My Daughter Told Me to Shut the Pharmacy at Midnight

At two thirty in the morning, my daughter dragged me up from behind the register and pressed a finger to my lips. ‘Mom, don’t turn on the lights, don’t answer the phone, and lock the rolling shutter right now.’ I thought some frightening short video had gotten to her. Then the alarm on the pharmacy’s medicine refrigerator went off. My husband called a moment later and ordered me to open the door and sign for a shipment of ’emergency medicine.’ He said his cousin’s livestream had been flooded with orders, so the goods only needed to stay in my shop until daybreak. My daughter clung desperately to my sleeve. ‘You can’t sign for it. Someone has already changed the refrigerator temperature remotely.’ By the next morning, the neighborhood group chat was full of people cursing me. Some said I had refused to save lives, while others said I had left elderly patients without medicine. My mother-in-law wept outside the pharmacy clutching a medicine box, and my husband publicly demanded that I hand over my business license. Only when the regulators pulled up the system logs did everyone see the truth: that shipment of so-called lifesaving medicine was not medicine at all.