At The Hospital For My Daughter’s Poisoning, An ER Doctor Slipped Me A Note: “… Check Your Home…”

I was standing in the hallway of Pearson General Hospital, watching through the window as my daughter slept in ICU bed 7, when the young ER doctor approached me.

Dr. Chen didn’t look at me directly. He pretended to check his tablet, but as he passed, he pressed something small and hard into my palm. His hand was trembling. I glanced down—a folded sticky note.

I waited until he disappeared around the corner before I opened it. The handwriting was rushed, almost frantic. The ink had smeared where his thumb pressed too hard.

Lab results don’t match food poisoning. This wasn’t an accident. Check your home security footage from tonight before you talk to anyone.

What I found on that camera didn’t just shatter my trust. It revealed a conspiracy that had been months in the making, and it nearly cost me everything I had spent my entire life building.

But before I tell you what that footage showed me, let me tell you how I ended up in that hospital corridor at 11:00 on a frozen February night in Toronto, believing I had poisoned my own daughter.

My name is Thomas Whitmore. I’m 67 years old. For 40 years, I worked as a medical examiner for the Toronto Police Service. I’ve performed over 8,000 autopsies. I know what death looks like. I know what poisoning looks like. I know the difference between an accident and something deliberate.

But when it’s your own child lying in that hospital bed, logic abandons you. Fear takes over. And guilt—well, guilt is the sharpest scalpel of all.

The night started normally enough. It was Rebecca’s idea to have Sunday dinner at my house. My daughter is 38 years old. She’s married to Derek Lang, a commercial real estate broker who drives a BMW he can’t quite afford and wears suits that cost more than my monthly grocery bill. They live in a condo in the Liberty Village area that I helped them buy 3 years ago. I put down $200,000 as a gift. I didn’t ask for it back.

Rebecca is my only child. Her mother, Margaret, passed away from breast cancer four years ago. Since then, it’s just been the two of us navigating the holidays, the birthdays, the Sunday dinners.

That particular Sunday, Rebecca called me at 2:00 in the afternoon.

“Dad,” she said, and I could hear that forced cheerfulness in her voice that I’d started to notice more often lately. “Dererick and I were thinking, ‘Why don’t we come over for dinner tonight? We haven’t seen you in weeks. I miss you.’”

I should have been happy, but something felt off. We just had dinner the previous Sunday, and the Sunday before that. In the past 2 months, these visits had become more frequent, more urgent. But I pushed the thought aside. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Maybe my daughter actually wanted to spend time with her old man.

“Of course,” I said. “I’d love that. I’ll make your mother’s roast chicken, the one with the rosemary and garlic.”

“Perfect,” Rebecca said.

There was a pause.

“Dad, could you maybe open that bottle of wine? The Bordeaux from your seller, the 2015?”

I frowned. That bottle was worth about $400. I’d been saving it for a special occasion.

“Sure,” I said slowly. “What are we celebrating?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “I just thought, you know, life is short. We should enjoy the good stuff while we can, right?”

I spent the afternoon preparing dinner. I’m not much of a cook, but Margaret taught me a few dishes before she got too sick to stand in the kitchen. The roast chicken was one of them. I could still see her hands guiding mine, showing me how to tuck the rosemary sprigs under the skin, how to tie the legs with kitchen twine.

I set the table with her good china, the set with the blue rim that had belonged to her grandmother. I put out the silver candlesticks. I even ironed the linen napkins.

By the time Rebecca and Derek arrived at 6:30, the house smelled like Sunday dinners used to smell when Margaret was alive—like family, like home.

But the moment they walked through the door, I knew something was wrong.

Rebecca hugged me, but it felt performative. Staged. Dererick shook my hand with that aggressive grip he always uses, like he’s trying to prove something.

“Tom,” he said. He’s never called me Thomas. Always Tom, like we’re buddies. Like he didn’t marry into this family—he conquered it. “Great to see you, man. Something smells incredible.”

Rebecca was already walking through the house, her heels clicking on the hardwood floors.

“The place looks good, Dad. You’ve been keeping it clean.”

“I try,” I said, following them into the dining room. “I know it’s big for just one person, but I can’t imagine leaving. Your mother loved this house.”

“About that,” Derek said, and Rebecca shot him a look. A warning look.

“We’ll talk later,” she said. “Let’s eat first.”

We sat down. I carved the chicken. I poured the wine. We made small talk about Dererick’s work, about Rebecca’s yoga classes, about the snowstorm that was supposed to hit Toronto overnight. But underneath the pleasantries, I could feel the tension—the waiting.

They wanted something. I just didn’t know what yet.

We were halfway through the main course when Rebecca’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it and her face went pale.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, but her hand was shaking as she put the phone face down on the table. “Just work stuff.”

Dererick reached over and squeezed her knee under the table.

“I saw it.”

The gesture was supposed to be comforting, but it looked more like a warning.

“Don’t. Not yet.”

I was about to ask what was going on when Rebecca suddenly pushed her chair back.

“Dad,” she said.

Her voice had changed. It was weak.

“Thddy, I don’t feel well.”

“What’s wrong?” I stood up. Dererick stood up too, but he didn’t move toward her. He just watched.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Rebecca said.

And then she was right there at the table—violent, wrenching heaves that brought up everything she’d eaten. The chicken, the wine, everything. She collapsed forward, and I caught her before she hit the floor.

“Call 911!” I shouted at Derek, but he was already on his phone.

“Yes, we need an ambulance,” he was saying. “My wife is vomiting uncontrollably. We’re at her father’s house. He cooked dinner. I think she’s been poisoned.”

Poisoned?

The word hit me like a fist.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Derek, I used fresh ingredients. I cooked everything properly.”

“I don’t know, man,” Derek said, but he was looking at Rebecca, not at me. “Maybe something was bad. Maybe the chicken wasn’t cooked all the way. Jesus, Rebecca, stay with me.”

The ambulance arrived in 7 minutes. The paramedics loaded Rebecca onto a stretcher. She was barely conscious, mumbling incoherently. One of the paramedics, a woman with kind eyes, looked at me.

“Sir, did everyone eat the same food?”

“Yes,” I said. “I had the chicken, too. Derek had the chicken.”

“Are you feeling sick?”

“No,” I said. “I feel fine.”

She made a note on her tablet.

“We’re taking her to Pearson General. You should come with us.”

In the ambulance, I sat next to my daughter and held her hand. It was cold. Her skin was clammy.

I’ve seen this before hundreds of times. Victims of poisoning present with nausea, vomiting, excessive salivation, abdominal pain. But there are different types of poisoning. Food poisoning from bacteria like salmonella or ecoli takes hours, sometimes days, to manifest.

Rebecca got sick within 90 minutes of eating.

That timing didn’t make sense, unless it was something else—a chemical toxin, something fast acting. But I had eaten the same food. I had drunk the same wine. Why wasn’t I sick?

The thought crept in, cold and unwelcome.

What if this wasn’t about the food at all?

At the hospital, they rushed Rebecca into the ER. Derek and I sat in the waiting room. He was on his phone, texting someone.

“Who are you texting?” I asked.

“Rebecca’s friends,” he said without looking up. “They need to know.”

“She’s going to be fine,” I said. But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure.

Derek finally looked at me. His eyes were hard, calculating.

“I hope so, Tom. Because if she’s not—if something happens to her because of that dinner you made—I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

It was a threat, barely veiled. And in that moment, I realized that whatever was happening, Derek was part of it.

2 hours later, Dr. Chen came out. He was young, maybe 35, with wire-rimmed glasses and the exhausted look of someone who’d been working a double shift.

“Mr. Whitmore,” he said. “Your daughter is stable. We’ve pumped her stomach and given her activated charcoal. We’re running a full toxicology panel.”

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“food poisoning,” Dr. Chen hesitated. “Her symptoms are consistent with poisoning, but the onset was very rapid. We’ll know more when the labs come back.”

“How long?”

“A few hours.”

Dererick stood up. “Can I see her?”

“She’s sedated right now,” Dr. Chen said. “You can see her in about 30 minutes. We’ve moved her to ICU as a precaution.”

That’s when it happened.

As Dr. After Chen turned to leave, he walked past me—and that’s when he pressed the note into my hand.

I didn’t read it right away. I waited until Derek went to the bathroom. Then I unfolded the sticky note and read it.

Lab results don’t match food poisoning. This wasn’t an accident. Check your home security footage from tonight before you talk to anyone.

My heart started pounding. I looked up, trying to find Dr. Chen, but he was gone.

I stood there in the hallway holding that note, trying to make sense of it. If this wasn’t food poisoning, then what was it? And why would Dr. Chen, who didn’t know me, take the risk of warning me?

I thought about the dinner. I thought about Rebecca’s phone call that afternoon, the request for the expensive wine, the timing of her visit, Dererick’s strange behavior—his immediate assumption that she’d been poisoned.

And I thought about my house.

Two years ago, after a break-in in the neighborhood, I’d installed security cameras. One in the front entrance, one in the living room, and one in the kitchen, positioned above the stove. Margaret had insisted on that one. She wanted to be able to check on dinner from her phone when she was upstairs resting during her chemotherapy treatments.

I hadn’t looked at that footage in months, but it was all there—cloud stored, timestamped.

I pulled out my phone and opened the security app. My hands were shaking so badly, I almost dropped it. I found the kitchen camera. I scrolled back to 6:30 that evening when Rebecca and Dererick had arrived.

I watched us sit down to dinner. I watched myself carve the chicken, pour the wine, and then I watched Rebecca do something that made my blood run cold.

It was subtle. So subtle that if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it completely.

While I was in the kitchen getting dessert, while Derek was deliberately keeping me talking about some fabricated issue with his car, Rebecca reached into her purse. She pulled out a small vial. She opened it, and she poured the contents into her own wine glass.

Then she drank it—all of it—in three long swallows.

And then she waited. Waited for it to take effect. Waited for the right moment to start vomiting.

She had poisoned herself.

I watched the footage three times, four times, five times—each time hoping I was seeing it wrong, but I wasn’t.

My daughter had deliberately ingested something, knowing it would make her violently ill, knowing I would be blamed.

I sat down on a bench in the hospital corridor. My legs wouldn’t hold me anymore.

Why would she do this?

What could she possibly gain from framing me for poisoning her?

And then I remembered a conversation we’d had 3 weeks ago.

Rebecca and Derek had come over, and they’d started talking about the house. About how big it was, how I didn’t need all that space, how it would be easier if I moved into a condo—something smaller, more manageable.

“Dad, you’re 67,” Rebecca had said. “What if you fall? What if something happens and nobody’s there to help?”

“I’m fine,” I’d said. “I’m not ready to downsize.”

Derek had jumped in then.

“We’re just worried about you, Tom. And you know, property values in this neighborhood have gone up significantly. If you sold, you’d make a fortune. You could live very comfortably somewhere smaller.”

I’d shut down the conversation, told them I wasn’t interested.

But now, watching that security footage, I understood.

They didn’t want me to sell the house for my benefit. They wanted me to sell it for theirs. And if I wouldn’t do it willingly, they’d find another way.

They’d make me look incompetent. Dangerous. They’d make me look like a father who accidentally poisoned his own daughter because he was too old, too careless, too much of a liability to live alone.

And once they established that narrative, what would come next?

A lawsuit. A push to have me declared mentally incompetent. An application for power of attorney.

I thought about Dererick’s text messages in the waiting room. He wasn’t texting Rebecca’s friends. He was probably texting a lawyer, building a case, documenting everything. And Rebecca, lying in that ICU bed, was the star witness in a fraud she’d orchestrated herself.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to run into that room and demand to know why.

Why would my own daughter do this to me?

But Dr. Chen’s note had been clear.

Before you talk to anyone.

He knew something, and I needed to understand what—before I made a move.

I found Dr. Chen in the staff break room drinking what looked like his fifth coffee of the night. When he saw me, his expression shifted from exhaustion to alarm.

“Mr. Whitmore,” he said. “You shouldn’t be back here.”

“I watched the footage,” I said quietly. “I saw what she did.”

Doctor Chen glanced around to make sure we were alone. Then he pulled out his phone and showed me something.

It was a lab report. Rebecca’s toxicology screen.

“See this?” He said, pointing to a line of text. “This is IPAC syrup. It’s an aimed. It induces vomiting. It used to be used for accidental poisoning, but it’s not recommended anymore because it’s too harsh on the system.”

“Where would she get that?” I asked.

“It’s available online,” Dr. Chen said. “You can buy it from veterinary supply sites. It’s used to make dogs vomit if they eat something toxic.”

I stared at the report.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because 3 months ago, the same thing happened to my mother,” Dr. Chen said.

His voice was tight with anger.

“My brother’s wife convinced him that my mother was becoming scenile. She staged a series of incidents—small things at first. forgetting to turn off the stove, leaving the door unlocked. And then one night, she put Ipac in my mother’s tea at a family dinner. Made it look like my mother had eaten something bad.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“My brother filed for power of attorney,” Dr. Chen said. “He moved my mother into a care facility and then he and his wife reorggaged her house. Took out $400,000.”

“By the time I figured out what was happening, they’d already spent most of it.”

“Did you go to the police?”

Dr. Chen shook his head. “My mother refused to press charges. She said she didn’t want to destroy the family. She died 6 months later, heartbroken. And my brother got everything.”

He looked at me with eyes that had seen too much.

“When I saw your daughter’s labs, I recognized the pattern. I couldn’t prove what my brother did to my mother, but maybe you can prove what’s happening to you.”

I left the break room with a plan forming in my mind.

I wasn’t going to confront Rebecca. Not yet.

I was going to do what I’d done for 40 years as a medical examiner. I was going to gather evidence. I was going to build a case. And I was going to make sure that when I finally revealed the truth, there would be no room for doubt.

The next morning, Derek called me.

“Tom,” he said.

His voice had that false concern that made my skin crawl. “Rebecca’s awake. She wants to see you.”

“How is she?” I asked. I tried to sound worried. Guilty.

“She’s weak,” Derek said. “But she’s going to be okay. The doctors think it was severe food poisoning. They said, ‘You’re lucky you and I didn’t get sick, too.’”

“I feel terrible,” I said.

And I did. Just not for the reasons Derek thought.

“Listen, Tom,” Derek said. “I know this was an accident, but Rebecca and I have been talking. We think maybe it’s time to consider some changes.”

“What kind of changes?”

“Well, living alone in that big house. cooking for yourself. It’s a lot of responsibility. And you’re not getting any younger. What if next time something worse happens? What if you accidentally leave the gas on? What if you fall down the stairs?”

I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles turned white.

“I appreciate your concern,” I said carefully. “But I’m fine.”

“Just think about it,” Derek said. “We love you. We want what’s best for you.”

I hung up and immediately called my lawyer, Edward Morrison. Edward had handled Margaret’s will. He’d known our family for 20 years.

“Edward,” I said when he answered, “I need your help, and I need you to trust me that what I’m about to tell you sounds insane, but it’s true.”

I told him everything—the dinner, the security footage, Dr. Chen’s warning, the IPAC.

Edward listened without interrupting. When I finished, there was a long silence.

“Thomas,” he finally said, “this is elder abuse. This is fraud. We need to go to the police.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I need more proof. I need to understand the full scope of what they’re planning.”

“What are you thinking?”

I told him.

And for the first time since I’d watched that security footage, I felt something other than betrayal. I felt like myself again—like the medical examiner who’d spent four decades finding the truth in the evidence.

Over the next 3 days, I played the role of the guilty, frightened father perfectly. I visited Rebecca in the hospital. I apologized profusely. I even cried, which wasn’t entirely an act, because part of me was mourning the daughter I thought I had.

Derek was always there, watching, guiding the conversation.

On the third day, Rebecca came home.

They didn’t go back to their condo. They came to my house.

“Just until I’m stronger,” Rebecca said. “I feel safer here with you, Dad.”

I set them up in the guest room. I cooked them meals, carefully documented and photographed every ingredient I used.

And I listened.

I listened to their late night conversations through the baby monitor I’d hidden in their room. Technology Margaret and I had bought when Rebecca was an infant, now repurposed for surveillance.

“He’s falling for it,” I heard Derek say on the fourth night. “I think we can move forward with the next phase.”

“What if he fights us?” Rebecca asked.

“He won’t,” Derek said. “We have the hospital records. We have witnesses. We have him on tape apologizing for poisoning you. If he fights us, we’ll destroy him.”

“I still feel bad,” Rebecca said quietly. “He’s my father.”

“Your father who’s sitting on a $3 million house while we’re drowning in debt,” Dererick snapped. “Your father who could help us but won’t. We tried asking nicely, Rebecca.”

“This is survival.”

“I know,” she said. “I just wish there was another way.”

“There isn’t,” Derek said. “Tomorrow, I’m calling my lawyer. We’re filing for emergency power of attorney. Medical incompetence. We’ll cite the poisoning incident. Once we have control of his finances, we sell the house. We clear our debts. and we set up your father in a nice retirement home somewhere.”

I listened to this with a recorder running, capturing every word.

The next morning, Derek sat me down at the kitchen table. He had papers with him—legal documents.

“Tom,” he said, “Rebecca and I have been talking, and we think given what happened, it might be a good idea for us to help you manage things, just temporarily, until you’re feeling more confident.”

He slid the papers across to me.

power of attorney, durable and financial.

Signing these would give Dererick and Rebecca complete control over my assets, my property, my medical decisions—everything.

“I don’t understand,” I said, playing confused. “You think I need help managing my finances?”

“It’s not about that,” Rebecca said. She looked pale, guilty. “It’s about making sure you’re safe.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “This feels like a big step.”

Dererick’s expression hardened.

“Tom, let me be clear. What happened last week could have killed Rebecca. If we hadn’t gotten her to the hospital when we did, she could have died from food you prepared. Now, we’re not blaming you. We know it was an accident, but legally speaking, you created a dangerous situation. And if you’re not willing to take steps to prevent that from happening again, we might have to consider other options.”

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.

“I’m being realistic,” Derek said. “Sign the papers, Tom. Let us help you, or we’ll have to involve the courts.”

I looked at Rebecca—my daughter. The little girl I’d taught to ride a bike. The teenager I’d stayed up late with helping her study for exams. The young woman I’d walked down the aisle.

“Rebecca,” I said, “Is this really what you want?”

She couldn’t meet my eyes.

“It’s for the best, Dad.”

I picked up the pen.

Derek smiled.

And that’s when my lawyer, Edward Morrison, walked into the room.

He wasn’t alone.

Behind him were two Toronto Police Service officers and a detective I’d worked with years ago, Sarah Mendoza.

“Thomas Whitmore doesn’t need to sign anything,” Edward said.

Derek stood up so fast his chair fell over.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Edward Morrison, Mr. Whitmore’s attorney,” Edward said calmly. “And these are officers Park and Stevens, and Detective Mendoza. They’re here to discuss an ongoing investigation into fraud and elder abuse.”

Rebecca’s face went white.

“What’s going on?”

Detective Mendoza stepped forward.

“Mrs. Lang, we have evidence that you deliberately ingested IPAC syrup on the evening of February 18th with the intention of framing your father for poisoning you. We also have recorded conversations between you and your husband discussing plans to obtain fraudulent power of attorney over your father’s assets.”

“That’s insane,” Derek said. But his voice was shaking.

“We have video footage from Mr. Whitmore’s security cameras,” Mendoza continued. “We have testimony from Dr. James Chen at Pearson General Hospital. We have toxicology reports, and we have audio recordings of conversations between you and Mrs. Lang discussing the scheme.”

Rebecca started crying.

“Dad,” she said. “Dad, please. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do it. We were desperate. Derek said it was the only way.”

“The only way to what?” I asked.

My voice sounded strange to my own ears. Distant. cold.

“To save our lives,” Derek said.

He was angry now.

“You want to know the truth, Tom? We’re broke. We owe $300,000 to some very dangerous people. people who don’t accept late payments, people who make examples out of debtors. We tried to borrow from banks. We tried everything. And then we thought, you’re sitting here in this mansion alone with millions in equity, and you won’t help us. Your own daughter asked you for help, and you said no.”

“You never asked for help,” I said. “You asked me to sell my home—the home I built with my wife, the home where I raised my daughter. You didn’t want help. You wanted my life savings so you could pay off gambling debts.”

“It wasn’t gambling,” Rebecca sobbed. “It was investments. Derek said they were sure things. He said we’d make it all back.”

“I’m not interested in your justifications,” I said.

I looked at Detective Mendoza.

“What happens now?”

“We’re taking them both in for questioning,” she said. “The crown attorney will decide on charges. likely fraud, elder abuse, conspiracy to commit fraud.”

As the officers moved to cuff Derrick and Rebecca, my daughter looked at me one last time.

“Dad,” she said, “I love you. I know you don’t believe me, but I do.”

I wanted to say I loved her, too. But the words wouldn’t come, because the daughter I loved would never have done what she did. That Rebecca was gone. Maybe she’d never really existed.

After they left, Edward and I sat in the now quiet kitchen.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said honestly. “But I will be.”

“What are you going to do now?”

I thought about that. About Margaret. About the life we’d built. About the daughter we’d raised who turned into someone I didn’t recognize.

“I’m going to keep living,” I said, “in my house, on my terms, and I’m going to make sure that what happened to Doctor Chen’s mother—what almost happened to me—doesn’t happen to other people.”

6 months later, I testified at Rebecca and Dererick’s trial. The evidence was overwhelming. Security footage, audio recordings, bank records showing their debts, text messages between Derek and the people he owed money to.

The jury deliberated for less than 3 hours.

Derek got 4 years in federal prison for fraud and conspiracy.

Rebecca got 18 months, reduced because she testified against Derek and showed genuine remorse.

I sat in the courtroom and watched my daughter being led away in handcuffs. She didn’t look at me.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Because 3 months after the trial, I got a letter.

It was from Rebecca, written from the Vanier Center for Women in Milton, Ontario.

In it, she apologized. Really apologized—without excuses or justifications. She told me about the therapy she’d started, about the programs she was taking to understand how she’d lost herself in Dererick’s manipulation. She didn’t ask for forgiveness. She didn’t ask for money. She just said she wanted me to know that she was trying to become someone worthy of the father she’d betrayed.

I wrote back.

I didn’t say I forgave her. I couldn’t. Not yet.

But I told her I would visit.

And I did.

Once a month, I drive out to Milton and sit across from my daughter in the visitor’s room. We talk carefully at first, then more honestly. It’s not the relationship we had before. That relationship died in a hospital corridor when I read a note from a stranger.

But it’s something.

Maybe with time it can become something real.

I’m 68 now. I still live in the house Margaret and I bought 42 years ago. I still cook Sunday dinners, though now it’s usually just for myself. But I’ve also started volunteering. I work with an organization that helps elderly people protect themselves from financial abuse. I give talks. I share my story. I tell people about the warning signs—the sudden pressure to sign legal documents, the isolation from friends and family, the guilt trips, the manipulation.

Dr. James Chen and I have become friends. We meet once a month for coffee. Two men who understand what it’s like to love someone who betrayed you. He tells me about his mother, about the regrets he carries. I tell him about Rebecca, about the hope I’m trying to hold on to. We remind each other that the hardest thing isn’t surviving the betrayal.

It’s learning to trust again.

The house still has security cameras. I still check the footage sometimes, a habit I can’t seem to break. But mostly, I try to remember the good times. The Christmases when Rebecca was young and believed in magic. The summers we spent at the cottage on Lake Msoka. The day I walked her down the aisle—so proud and so certain I was giving her to someone who would love her the way she deserved.

I was wrong about Derek.

But maybe I’m not wrong to hope that somewhere inside the woman in that prison visiting room, there’s still some part of the daughter I raised. The one who used to tell me she loved me before bed every single night. The one who cried when we had to put our dog to sleep because she couldn’t stand to see anything suffer.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s not about trust. It’s not about family.

It’s about knowing your worth.

I’m not just the man who built a life. I’m the man who refused to let that life be stolen from him. I’m the medical examiner who spent 40 years finding truth and evidence, and when I needed that skill most, I didn’t forget how to use it.

And if someone ever tries to make you doubt yourself, to make you believe you’re too old, too incompetent, too much of a burden to deserve your own life, remember this: You know yourself better than anyone. Trust that knowledge. Protect it.

Because your life, your home, your dignity—they’re not negotiable. They’re yours, and they’re worth fighting.