Chapter 24
Jul 4, 2025
My mother knocks gently at my door.
It’s the first sound I’ve heard from her in hours. Maybe days. She hasn’t spoken since the leak. Not on the ride home. Not when I stood in the foyer and handed over my phone.
Not even when my father slammed the study door and said, “You’ve humiliated this family.”
She just walked past me like I was air. Like I didn’t exist.
But now she’s here.
I’m sitting on my childhood bed in a room that doesn’t feel like mine anymore. The walls still have the ballet posters and the ribbons, but it all feels like it belongs to someone else. A girl who believed that working hard and following rules would keep her safe. A girl who didn’t know what it meant to be hated for loving the wrong person.
She opens the door slowly, like she’s afraid I’ll shatter if she moves too fast.
She doesn’t say anything right away. She just walks over and sits beside me, smoothing her skirt like she’s rehearsed this moment a thousand times and never once got it right.
“I was like you once,” she begins.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I don’t trust my voice.
“Headstrong. In love. At this school.”
I blink. I turn to her. “You went to St. Augustine’s?”
She nods, a bitter smile tugging at her lips. “A long time ago. Before I was a wife. Before I was someone’s cautionary tale.”
I stare at her. The version of her I’ve always known—silent, elegant, obedient—is crumbling right in front of me.
She swallows, hard. “I loved someone who didn’t come with a pedigree. So they made me marry someone who did.”
Her voice cracks.
And for the first time in my life, I see it—regret. Not the polite, quiet kind. The screaming kind. The kind that never really dies.
“I thought I could survive it,” she says. “I thought I could learn to love what they chose for me.”
I glance at the hallway, half-expecting my father to appear like a shadow. But it’s just us.
“You didn’t?” I whisper.
Her hands twist in her lap. “I learned to smile through it. That’s not the same.”
“Why didn’t you fight back?” I ask, my voice trembling. “Why didn’t you run? Or scream?”
“I wanted to,” she breathes. “But wanting isn’t always enough when you’re raised to be obedient. When every part of you is trained to say ‘yes’ even when your heart is screaming ‘no.’”
I want to ask a hundred questions. Who was he? What happened? Does she still love him? But I don’t ask. Because what she says next matters more than any name.
“Don’t let them rewrite your life. Don’t let them erase you.”
She looks me in the eye, fiercer than I’ve ever seen.
“Do what I couldn’t. Fight for who you are. Or you’ll spend your life pleasing men who hate you.”
The words land like fire in my lungs. And suddenly, all the quiet rage I’ve been holding in—every injustice, every cruel comment, every time I was told to sit still and smile—it all begins to rise.
“I thought you hated me,” I whisper. “For what happened. For the photos. For… Grayson.”
“I hated how powerless I felt,” she says. “I hated that I couldn’t protect you. That I didn’t know how.”
I shake my head, bitter. “You didn’t even look at me.”
“I was ashamed,” she says, tears pooling in her eyes. “Not of you. Of myself. Of all the years I stayed quiet and told myself it was strength. Of how I watched you walk into the same trap I did and said nothing.”
Her voice breaks. “I failed you.”
“No,” I whisper. “You didn’t. Not now.”
Tears burn at the edges of my eyes. I’ve spent weeks trying not to cry, not to fall apart. But now, sitting here with the only person who’s ever truly known what it’s like to be told who to love and how to live—I can’t hold it in.
I hug her. Hard. Like I’m anchoring myself to a truth I didn’t know I needed.
We cry.
The tears aren’t graceful. They’re messy. Years of silence unraveling in sobs and broken apologies. She holds me like she’s trying to say everything she never could.
And just like that, the spell of obedience shatters.
