Rewinding Time to Save Mom

The howling wind ripped my eardrums.

Under my husband's cold, dead stare, I crushed my fivemonthold daughter against my chest and plummeted straight out the thirtiethfloor window. Weightlessness. Freefall.

My eyes snapped open. I gasped for air, my fingernails digging into the wooden rails of the crib until my knuckles turned white. Time had dragged me back to yesterday.

The piercing wail of my baby hammered against my skull. "Maeve, you don't even have a mother.

No wonder you're so pathetic at taking care of a kid!" Spencer glared at me, his face twisted in pure disgust. It was the first time he had spat those words at me.

That vicious curse was the final straw that pushed me out that window. I used to think our marriage was solid.

I used to blame myself, thinking it was just a slip of the tongue and I was just being overly sensitive. But the hands on the wall clock spun backward in a blur.

Time kept reversing! Memories I had blocked out slammed into my brain. That wasn't the first time he had used my dead mother against me.

During my postpartum recovery, he slouched on the couch, mindlessly scrolling on his phone.

He didn't even look up as he weaponized his words: "If you had a mother who could actually pitch in with some cash and elbow grease, my mom and I wouldn't be dragged down by a useless burden like you." In the delivery room, when the nurses asked about family, he wore a sickening savior smile. "Her mom passed away.

Who else is going to be her support system but me?" Even at the altar, he squeezed my hands and made a vow for the crowd: "Maeve, I swear to take care of you in your mother's place!" Every single promise was a suffocating reminder.

He had been exploiting the raw wound of my mother's death all along, twisting the knife to gaslight me into submission. Chapter 1 So he had always cared that I was motherless.

But the strange thing was, I didn't have a single memory of my mother. Did she even exist? If time kept flowing backward, would I finally see her?

Time continued to reel backward day by day. It dragged me to the exact afternoon I first met Spencer's family. Back then, we were deeply in love.

Spencer's parents were both tenured university professors—a lifetime of prestige and polished respectability. They were satisfied with me.

His mother, Josephine, who also happened to be my Ph.D. advisor, always flaunted me as her star pupil. Why? Because I was the most obedient. The easiest to exploit.

She took a slow sip of her espresso, smiling with the condescension of a savior handing out scraps. "Maeve, your background might be practically unsalvageable, but as long as you play the good, obedient wife to Spencer, this family will naturally keep a roof over your head and food on your plate." Josephine was a renowned medical expert.

She was also the woman I respected most in the world. Just because of those few scraps of validation, I had spent my entire marriage treating her like my own flesh and blood.

Yet, right after I gave birth, when my newborn choked on milk for the first time, her immediate, instinctive reaction was to sneer, "Didn't your mother teach you anything?

You can't even nurse a baby properly!" Back then, I convinced myself she was just overanxious about the baby. I was so incredibly naive. Time ticked steadily backward.

My obvious distraction finally caught Spencer's eye. In my past life, our friends had crowned him the ultimate catch—handsome, easygoing, blindly devoted to me.

I had bought into the delusion too. But living through these memories again, the ugly truth surfaced. Spencer was a master of the silent treatment.

The second he felt slighted, he would just vanish. Today, simply because I zoned out while he was talking, his face instantly hardened.

He turned on his heel and walked out without a backward glance. [ Busy. Don't bother me. ] In the past, I actually believed he was swamped.

I bombarded him with worried texts and practically begged for his attention by delivering homemade soup to his lab.

Waking up to reality, I realized this socalled fairytale romance was just a performance he directed while wiping his feet on my dignity. So this time, I let him ghost me.

I didn't even bother tossing a reply to his pathetic little power play. Barely twelve hours later, realizing I wasn't taking the bait, Spencer called.

He used his perfectly engineered, casual tone. "Maeve, didn't your mother ever teach you to apologize when you screw up?" Honestly, for the longest time, I never thought my mother's early death was a big deal.

Even after Wayne remarried, I never starved. Joanne never laid a hand on me. So, I convinced myself I was lucky.

But as the past meticulously unspooled before my eyes, a cold realization clicked into place. If I was so damn happy, why did I jump out of a building?

Holding my fivemonthold baby, no less. That kind of finality didn't come from nowhere. On the other end of the line, Spencer waited in silence.

He was waiting for me to grovel, to beg for his forgiveness just like I always did. Not this time. I kept my voice deadpan, razorsharp. "Your mother sure knows how to teach.

But enjoy it while it lasts. In three years, she's going to get cancer.

Then you'll be a motherless child too." According to the original timeline, Josephine got diagnosed with breast cancer the year we got married.

No, to be perfectly accurate—she found out she was sick, and then she manipulated Spencer and me into rushing the wedding and popping out a kid.

I even torpedoed my shot at a toptier residency program just to play her little game. A massive crash erupted through the speaker.

Spencer tripped over something, his phone clattering violently across the floor.

Chapter 2 The next day, time receded like an outgoing tide, dragging me back to yet another yesterday.

Even if I hacked Spencer into pieces, I couldn't stop the clock from ticking backward.

Just as the suffocating grip of despair started to crush my chest, I woke up and stared at the calendar on my phone: October 10, 2016. My eighteenth birthday.

The exact day I officially met Spencer. It was burned into my brain. I was only a sophomore in college. Just yesterday—my yesterday—I was a Ph.D. candidate.

Time had snapped back five whole years overnight. The sheer whiplash of the jump left me dizzy, my fingertips tingling with a cold sweat. I had started school two years early.

First grade at five years old. That meant at eighteen, I was always the youngest in my college classes. According to Wayne, my father, I was a prodigy.

By the time I was four, I had the multiplication tables memorized.

As a teacher at the local elementary school, he claimed he instantly spotted my academic potential, fighting against the school board's rules to throw me straight into a firstgrade classroom.

I didn't remember any of that happening. Still, being younger than my peers gave me a tangible edge, especially when hitting deadlines for grant applications and academic funding.

Because of that, I had spent my life feeling indebted to his socalled visionary decision.

That night, after leaving the campus library, I hit the dining hall and bought a cheap bowl of spicy noodles to celebrate my birthday. My brain was on autopilot.

Muscle memory took over, tossing the exact same cheap ingredients into the bowl as I had in my previous life.

I stared down at the steaming broth and muttered, "Happy birthday." As time rewound, my memories sharpened, like wiping the grease off a dirty mirror.

Suddenly, dark corners of my childhood clicked into place. Wayne always preached about our family's "humble and righteous" values.

He claimed we didn't waste money on superficial nonsense. Naturally, that meant no one ever threw a birthday party for me.

Yet, Joanne's two kids—my stepsiblings—got a massive blowout every single year.

Whenever their birthdays rolled around, the dining table groaned under the weight of roasted meats, expensive side dishes, and a massive cake.

Whenever it was time to cut the cake, my grandmother would snatch the paper plate right out of my hands and sneer, "Your stepmother's family paid for this.

You're just a motherless burden. What gives you the right to eat?

Every bite you shove down your throat is stealing money from our family!" Because of that, I was only ever allowed to scrape up a tiny, smashed sliver of frosting from the cutting board.

Sure, Joanne's family lived in the nicer part of town. Her father was the principal of the elementary school; they had the cash for a fancy bakery cake.

But those roasted chickens and ducks on the table? I was the one who fed them, cleaned up after them, and raised them with my own two bare hands.

And I craved the taste of cake just as much as anyone else. So, when Spencer suddenly slid a small, perfectly frosted cupcake onto my dining hall table, I froze.

I stared at it for a full sixty seconds. Twentyyearold Spencer was radiating confidence and sunshine.

Playing the perfect gentleman so I wouldn't feel awkward, he offered a smooth excuse. "Hey, take this.

I bought way too much and can't finish it." Even knowing that I threw myself out of a building at twentyeight because of this exact man, reliving this moment—watching him slide that cake toward me again—made my eyes burn.

A heavy lump lodged in my throat. But this time, the tears threatening to spill weren't for him. They were for me.

When I got accepted into college, the local government handed Wayne a massive scholarship check—tens of thousands of dollars—in my name.

So why the hell was I made to feel like I didn't even deserve a single bite of cake?

Chapter 3 In my past life, I just sat there frozen, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

I was so overwhelmed I couldn't even force a single word past my lips until Spencer flashed his trademark charming smile and walked away.

I didn't realize until much later that he possessed an unshakable arrogance when it came to manipulating women.

Tossing breadcrumbs of affection to pathetic, downtrodden girls wasn't kindness—it was an ego trip. A charity case to stroke his own vanity.

Back then, I carefully carried that cheap cupcake back to my dorm room and hid it in the back of my closet. I couldn't bear to eat it.

It sat there until the frosting went stale and sour, and only then did I swallow it down bite by bite, tears of pathetic gratitude pricking my eyes.

I used to think that was what love looked like. Now I knew the truth. It was just pathetic, groveling submission.

This time, as time snapped back to this exact second, I stared down at that mediocre cupcake. It was topped with diced mango—the one fruit I absolutely despised.

I met his eyes. "Are you serious right now? Handing out your literal leftovers like some grand prize?

Is that the kind of trash manners your mother taught you?" I had never seen Spencer’s face contort through so many ugly shades of shock.

It was probably the first time his little pickup artist routine had derailed. His brain shortcircuited.

Without a backup plan, he just snatched the cupcake off the table and bolted like a kicked dog. Watching his retreating back, a memory clawed its way up my throat.

Right before we got married, he sat me down for a deep conversation. "Maeve, honestly, women with severe mommy issues usually make terrible wives.

But you're the most flawlessly broken woman I've ever met. So, I still want to build a family with you.

I want you to have my baby." Back then, I actually swallowed that toxic garbage like it was the highest compliment. But as the memory washed over me now, my blood didn't boil.

Instead, a chilling question hooked into my brain. Everyone constantly used my dead mother as a weapon to tear me down, so why was my own mind completely blank when it came to her?

It wasn't just a foggy memory. It wasn't normal childhood amnesia. It felt like she had never existed in the first place! If time kept rewinding… would I finally see her face?

Back in my dorm, I turned on the faucet to wash my face. My gaze caught the bathroom mirror.

A string of glowing red numbers hovered in the glass. [ 13:00:00 ] I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.

I rubbed the back of my hand against the glass, but the red digits remained, floating suspended in the reflection. They ticked down with a chilling, mechanical rhythm.

I killed my phone flashlight and checked the screen. 11:59 PM. Midnight was breathing down my neck. The next second, the clock hit zero. My eighteenth birthday officially died.

As time snapped back to the day before, the mirror flickered and warped. My head snapped up.

The numbers in the glass had warped into something new. [ 12:11:29 ] It looked exactly like a countdown. But what the hell was it counting down to?

Honestly, waking up on my eighteenth birthday wasn't the first massive time jump. I had figured out the pattern early on. Time wasn't just walking backward day by day.

It was rubberbanding to very specific dates. Milestones. Days that were either burned into my trauma or days where the trajectory of my life irrevocably shifted.

So, to artificially drag out this reversed lifespan, I fought to dredge up more past memories. But for some sickening reason, my mental timeline was full of black holes.

If time hadn't literally dragged me backward, I never would have realized that I wasn't just a spineless peoplepleaser—I had the memory capacity of a damn goldfish!

Before I could even catch my breath, the days blurred and skipped again, slamming me straight into the summer after my freshman year.

Chapter 4 All I remembered was being dead broke the second I hit college. The massive government grant I won for my test scores? Wayne pocketed every single dime.

Meanwhile, my actual tuition was paid entirely through federal student loans.

Wayne fed me a line about how subsidized loans were practically free money and swore he’d pay them off the second I graduated. He never paid a cent.

I couldn't even remember his pathetic excuse anymore, only the cold reality of draining my own academic scholarships just to clear the debt.

As time dragged me back to this specific summer, a glaring question hit me. Wayne was a government official making solid money.

How the hell did I even qualify for extreme poverty financial aid? The memories unspooled, and the ugly truth clicked into place.

When Wayne got promoted and moved to the affluent suburbs, he bought a new house and legally transferred the residency for himself, Joanne, and her two kids.

He deliberately left my permanent address registered at his rotting rural property. Then, he pulled strings with his local buddies to forge my lowincome tax documents.

I remembered his smooth justification. "The land out there is valuable.

Developers will buy it out soon, and since your name is on the deed, the massive payout will be your wedding fund." I was married for years.

Not a single bulldozer ever touched that land. A bitter laugh caught in my throat. Manipulating a motherless kid didn't require a masterclass in deception.

When you have zero power and zero safety net, you instinctively swallow whatever garbage the adults in charge feed you. How many other lies had they buried in my blind spots?

Right after my freshman finals, Wayne called. For whatever reason, it devolved into a screaming match. After that, he screened all my calls and eventually powered off his phone.

A chill ran down my spine. Wayne's exact playbook was the blueprint Spencer used to break me. The silent treatment. The absolute emotional starvation.

Back then, I was flat broke, and the dorms were kicking everyone out for the summer.

Just as I was staring down the barrel of homelessness, I found a flyer plastered to my dorm room door. A private tutoring gig.

It offered room, board, and a paycheck fat enough to cover my entire next semester's living expenses.

I went to the interview with zero expectations, but I landed the job on the spot.

The employer was a single mom in her forties, and her daughter was heading into her senior year of high school. The mother hired me instantly.

She figured since my own college entrance exams were still fresh, I was the perfect, costeffective weapon to drill her kid.

The girl was my exact age, but two grades behind me—which really just meant she was on a normal human timeline.

She was smart enough, but from my perspective, she entirely lacked the killer instinct needed to survive the academic meat grinder. That was why her grades were tanking.

Refusing to take her mother's money for nothing, I weaponized every testtaking strategy I knew and dragged her into academic boot camp.

During our breaks, we clicked like we had known each other for a lifetime.

The conversation never stopped flowing. "I want to major in architecture," she told me once. "I want to travel the globe.

See the earliest monolithic structures in Egypt, trace the classic Doric columns in Greece…" "But architecture programs bleed you dry.

My mom supports my dream, but I can't stand watching her work herself to the bone. So, I need to rethink it." She paused, tilting her head. "By the way, Maeve, why premed?

Do you actually love it?" I froze.

I looked her dead in the eye and gave her the ugliest, most honest truth. "No." Chapter 5 Wayne had always pushed me to attend the local community college and get a teaching degree.

He wanted me trapped in our deadend town, preaching about giving back to my roots.

But when my SAT scores and AP results came back off the charts, my high school counselors cornered me, urging me to aim higher. I was torn.

I clearly remembered filling out the college application portal. Terrified of Wayne, I obediently listed the local state college as my top choice.

But somehow, someone hacked the system and changed my preferences. I ended up getting a fullride acceptance letter from an Ivy League premed program. I never dug into who did it.

Honestly, I silently worshipped whoever pulled it off. I never wanted to be a smalltown teacher; I just lacked the spine to defy Wayne.

In my memories, the single mom who hired me ran a small diner, leaving before dawn and dragging herself home late at night.

Before she left, she would yank a few crumpled twentydollar bills from her purse and toss them on the counter for us to grab breakfast.

When she returned, her arms would be loaded with grocery bags.

She would lecture us about rotting our teeth on junk food while simultaneously pulling out pints of ice cream, sodas, and chocolate bars from the bags.

Whenever she bought something, she bought it in pairs. Canvas sneakers, sundresses, sunscreen. Whatever her daughter got, I got an exact replica.

Those weeks always felt like a strange, glowing anomaly in my brain, but I could never put my finger on why. Until time dragged me back to this summer.

As the suppressed details clawed their way to the surface, the realization hit me like a physical blow.

That was the first time I ever admitted to myself that I missed my own mother. That nameless ache throbbing under those memories was pure, unadulterated longing.

If time was retracing my trauma, it had no right to skip those days. Yet, the universe was playing a sick joke.

Time glitched from the very last day of summer straight to the first day. It cleanly amputated the exact month I spent tutoring at her house!

The first day of summer break: Wayne blocked my calls, and the next morning, I found the flyer on my door.

The last day of summer break: I was scrubbing my dorm room, having just moved back from their house the day prior.

Time had operated with surgical precision, deliberately slicing that entire month out of existence. The red digits in the mirror kept ticking down. The numbers were bleeding away.

Three sets of digits. Years. Months. Days. I shoved my face into the sink full of icy water. I scrambled wildly through the chaotic wreckage of my memories. My lungs burned.

The last scrap of oxygen vanished. I jerked my head up, water streaming down my face as I stared at my reflection. A terrifying detail suddenly paralyzed me.

What did their faces look like? My stomach dropped. I could not conjure the faces of that mother and daughter.

In the movie reel of my mind, their features were entirely blurred out. Every single conversation, every mundane detail of living with them was razorsharp.

But their faces were terrifying blanks! Panic wrapped around my throat like a poisoned vine, choking the air from my lungs. Did they even exist?

I slammed my forehead against the mirror. Once. Twice. Three times. The glass rattled. Finally, a fractured memory broke loose. The mother's name was Joanne.

And I remembered her exact address. I was going to that house. I had to prove my own mind was not lying to me.

Chapter 6 Following the address burned into my memory, I rode the city bus for over two agonizing hours. I finally stepped off in front of a gated community by the river.

Riverbend Estates. Building 4, Unit 605. As my finger hit the elevator button, another wave of memories crashed into me. I remembered exactly why I had cut them out of my life.

In the beginning, we were actually close. Whenever the holidays rolled around, Joanne would insist I come over for dinner.

That illusion lasted until my senior year, when my roommate casually dropped a bomb on me. Spencer might be cheating. She saw him walking around the campus quad with another girl.

He was even carrying her bag. "Maeve, I swear I saw it with my own eyes," she had told me. "From the back, I totally thought it was you! You guys looked identical.

But when I got closer, I realized it wasn't. The lighting was garbage, but that girl was talking so loud, just completely obnoxious.

That's how I knew for a fact it wasn't you." I hadn't been anywhere near the quad that night. That betrayal became a toxic secret I swallowed and buried for years.

I never confronted Spencer. I never hunted the girl down to scream in her face. Why? Because not long after, Spencer got dumped.

I did some quiet digging and found out the girl had gotten back together with her high school sweetheart. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

But what crushed me wasn't Spencer's wandering eye. It was the girl's identity. She was Joanne's daughter.

With her original grades, there was zero chance she would have ever gotten accepted into my Ivy League premed program.

But after the brutal academic boot camp I put her through that summer, her test scores skyrocketed. She was supposed to major in architecture.

Yet, guilty about bleeding her mother's bank account dry, she pivoted to premed. She literally became my direct junior in the program. Fate had a really sick sense of humor.

From that moment on, I cut ties with them. I hated Spencer for his disloyalty, but I hated that loud, obnoxious girl even more. She already had so much.

Why did she have to steal the pathetic little scraps I had left? Yeah, I was jealous of her. But it wasn't about Spencer. I was jealous of her entire existence.

Looking back, she took the exact same electives as me. She joined the exact same clubs. But there was one massive, glaring difference. She had a mother.

A mother who loved her fiercely. The elevator dinged. I stepped out and stopped dead in front of the familiar door.

After a second of hesitation, I raised my knuckles and rapped against the wood. Knock. Knock. Knock. Nothing. I tried again, hitting it harder. Knock. Knock. Knock.

The narrow, suffocating hallway acted like a giant amplifier. The hollow thuds echoed endlessly against the cheap walls.

It was over a hundred degrees outside, but a layer of icy sweat slicked my spine. Just as I raised my fist to bang on the door again, it jerked open.

A heavyset woman dripping with sweat pushed her way out. I froze in my tracks. Joanne? But in my memory, she was so thin.

The heavy woman wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, raking her eyes up and down my body.

Figuring out I was just some broke college kid, her face instantly twisted into a scowl. "Can I help you?" The tone, the voice—nothing matched. I peered over her shoulder.

The apartment was completely stripped bare. Not a single piece of furniture. A sudden chill shot up from the soles of my feet straight to my skull. Empty.

How the hell could it be empty? The woman's harsh, abrasive voice cranked up a few decibels. "Hello? Are you deaf? What’s with the incessant banging?

You trying to wake the dead?" I flinched, my heart slamming against my ribs. My brain stalled.

Then I noticed her cheap, illfitting blazer and the corporate lanyard hanging out of her pocket. She wasn't Joanne. She was just a real estate agent.

Chapter 7 I blurted out the first disjointed thought that formed in my panicaddled brain. "Hhi.

Has this apartment… has it always been empty?" The woman turned her back, aggressively sloshing a mop across the dusty floor. She let out a loud, heavy huff. "Don't bother asking.

The lease is already signed." I froze, refusing to let it go. "Was there a previous tenant named Joanne?

Really thin, maybe in her early forties?" "Come back tomorrow." "What?" She whipped around and glared at me.

Professional courtesy was the only thing stopping her from slamming the door in my face.

Choking back her annoyance, she dragged out her words in a flat, deadpan drawl. "The tenant named Joanne moves in tomorrow. A mother and daughter.

The kid is prepping for college entrance exams, so the mom is moving here to support her. The furniture arrives in an hour, and they paid me extra to supervise the delivery." Oh!

The realization hit me like a physical blow. In the original timeline, I didn't find the tutoring flyer until tomorrow. I was exactly one day too early.

Desperation spiked in my chest. "Where are they right now?" The real estate agent let out a harsh, mocking laugh. "I just told you, they're from out of town!

They had a friend lock down the lease for them.

How the hell should I know where they are?" "Do you have her phone number?" "Yeah, and I'm legally not allowed to hand it out to random kids.

If you want to see them so bad, just come back tomorrow." Tomorrow? But tomorrow, time would violently yank me backward again. It meant that today, we were infinitely close.

A hair's breadth away. But once this day ended, the timeline would sever, and we would never cross paths again. At the very least, this proved they were real.

They weren't just a traumainduced hallucination. But why couldn't I remember their faces? And what the hell was the daughter's actual name?

I stumbled out of the gated community, the chaotic wreckage of my memories crushing the air from my lungs.

I collapsed onto a concrete bench by the river, staring blankly at the water.

The glassy surface of the river perfectly mirrored the glowing red digits suspended in my vision. [ 12:06:15 ] Twelve years. Six months. Fifteen days.

That was the exact lifespan I had left. A sickening realization washed over me. This wasn't a rebirth. I hadn't been given a second chance.

This was a slow, agonizing retrospective of my death! I was currently seventeen years old. Which meant the countdown would officially hit zero when I turned five.

What happens when the clock stops? Will the timeline snap forward, and I'll still plunge thirty stories to my death?

Consumed by despair, I forced my brain to dig into the darkest corners of my past. What happened when I was five? Oh! The truth clicked into place. That was the year my mother died.

Yes. Being five years old was the absolute origin point of my memories. More accurately, my life officially began on that exact day. The blazing heat of midsummer.

Cicadas screaming outside the window. Chirp… chirp… Inside the crumbling, dirtfloor house, a woman lay motionless on the bed. A faded, floral quilt covered half her face.

She reached a trembling hand under her pillow and pulled out a crumpled fiftydollar bill, pressing it into my tiny hand to buy snacks at the village store.

In that isolated, impoverished mountain village, a single penny could buy ten pieces of hard candy. Ten dollars was an astronomical fortune.

It could buy bags of rice seed or a whole flock of chicks… Yet, she handed it to me and told me to buy whatever junk food I wanted.

As the memory resurrected itself, her voice—so unfamiliar, yet so deeply ingrained in my bones—sent a tremor through my chest. "Maeve, buy whatever you want to eat.

Make sure your stomach is full before you come home." I had been so happy.

I bought popsicles, spicy strips, lollipops… and one expensive thing that cost three whole dollars, though the memory of what it was had rotted away.

I kept the remaining twentydollar bill clutched tight in my fist, fully expecting her to praise me for being so responsible when I got back.

But when I skipped back into the courtyard, there was a makeshift wooden bed sitting right in the center. A stark white sheet was draped over it.

Underneath, a cold, human silhouette protruded against the fabric. Chapter 8 My grandmother told me she died of a highly contagious illness. She ordered me to stay away.

I was the most obedient kid in that miserable rural town, so I never took a single step closer.

Even when they carried her casket up to the cemetery, I never got to see her face one last time. A sharp ringtone shattered my memories.

I glanced at the caller ID, my finger hovering over the screen before hitting accept.

Wayne's theatrical, selfrighteous voice immediately blasted through the speaker. "Well, if it isn't our Ivy League scholar. Finished your finals? How did you do?

Are you locked in for valedictorian?" "By the way, holiday flights are completely sold out. I've been checking online every single day, and I just can't snag a ticket.

I told you to just go to the local state college, but you refused to listen." "You just had to run off across the country. Now look at you.

If you can't make it home, you only have yourself to blame!" "Sigh. You know, when your mother got sick, I dragged her to every hospital.

I drained my bank accounts and went into massive debt just to save her, but she still left us." "On her deathbed, she begged me to find you a new mother.

She said a little girl needs a mother's touch." "That's the only reason I married Joanne.

Even though she came with two kids of her own, I swallowed my pride because she promised to take care of you. I sacrificed everything over the years to mold you into a success.

All I ever wanted was for you to get a stable job and live a quiet life." "Sure, you're all grown up now. You think you know better than me.

But don't you ever forget—if I hadn't pushed the school board to skip you ahead two grades, you never would have qualified for those earlyadmission academic grants.

You owe your entire future to me!" "I climbed from a nobody rural teacher to the Vice Superintendent of the school district.

You think I did that without knowing how the world works? How many times do I have to say it? I do everything for your own good, Maeve." Word for word.

It was the exact same script burned into my memory. He had always held a massive grudge over me rejecting the local teaching college.

For years, no matter what crisis I faced, he twisted it into a punishment for defying him, launching into the same emotionally manipulative monologue. I used to be numb to it.

But reliving this timeline stripped the fog from my brain. I broke down his lies with cold precision. Couldn't book a flight?

A girl from my dorm who lived a town over had just bought her ticket yesterday. Married a new mom to take care of me?

Joanne hadn't cooked me a single meal or asked about my day in my entire life.

When Joanne got divorced and dragged two kids with her, our conservative little town treated her like toxic waste.

Unless a guy was dead broke and desperate, no one would touch a woman with that kind of baggage. Yet Wayne actively pursued her.

On their wedding day, my grandmother threw a massive, extravagant reception like it was his first marriage. They shoved it down my throat that it was all a sacrifice for me.

But looking at his career trajectory… from rural teacher to suburban administrator, straight to the city's district office.

Every single promotion perfectly aligned with the influence of his new fatherinlaw, the wellconnected school principal.

And that shiny new house he bought in the affluent suburbs after his big promotion? I was only allowed to sleep on the couch two days a month.

As for him brilliantly skipping me to first grade at five years old? The timing was just a little too perfect. That was the exact same year my mother suddenly died.

His voice droned on, vibrating through the phone. "By the way, make sure you call your grandmother. You're the smart college kid.

Buy whatever she needs online and ship it to the house. It's convenient, and people will praise you for being a good, grateful granddaughter.

And your mother has been complaining about migraines for months, but you haven't bothered to call her once! You call yourself a college student?

Did all those expensive books just rot your brain?" … Chapter 9 I finally realized his speech patterns reeked of a corporate dictator.

He seamlessly flipped between playing the concerned patriarch and the barking tyrant.

For twentysix years, just hearing his voice was enough to make my spine lock up and my palms slick with cold sweat. The truth about our last "argument" finally clicked into place.

Back then, terrified of being stranded on campus, my voice had just clipped a decibel higher. "Dad, just Venmo me the cash.

I'll buy the bus ticket myself!" He instantly hung up on me. When I called back, he sent me straight to voicemail, then powered off his phone.

He spent the next week crying to every relative who would listen, claiming I had cursed him out by his first name and screamed that I didn't need his charity.

All because I called him "Dad" instead of groveling with "Father." I had spent hours calling every single aunt and uncle, sobbing out humiliating apologies and submitting to a selfcritique just so he would gracefully accept my phone call again.

The memory was razorsharp. Yet, my blood didn't boil. I felt nothing but a bonechilling calm. "Wayne." Now that was calling him by his first name.

On the other end of the line, the mask slipped. A tidal wave of filthy, degrading curses blasted through the speaker.

But when he didn't hear my usual pathetic sobs or frantic apologies, his voice faltered. The screaming abruptly died out, replaced by a cowardly silence.

I kept my voice deadpan. "How exactly did my mother die?" The line went dead quiet. I could hear him holding his breath.

I dragged out every single syllable. "If you had anything to do with her death, I will kill you.

Do we understand each other?" I killed the call and braced myself for the next yesterday