I turned and ran back to my mother, throwing my arms around her, pressing my face into her shoulder. “I’m coming back for you,” I sobbed, my voice breaking completely now. “I promise. Just—just stay. Please stay. I love you. I love you so much.”
She smelled like antiseptic and something chemical beneath it, sharp and wrong. Her body sagged against mine, unresponsive. Her eyes stayed fixed on the floor, glassy and distant, like she’d already been taught not to fight.
I barely had time to register my father’s grip before the impact came.
He swung me to face him—then the slap came, sudden and brutal, snapping my head sideways with a sting that bloomed hot across my cheek. “Shut up,” he hissed. “Stop embarrassing me.”
I looked at him, waiting—stupidly—for something. Guilt. Anger. Anything human. There was nothing there. Not even a flicker. Just calculation, cold and intact.
I didn’t scream. I just cried—loud, ugly, uncontrollable—as he dragged me backward, away from her, away from the last solid thing I had left in this house.
They walked her out.
I watched from the doorway, shaking, helpless, as they guided her into the car, her head dipping low enough that she nearly disappeared into the dark interior. The door closed with a final, clinical click.
The engine started.
And then she was gone.
I stood there long after the car disappeared down the drive, my chest heaving, my face burning, my hands empty and useless. The house felt cavernous around me, too clean, too quiet, like it had already swallowed the evidence of what had just happened.
I didn’t look at my father again.
I turned and ran.
I ran up the stairs, down the corridor, into my room, slamming the door behind me and collapsing against it as if it were the only thing holding me upright.
My mother was gone.
I slid down to the floor and pressed my face into my hands, the sobs tearing out of me with no grace, no control. I cried like a child, loud and broken and unfiltered, because something inside me had snapped so cleanly I wasn’t sure it would ever fuse back together. I couldn’t stop seeing her—the way her body moved without purpose, her eyes fixed on nothing, her mouth slack with whatever they’d injected her with. The sound of her silence, that unbearable silence, was louder than any scream.
She didn’t even look at me.
I curled onto my side and rocked slightly, trying to calm the tremors that wracked my chest. But nothing helped. Because I couldn’t stop thinking—not just about the hollow shell they dragged out of this house this morning, but the woman she used to be. The woman no one but me ever really saw.
Had she even had a single happy day in her life?
I remembered walking through the garden with her when I was little—tiny legs struggling to keep up, but her hand always wrapped around mine. We weren’t allowed to go out often. We weren’t even supposed to be alone. But she used to sneak me outside in the early evenings. That was when she first showed me the service gate at the far end of the garden—the one with a blind spot in the cameras she had discovered years earlier. From there we could slip out without anyone noticing. We’d pick flowers that weren’t really flowers—just stubborn weeds—and pretend we were in some storybook forest. Sometimes, when the weather was good, she would bring a blanket and we would sit in the grass like it was some secret picnic. She’d read to me from whatever book she had hidden in her bag while I lay beside her,listening to her voice and watching the sky through the trees. Those afternoons became some of my favorite memories of her.
Back then, she smelled like jasmine and fresh nail polish. She laughed sometimes. Not often, not loudly, but real enough for me to believe it. I don’t think anyone else in this house ever heard her laugh.
Then that night happened.
The night everything changed.
The house was attacked—our house. I was five. I didn’t understand what was happening—just that something was terribly wrong. My mother was frantic, trying to stay calm, her breath fast and sharp as she grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the hallway. There wasn’t a second to run, barely even a breath to hide. She took me to the old cabinet in the linen storage, the tall one no one ever used because the top shelf was too high to reach without a ladder. She opened it, pushed aside the sheets, and lifted me up into that dark, narrow space.
“I want to stay with you,” I’d said, clutching her sleeves.
She kissed my forehead, once. “Be quiet, baby. Be strong. No matter what happens, don’t come out. Do you understand?”
Then she shut the doors.
There were thin cracks between the wood. Just enough for me to see out. To see her stepping away. To see her rushing into the bathroom at the end of the hallway and locking the door behind her. I heard the click of the lock.
She couldn’t fit in with me. She didn’t even try.
Then the screams started.
