Chapter 1Don’t Let Me Fade Away

On the very day his company went public, my father had my mother committed to a private asylum.

She lived out her days in a cold, sterile hell, enduring endless torment.

When he locked her away, his voice was devoid of warmth. "If you want to blame someone, Vivian, blame yourself. You're the one who killed Selene."

Selene. My father’s long-dead first love. The untouchable ghost he worshiped.

* * *

For as long as I could remember, my parents never loved each other.

There was no passion between them, but no explosive fights either. Just a quiet, suffocating indifference.

Until the day Arthur's company went public. In front of my very eyes, he had the men in white coats drag my mother away to the asylum.

He looked down at her, his face a mask of stone, and spat those cruel words: "If you want to blame someone, blame yourself. You're the one who killed Selene."

Fourteen years ago, Selene was on her deathbed. Desperate to raise money for her treatment, my father decided to risk everything at an underground casino, intending to gamble away our entire livelihood on a single, mad hope.

My mother fought tooth and nail to stop him. She locked him in the bedroom to keep him from throwing us into ruin. We were already struggling to put food on the table; losing everything would have meant our starvation.

And so, while my father raged behind that locked door, Selene’s heart gave out. She died.

After her funeral, Arthur went back to his usual, detached self. It was as if the man who had been willing to destroy his family for Selene had never existed.

We all thought he had finally grown up. We thought he understood the cost of his recklessness and appreciated my mother's sacrifice.

But we were wrong. He nurtured that poison in his heart for fourteen long years.

And he laid all the blame at my mother's feet.

What my father never knew was that on the night she locked him in, my mother had braved a blinding blizzard, knocking on every door in town to beg for charity. She wanted to save Selene, if only to spare Arthur the lifelong guilt of her death.

All that devotion, all that quiet suffering, and all he had to say was:

"Spend the rest of your miserable life repenting for Selene. This is your punishment for leaving her to die."

My mother whispered the word "punishment" over and over, laughing through her tears until she choked.

"Losing her wasn't my punishment," she sobbed, her voice breaking. "Meeting you was!"

Her tears carried the weight of her stolen youth and decades of wasted devotion.