Silence Between Us
377 Words
We don’t talk much after that night.
The silence isn’t cold—but heavy, like the air before a storm. Evelyn moves through the house with a softness I’ve never seen in her. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t snap. She just… exists beside me, like a shadow trying to relearn how to be light.
I watch her from across the room sometimes, wondering what she sees when she looks at me now.
Guilt? Regret? Or just a girl she’s finally starting to understand?
She cooks more. Not fancy meals—just warm, simple food that fills the house with smells I never knew I missed. Sometimes she leaves a plate at my door. Sometimes I eat with her in silence. We never speak about the past, but the quiet feels like an apology.
And maybe that’s enough for now.
One evening, I find her sitting on the floor of her closet, holding an old shoebox.
I kneel beside her. “What’s that?”
Her voice is barely a breath. “Memories.”
Inside the box are photos I’ve never seen before—my mother, young and beautiful, smiling with her eyes. A man with kind features and rough hands. Letters folded into neat squares. Hospital bracelets. A baby sock.
I touch the photo of my mother. “She was beautiful.”
“She was everything,” Evelyn whispers. “And I wasn’t enough to protect her.”
I look at her. “You were grieving too.”
She swallows. “Grief makes monsters out of people, Amara. I became someone I didn’t recognize. And I took it out on you.”
For a second, the pain resurfaces. But I let it pass.
“I survived,” I say softly.
She meets my eyes. “I don’t want you to just survive anymore. I want you to live. To laugh. To love without fear.”
The words wrap around something fragile in me.
“I’m trying,” I whisper.
She nods. “Me too.”
And in that small, quiet moment—sitting on the floor, surrounded by the wreckage of what we both lost—we begin again.
Not as mother and daughter.
But as two broken women, learning how to build something real from the ruins.
- Writer
