Chapter 169

My silence was gasoline poured on a fire I could not see. I still couldn’t tell him that it’s not Moosa’s, the confession lodged somewhere deep in my chest like a stone I couldn’t swallow or spit out, because the truth would shatter the fragile story he had built to make sense of my pain, would replace one villain with something even uglier, something nameless and faceless that had no address for his anger to find. How do you aim a bullet at a ghost? And I wasn’t sure I could bear to watch him break all over again, not when he was already carrying so much of my weight on his shoulders without ever complaining.

My chest constricts whenever I have to talk about anything related to my past in front of anyone, the simple act of opening my mouth about it makes my lungs feel too small, my throat too tight, as though the words themselves carry weight that presses down on my ribs. The weight is not in the words—it is in the silence that follows them. It doesn’t matter that I was force