“All I could think was that I was in some sort of trouble at work,” I told Brio, shaking my head at my naiveté.
And that was what I’d asked as my mother’s watery gaze slid toward me.
Because why else would she be crying?
It was no secret that she’d come to depend on my income to help keep the lights on. It was the main reason I didn’t do what everyone else my age had been doing. Moving out. Getting a life of their own.
She needed me.
And my sister needed me.
So I’d stayed to help.
Because that was the kind of person my parents had raised me to be.
If my mom thought I’d screwed up at work and that income was going to be gone, I could totally see why she’d been so upset. Especially because the rent was already a little overdue since I’d been putting money aside for the laptop. A luxury, yes, but everyone deserved a little luxury, regardless of their socioeconomic standing.
“Mr. Polat, is something wrong at work?” I asked, watching as he all but looked through me, like he had no idea who I was, like I hadn’t served him dinner a few times in the past. “At the restaurant,” I clarified, then watched as he seemed to start putting things together.
“And that is when it went to shit,” Brio said, seeing where the story was going.
“Exactly.”
It turned out my mom was almost three months behind on the money she owed the Polat family. And Eren wasn’t interested in giving her any more time to find the cash.
“Was he going to hurt her?” Brio asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe? There were two instances in my childhood where my father came home bloodied and bruised. He’d told me that he’d been mugged. But… yeah… looking back, it was probably the Polats.”
All I knew was he started to raise his voice to my mom.
And then his hand raised and I saw something sharp catch the light.
“I didn’t think. I just flew between them. He grabbed me instead of her and pressed the knife to my throat. Then he kept pressing it in as my mother tried to explain there was no money.”
I remembered the way the blade sliced in, the pain a hot, burning sensation. The blood trickled down my neck, staining my work shirt.
My mom was slipping in between English and Turkish in her panic.
My own mind was racing as the blade dug deeper and deeper as Eren yelled.
“Then I just blurted it out. That I would do anything. Anything,” I said, sighing.
“And he chose to force you to marry him?”
“If I married him, he would lower the rate my mom owed him by a third. Which would give her and my sister a chance to get their lives together,” I said. “And if I didn’t, she would owe him what she hadn’t paid, and then double each month in the future. It was impossible. That was why my father had a heart attack. From all the stress.”
“You were sacrificing yourself to give your family a chance at a better life.”
“I might not have been so noble had I known what being married to him would be like,” I admitted.
“No, you would have,” Brio said, shaking his head.
No, he was right.
Even if I had known, I would have made the same choice. Saving my mom and my sister.
“I never got a chance to see if he was good on his word, though,” I admitted. “I wasn’t allowed to have contact with them after we married. Eren always checked the phone records,” I added. “And I was never allowed to go anywhere. And I don’t think my mom wanted to risk trying to make contact either. A part of her must have known what life was going to be like for me.”
In fact, she had been the one to take me before my wedding to her gynecologist, insisting I get myself an IUD.
“You do not want his evil spawn,” she’d told me.
And, well, when she was right, she was right.
So I’d put my feet in those stirrups, I’d held my mom’s hand, and I’d endured the pain of the insertion, knowing that he would never get an heir out of me.
And a part of me secretly hoping that he would get pissed about that and divorce me for someone who could give him a baby.
Maybe that would have come. If he hadn’t died.
“And that is that, I guess. I married him. You can imagine what that was like for me,” I said, shrugging.
“Yeah, I can,” he said, his hand shifting, massaging the muscles of my shoulder.
I knew I was supposed to push him away, tell him I didn’t want him touching me, something, anything.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say that.
His fingers felt like magic.
And it felt so good to be touched with care after so long without that.