“You tried to break her.”
“She’s weak!” my mother snapped. “You’re blinded. She’ll ruin your child!”
I felt something inside me collapse.
“Eliza is not weak,” I said quietly. “She trusted the wrong people.”
Upstairs—
Eliza cried.
Real cries this time.
Not silent.
That decided everything.
“Leave,” I told my mother.
“You’re choosing her over me?”
The sentence that ended everything.
I opened the door.
“Leave.”
She did.
And just like that—
My past walked out of my life.
Chapter 3: The Severed Ties
I found Eliza upstairs, wrapped in my shirt, trembling.
I knelt in front of her.
“I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look at me.
“That scares me,” she whispered. “It sounds like you knew.”
“No,” I said. “But I should have.”
That mattered.
“I tried to tell you once,” she said.
My chest tightened.
“When?”
“You were on your laptop. I said she scared me.”
