Vanessa remembers the day three years ago when her mother’s gambling addiction came to a head. Returning from work, she saw scribbled on the lift door of her HDB block her mother’s name, IC number and mobile phone number.

For months, the 31-year-old auditor had suspected that her mother’s beauty salon business was in financial trouble, but never did she imagine that it would warrant borrowing from loan sharks. “After I returned from my two-year job posting in London, Mum was still her jovial self, even if she seemed more calculative. In the past, she had always been very generous with me, but now, she would ask me to pay whenever we ate out and even collected money from me for things like laundry detergent,” says Vanessa.

That very night, Vanessa confronted her mother, 60-year-old Pauline*, which opened up a can of worms.