Chapter Ten: She learned to be quiet

The room was dark when I woke up.

For a moment, I didn’t know where I was only that my chest hurt and my throat felt tight, like I’d been crying for hours.

Then I remembered.

I wasn’t in the mansion with Lucas anymore.

I was alone.

The hotel room smelled faintly of detergent and old air. My suitcase sat unopened by the door, because unpacking meant accepting that I was really here that I had left and not going back.

Or been left.

I curled onto my side, pulling the blanket tighter around myself.

That was when the memory came.

It always did.

I was eight years old the first time I learned that silence could be safer than speaking.

My father’s voice boomed through the small apartment, sharp and angry, cutting through the thin walls. I sat on the floor outside the bedroom, my knees hugged to my chest, counting the cracks in the tiles.

One……………

Two……………

Three………….

If I stayed quiet, maybe he wouldn’t notice me.

“Amara!” he shouted.

My heart skipped a beat.

I didn’t move.

Inside the room, my mother’s voice was soft, pleading. I couldn’t hear the words clearly, only the fear in them. There was a loud bang something hitting the wall and I squeezed my eyes shut.

Don’t cry.

Don’t make noise.

I learned early that love could disappear without warning.

That promises didn’t protect you.

When the door finally opened, my father stormed out, his face hard, his eyes empty. He walked past me like I wasn’t there.

I waited until his footsteps faded before crawling into the bedroom.

My mother sat on the edge of the bed, her hands shaking.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.

She pulled me into her arms, holding me too tightly. “No, baby. You were perfect.”

Perfect.

I tried to be that after perfectly quiet, perfectly helpful, perfectly invisible away from everything.

All of a sudden I was sixteen this time, standing at the school gate, watching other girls hug their fathers goodbye. Mine never came, never showed up.

Again.

I told myself I didn’t care.

I told myself I didn’t need anyone to choose me.

But when I got home that evening, my father’s suitcase was gone.

So was he.

No goodbye. No explanation.

Just empty space where love should have been.

My mother cried in the kitchen that night, her shoulders shaking as she held a cup of tea she never drank. I stood in the doorway, saying nothing.

Because by then, I knew better.

The present crashed back into me like a wave.

I sat up in bed, gasping, my hands clutching the sheets.

Lucas’s face flashed in my mind the way he had hesitated, the way he had stayed silent when I needed him most.

It wasn’t the contract that hurt the most.

It was the pause.

The familiar feeling of waiting for someone to choose me…… and realizing they wouldn’t.

I pressed my fist against my mouth, biting down on the sob that threatened to escape.

I had married a man who spoke powerfully to the world but fell silent when it came to me.

And somehow, that hurt worse than shouting ever could.

Because silence had always meant the same thing in my life.

You don’t matter enough.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood, forcing myself to breathe.

I wasn’t eight anymore.

I wasn’t sixteen.

And I wasn’t powerless.

The girl who learned to be quiet had grown into a woman who finally walked away.

I picked up my phone and typed a single message to myself, not to him.

You didn’t leave because you were weak.

You left because you refused to disappear.

I set the phone down and stared out the window at the city lights.

Healing wasn’t loud.

It didn’t come with apologies or grand gestures.

Sometimes, healing looked like choosing silence not because you were afraid to speak…

But because you finally knew your worth without needing anyone else to say it.