All Chapters of Mummy, i didn’t Run Away: The Unwanted Child: Chapter 21 - Chapter 28

Madam Veronica called only a few of us into her living room She was sitting on her leather chair, her two legs stretched out resting on the center table, one leg crossed right over the other leg. She was dragging on her cigarette with one hand while her thumb kept pressing her phone screen. She didn't even raise her head to look at us when we packed ourselves by the door. "Listen good," Madam Veronica said, her voice dry. She tapped the phone against her knee and finally looked at us. "The Arab people have already paid. Heavy money. No one should go there and disgrace me. Do everything they want, exactly how they want it, and satisfy them." She paused, her eyes moving round the room until they landed on me. "Especially you, Juliet," she said, pointing a long fake nail straight at my chest. "You are the one they specified by description. Make sure you don't go and spoil this business for me." Me and three other girls just took it as normal work. We thought it was just the usua

Before we finally left, Mr. Habib handed me a brown envelope. I quietly took it from him. I didn’t thank him. Not even once. I had worked for every single euro inside that envelope with my own body and my own pain. I tucked the envelope deep under my breast, hiding it right against my chest before we walked out to the car. When we got back to Madam Veronica’s house, she wasn't around yet. The moment we stepped inside, all of us rushed straight to the bathroom to clean ourselves up. I turned on the tap and started scrubbing. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed my body until my skin turned raw and red, almost like I was trying to tear my flesh off. I felt like if I scrubbed hard enough, I could cleanse myself from the dirt, from the sin, from the heavy image of those dogs climbing on top of us, and from their thick saliva dripping down onto our bare backs while they were on us. Those pictures kept flashing back into my memory, over and over again. All I wanted to do was cry. All I w

My heart broke into thousands of pieces. I couldn't even sleep that night, Mommy; my chest was simply too heavy, weighed down by a pain so deep it felt physical.I kept staring at that single word glowing on the phone screen—*Received*—for almost an hour. Silent tears just kept dropping out of my eyes, sliding down my cheeks to soak straight into my pillow in Madam Veronica’s compound.I turned my head and looked at the dark bruises coloring my skin, mapping the ugly purple marks across my arms and legs. I kept thinking about the hell I had lived through every single day in this place, about how I labored for this money, what I had to sacrifice, what parts of my body I had to hand over just to get this cash—and all I got in return was a cold, transactional receipt.There was nothing else from you, Mommy. No inquiry about my safety, no concern for whether I was eating or bleeding, not a single drop of warmth. I didn’t say anything out loud. I couldn't. My voice was completely trapped.

The house was dead quiet, save for the heavy, rhythmic snoring of one of the girls down the hall and the distant, low hum of traffic outside the iron-barred windows. Sleep had abandoned me hours ago. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Madam Veronica’s face—cold, dismissive, and utterly void of human feeling—telling me that the twenty million naira I calculated from my own sweat, flesh, and blood didn't even amount to a single million.The lie was so massive, so suffocating, that it felt like something physical pressing down on my chest. I couldn't stay in my bed a minute longer. The walls of the room felt like they were shrinking, closing in around me with the weight of forty-four million naira in impossible debt.The moment the compound door was unlocked at dawn, I slipped out before the other girls were fully awake.I hurried down the dusty path to Rose’s camp two streets away. We didn't live under the same roof—Veronica and Rose’s madam made sure of that, keeping different houses a