The Right Word

I was nineteen the first time Cole Whitfield broke me. Not with cruelty. With a single word. Why. Not did you — why. Like the answer was already settled and he just wanted the story to make sense. I told him the truth anyway. He said nothing that mattered. So I picked up my bag, walked out of his apartment, and decided that a man who trusted a rumor over two years of me wasn’t worth a correction. I spent the next two years becoming someone I actually liked. New city. Graduate program. A published paper with my name on it. I was done with Cole Whitfield in every way a person can be done. Then I walked into Seminar Room 114 and he was sitting right there, gray eyes already on the door, like some part of him knew. I sat down. I opened my notebook. I did not look up. Here’s the thing about studying how people form beliefs: you understand exactly why he believed it. That doesn’t mean you forgive it. That doesn’t mean two years of silence disappear because he’s learned how to look at you like he’s sorry. He wants a conversation. I want my degree. But the campus is small, the seminar table is round, and the boy who broke my heart at nineteen is doing everything right at twenty-one — and I’m starting to understand that composed isn’t the same thing as healed. I hate that I still know the exact sound of his voice.

My words can kill. Whatever I say comes true. When I was eight, my cruel adoptive father kicked me into an icy river. I glared at him and said furiously, "You'll drown if you go into water." The next day, he drowned in a stinking ditch where the water barely reached his knees. After realizing I could really kill people, I was so scared I stopped talking and became a mute. A year ago, I was taken back to the Shaw family. In order to stay with the family that I'd finally found after all these years, I absolutely refused to speak. But one day, after Jackie Shaw took a sip of the drink I brought him, he suddenly convulsed and fell to the floor, his face turning purple. A maid screamed in terror, "There's peanut powder in the drink!" Before I could even say anything, my twin sister, Violet, kicked the coffee table, grabbed my hair, and pressed me down hard onto the broken glass shards. "You know Jackie is severely allergic to peanuts! How could you poison him?!" After Mom gave Jackie an emergency injection, she turned around and slapped me hard. "I can't believe I gave birth to a malicious monster like you!" Dad's face was ashen. He splashed boiling tea all over me. "You heartless, vicious ingrate! I can't believe you tried to kill Jackie out of jealousy!" Boiling water mixed with blood dripped down my face, and I clenched my teeth tightly. They had no idea that if I truly wanted him dead, I wouldn't even need to poison him. I just had to speak. Like this. I slowly looked up at Jackie, and my lips moved...

How do you define love? A matter that speaks in general. A love to yourself, a love of a friend, a love of a family and a love of a lover all that includes trust, understanding and acceptance. But what if the love that you wanted the most, an understanding and acceptance that you need most can’t be given to you by your family. What will be your resolve, especially when it’s all about your own happiness? The love of a lover that you cherished feels like it's fading away because of other people that makes your relationship into ruins. How will you fight for your love if the one that you love is already giving up and turning their backs on you because of some misunderstanding. Without knowing the whole truth they judge you and hate you. Are you still willing to hold on or just give up and just love a person that is waiting for you to love them?

Behind the walls of the mind, where words fall silent, the stories no one dares to whisper begin. 'Whisper of Thoughts' is a journey into the corridors of mystery, where passion blends with psychological turmoil in an endless conflict. When thoughts become the enemy, can the soul find its sanctuary? Unravel the tangled threads of secrets in a story that defies the logic of reality. As the narrative unfolds, the protagonist finds themselves caught in a web of cryptic events, forcing them to confront buried secrets from the past while navigating an unexpected and complicated romantic connection.

By the seventh year of my engagement to Tristan, he postponed our wedding for the third time. The reason was simple. His childhood sweetheart, Gabriella, had returned to the country. She had just gone through a divorce and was emotionally unstable. Tristan personally retrieved every invitation we had sent out, his tone calm and steady. "Gabby has no one by her side right now. I can't upset her at a time like this." I held the ring that had already been resized twice and asked, "What about me?" Tristan glanced at me. "You're different. You're sensible." I had been hearing that word for seven years. Sensible. When his startup failed, I sold the old house my grandmother had left me to help him pay off his debts. When he suffered a gastric hemorrhage, I stayed at the hospital for three days straight and missed my own promotion defense. When his mother said my background was too ordinary for him, he only rubbed his temples and said, "Tori, don't make this difficult for me." Every time, I nodded. He once told me that no matter how thick the fog became, he would always leave a light on for me. Until the day Gabriella stood in front of the mirror wearing my wedding dress and smiled as she asked, "Victoria, you don't mind, do you? Tristan said your wedding's being postponed anyway." Tristan stood behind her. He did not deny it. He even reached out and adjusted her veil for her. The fog lamp he had given me with his own hands sat by the display window of the bridal shop. It was still lit, illuminating someone else in the white dress I had waited seven years to wear. Only then did I realize that some roads were not lost because the fog was too thick. It was because he had never planned to come for me at all.

My mother-in-law could not understand me. Before my business trip, I repeatedly told her not to touch anything in my study, but she mixed up the contract I needed. As a result, I lost a million-dollar order and was fired from my company. To make up for her mistake, she promised she would take care of my child and help me find another job. I froze my milk, labeled everything with notes, and gave her detailed instructions on timing and measurements. However, when my baby ended up in the hospital, I found out that she had thrown out all the milk and fed my baby expired formula instead. Even worse, she fed my baby peanuts behind my back, causing my baby to suffocate and die. Afterward, she wailed, "That was my granddaughter! How could I not care? If I could, I'd die with her..." My husband slapped me, shouting, "My mom worked so hard to take care of the child, and you want to drive her to her death? She's an old woman. It's not easy for her!" My sister-in-law came over too, calling me ungrateful and blaming me for treating an elderly woman badly. She claimed I deserved to be childless and alone. However, they did not know how many times I had stopped my mother-in-law from causing trouble and harm to them. I was driven to depression by them and eventually sent to a mental institution, where I was tortured to death. If I had the chance to do it again, I would protect my child and myself and stop preventing my mother-in-law from causing chaos for others. I would watch her bring equal destruction to each one of them!