The trash?” I grabbed the bed rail.

“It was ruined,” Lucinda said. “Wine-drenched, bloodstained—and the paramedics had to cut it off you. It’s not even fit for cleaning rags now. Unsalvageable. I told the orderly to throw it away.”

I don’t remember starting to cry, but by the time Lucinda paused, my face was wet, my throat was thick, and my breathing was shaky. “They threw away the dress?”

“It was trash, Sadie,” Lucinda said, doubling down. “It was beyond hope.”

But I shook my head. “But I need it,” I said.

Lucinda lifted her eyebrows, like, This better be good. “Why?” “Because…” I started.

But there was nothing to say. Lucinda had spent her entire marriage to my dad trying to erase all traces of my mother. If she’d known that dress was my mom’s, she’d have thrown it away even sooner.

And maybe set a match to it first. “… Because I just do,” I finished.

Lucinda stepped back then and eyed me as if to say, Just what I expected. Like she’d called me on my insultingly obvious bluff. “It’s gone,” she said on her way out the door. “Just let it go.”

But after she left, I pressed the button for the nurse.

When she showed up, I was crying so much, she took my hand and squeezed it. “Deep breaths. Deep breaths,” she said encouragingly.

Finally, through breaths that were more like spasms, I conveyed the question. “The dress—I was wearing—when I came here—my stepmother said—to throw it away—but I need it. Is there any way to—get it back?”

Her sigh seemed to deflate her entire body. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said

—and by the end of those first two words alone, I knew all hope was lost. “If we threw it away, it went to the incinerator.”

And so there was nothing left to do but cry myself to sleep.

LUCINDA DID NOT return “first thing in the morning.” Which was fine with me. I’d already had breakfast, an MRI, and begun a consultation with a deeply serious Filipino brain surgeon named Dr. Sylvan Estrera before she showed back up, appearing in the room just as he got to the juicy stuff.

“The scan didn’t reveal anything urgent,” Dr. Estrera was saying. “No stroke or hemorrhage. No significant bleeds in the brain.”

“That’s a relief,” I said.

Then he continued. “But it did reveal a neurovascular issue.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good. “A neurovascular issue?” The word

neurovascular felt like a foreign language in my mouth. “A lesion,” he explained, “that should be treated.”

“A lesion?” I asked, like he’d said something obscene.

Dr. Estrera put some images from the MRI up onto a lightboard. He pointed to an area with a tiny dark dot and said, “The scan revealed a cavernoma.”

He waited for recognition, like I might know what that was. I did not. So I just waited for him to go on.

“It’s a malformed blood vessel in the brain,” he explained next. “You’ve had it all your life. An inherited condition.”

I glanced at Lucinda, like that didn’t seem right.

But Lucinda lifted her hands and said, “Don’t blame me. I’m just the stepmother.”

I looked back at the scan—and that menacing little dot.

Could he have gotten my scan mixed up with someone else’s? I mean, I just didn’t feel like a person walking around with a malformed blood vessel in her brain.

I frowned at Dr. Estrera. “Are you sure?”

“It’s plain as day right here,” he said, pointing at the image. Plain as day? More like a fuzzy blur, but okay.

“Cavernomas frequently cause seizures,” he went on. “They can be neurologically silent. You could go your whole life without ever having a problem. But they can also start to leak. So your best option is to get it surgically resected.”

“It’s leaking?” I asked.

“It is. That’s what brought on the seizure.”

“The nonconvulsive seizure,” Lucinda noted, like that made it better. “I thought you said there was no bleed in the brain,” I said.

“No significant bleed,” he clarified. Why was I arguing with him?

He went on, “We need to go in and resect that blood vessel.” Huh. “By go in,” I said, “do you mean go in … to my brain?” “Exactly,” he said, pleased I was getting it now.

I was definitely getting it now. “You’re telling me I need brain surgery?”

I looked at Lucinda again. There was no one else to look at.

Lucinda leaned toward the doctor like she had a juicy secret. “Her father is a very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon,” she said, as if that might somehow earn me a pass. Then, with all the confidence of a woman whose biggest accomplishment was being married to a very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon, she stated: “Richard Montgomery.”

Dr. Estrera took that in like a random pleasantry he was too polite to ignore. “Yes. I’ve met him on several occasions.” He turned back to me. “It’s an elective procedure, in the sense that you can schedule it at your convenience. But I’d recommend sooner rather than later.”

“How can brain surgery be an elective procedure?” I asked. Botox was an elective procedure. Tummy tucks. Tonsillectomies.

“I’ll have to refer you to scheduling,” Dr. Estrera went on, “but we can probably get it done in the next few weeks.”

The next few weeks! Uh, no. That wouldn’t work.

I mentally scanned back through the email I had just gotten yesterday about placing in the portrait competition.

Placing in this contest—landing in the top ten of two thousand entrants

—meant that I had exactly six precious weeks to plan and execute the best portrait I’d ever painted in my life. From choosing a model, a color palette, and a setting, to doing the prep work and the initial sketches, to rendering the final, full painting … I was going to need every minute I had.

The competition. I’d almost forgotten. I was a finalist in the most prestigious portrait competition in the country.

I couldn’t blow it. After all those years of failure: just scraping by and working overlapping jobs and questioning my value as a human being, I had to win.

Sue had wanted to celebrate yesterday, but now the real work started.

This was my shot. Possibly the only one I’d ever have.

So no, I wasn’t going to sign up for elective brain surgery right now, thanks very much.

“Um,” I said to Dr. Estrera, in a soft voice, like I didn’t want to offend him, “I just don’t have the time for brain surgery.”

How bizarre to say those words out loud.

And then my desire not to have brain surgery ran into direct conflict with my desire for Lucinda to never know anything about my life—and I hesitated so hard to explain my situation that when it all came out, it was one rapid burst: “I’m a portrait artist, and I’m a finalist in a competition that has a deadline in six weeks, and the first-place prize is ten thousand dollars, and this really is my big break that could change everything for me, and I’m going to need every single second between now and then to create the most kick-ass portrait in the history of time because I really, really need to win this thing.”

Had I just said the word ass in front of a brain surgeon?

“I understand,” Dr. Estrera said. “But please realize, there is some urgency here. Bleeding—even seepage—in the brain is never a good thing. And while ‘brain surgery’”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“sounds like a big deal, and it is, this procedure is relatively quick. You’d need only two to four days in the hospital. We can even do hair-sparing techniques to avoid shaving your head.”

Was he trying to make it sound appealing? I hadn’t even thought about anyone shaving my head.

What had started as a simple no was rapidly becoming a “hell, no.” I nodded like I was thinking about it. But what was there to think about? An old New Yorker cartoon of a person scheduling a meeting and saying, “How about never?” came to mind.

“I think,” I said then, “that I’d really like to put the surgery off for as long as humanly possible.”