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I think I’m killing my mother.

“I guess so,” I whisper. “Daddy didn’t hurt you?”

She sighs, weary and tired. “Don’t ask questions like that, Sibby. Leonard isn’t a bad man, he just is doing the best he can for us. He has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.”

She lies. She doesn’t even believe the words coming out of her own mouth.

Before I can stop it, I curl my lip in revulsion. The only thing he’s doing the best he can with is getting people to ride his cock and making my life miserable.

Clearly, he’s making her life miserable, too.

Mommy brushes her hair back, thoughtlessly, just to get it out of her eyes. But the small motion turned my life upside down.

Around her neck are deep handprint bruises. She’s wearing a turtleneck sweater, which isn’t out of the normal for her, especially during winters in Ohio. But her mangy sweater is sagging and exposing the lies Mommy told me.

He did hurt her.

Those bruises are not just blue, they’re nearly black. How long and hard do you have to squeeze a woman’s throat to turn it that shade?

My eyes round and a gasp slips from my lips. Her brown eyes snap to mine and they widen ever so slightly. Quickly, she brushes her hair forward again to cover the bruise. But she knew there was no covering up what I had already seen.

Her face falls, and her eyes shift some more.

Mountains of emotions rise to the surface—so many, I fear I’ll never be able to climb out of them. Rage. So much rage. Pure, utter heartbreak. Guilt, revenge, sadness. Every emotion a human has ever been plagued by is thrashing in my chest and bleeding into my heart.

I lost some of the red out of my heart in that moment, replaced by a deep, bottomless black. I feel so, so black.

“Why did you lie?” I plead, my lip trembling. A sob climbs up my throat, and there’s no stopping the tears. I’ve never felt like tears were a weakness in front of Mommy. Not when that’s all she’s ever given me, too.

It’s an unspoken understanding. That it’s okay to cry in front of one another. But never anyone else.

“Baby…” she trails off, at a loss for words. “It’s not your fault, Sibel. You know it’s not.”

“Then why did he do it?” I snap, enraged by her abuse. By my abuse. By this whole fucking community’s abuse. We’re all being subjected to it in one form or another, all by the same goddamn man—no. The devil. Fucking Satan himself.

She looks down at her lap, tremors wracking through her nimble fingers. Those same fingers that wiped so many tears away, brushed the hair off my face, helped me up after I had fallen. She was only a child herself when she had me—nowhere close to the maturity she should’ve been when mothering a child.

She’s not perfect, but she’s the best mother I could’ve asked for, given the fragility of her sanity. Her mind is breaking into pieces before my eyes. It has been for eighteen long years, and she’s so close to giving up. I can feel it in my bones, and the knowledge sends a fresh dose of panic into my bloodstream. It constricts my lungs like a python, slowly but surely sending me to an early grave.

“Why does he do anything around here?” she whispers under her breath. The words weren’t meant for me to hear, but I heard them anyway.

“Let’s leave,” I say quietly, pleadingly. “Please Mommy. You know he’s evil. You know it. We can run away together and start new lives far away from him. Somewhere he’ll never find us.”

A tear tracks down her cheek. Quickly, she wipes it away like it was never there in the first place.

“I can’t,” she says, her voice cracking. A sob bursts from her mouth. She slaps a hand over her mouth immediately, quieting the sound.

But you can’t silence heartbreak. It’s loud and painful. Even after you grieve and heal, it lingers in the background, sliding back into your life just when you think you’ve overcome it.

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nbsp; Mommy is well-versed in heartbreak; she’s been feeling it since the moment she lost her life. Now she’s just a shell of a woman, and her soul is ready to find something better.

More tears track down my cheeks. Desperation rises to the surface. Because I don’t want Mommy to leave me. I want us to leave here.

I want her to find that something better with me. Together.

Getting up, I rush over to her and sit next to her. The second I cradle her in my arms, she completely loses it. Shattering into tiny pieces in my hands. I want to pick up the pieces, but they’re like sand, and slipping through my fingers.