Violet is just an ordinary employee in a Multinational Corporation(MNC). Just another pencil pusher who entered the workforce as soon as she graduated because she needed the money, they needed the money.

Her father died in a car accident when she was 10. And for them to survive, her mother had taken on the role of managing all their finances.

They were a simple middle-class family. Seeing her mother struggle every day to put money on the table made her preserve and work harder in school, focusing on her studies and keeping out of trouble.

She never was at the top of her class but she scored well enough to graduate and have grades that would be acceptable in any type of job, which is what landed her in the MNC.

After two years of hard work and perseverance, she had finally been promoted. Her salary was good enough for her to volunteer to work overtime all the time and start to enjoy having weekends to herself again.

The dark days were behind her now, and even her mother was not worried about money for food, or the bills anymore, they were now living a very comfortable life. She even urged Violet to find a good man so she could get married.

It made her laugh when her mother started dropping hints. She started with the cute delivery guys that came to their door, from the single neighbors and their sons, then she even went to great lengths by mentioning the sons of people she knew.

She had been very timid in high school and college and never really tried to date anyone. So just to please her mother, she let her do her thing. She arranged blind dates for her daughter, which Violet went to her mom would stop nagging her. And one after another she rejected them. She told her mother that something was missing and was not ready to settle down.

Most of her dates were usually nice men, and some of them were even very good-looking, but she knew that good-looking people were usually bad news. They were too cocky for their own good because they knew they could get anyone.

And the ones that weren\'t bad news were too rude or too snobby. They treated getting married as a business merger. Questions like what are you bringing to the table and what are your best traits were asked to insult her intelligence, but the thing that drove her over the edge was the question about her background, they drilled her about the past like she was applying to work for the CIA. And to top it off, all of them said that having no father had deducted a lot of her points on their impossible grading system.

She always came out of these dates more upset than the last. She was a romantic at heart and was waiting for the right guy to sweep her off her feet, make her heart beat fast and treat her like a lover rather than a commodity.

Her expectations had not been high going into the blind dates but she had at least hoped that one of them would catch her fancy so it would not be as hard to give up her freedom and her identity because she loved the man.

But suddenly, the darkness came back and found her again. Her mother, who had been perfectly fine, fell ill. She was at home when she got dizzy and passed out. Luckily it was a weekend, and Violet was home that day, so she was able to take her to the hospital, where they were able to take care of her.

When the doctor came to talk to her, Violet felt optimistic, but then the shoe began to drop. After a few days, they said she needed to be brought to a bigger hospital because she was not responding to their treatments, and their equipment was not good enough.

A bigger hospital meant bigger expenses, and Violet got frustrated because even if they were living comfortably, hospital expenses were not factored into their savings. All she could do was hope that whatever treatment they needed at the big hospital would not be too much, because now that they were happier she could not afford for her mom to die. She was not ready to lose her mom.

The nearest hospital they could bring her mother to was the hospital in city X, the same hospital where Aurora worked at. This was one of the best hospitals in the city.

As soon as her mother was admitted, they ran a lot of tests on her, X-ray, EKG, a very extensive blood panel, and the test that nobody wants to get, the MRI. Not only because it was expensive, but also because it found things in your body that were not usually good.

And as expected, bad news had followed them. The MRI found a tumor in her mother\'s brain, it was malignant, which meant there was a chance she could die.

This was the news Violet had hoped she would not get. She had prayed the night before, but her prayers were not answered.

She stood staring at the doctor dumbfounded, she could not even ask the doctor if her mother would make it. But it seemed like he knew what she was thinking, he told her that it was imperative to do the operation as soon as possible because the tumor was still small and her chances of surviving were higher.

But then the biggest issue she had was the expenses. The only asset they had was their house. Any insurance money or savings they had after her father had died had gone to her schooling, so all of that money was gone. And the meager savings they had from work were not even enough to make a dent in the amount they needed.

She was walking listlessly in one of the corridors when someone bumped into her, knocking her cellphone out of her hand.

"Hey! You there! Stop!" and the man just kept on walking.

"That was rude! Aren\'t you going to apologize to me?" she called out to him, and he just raised his hand to wave back at her.