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MARIA

I couldn't believe that I was still crying like an idiot in front of her.

My mother stood and reached out for the crutch beside her. Then she walked, dragging her foot as she moved, and came close to me. I looked up at her through blurred vision and before I knew it, her arms were wrapped around me.

She was hugging me.

My eyes were wide, shocked that she was surrounding me with such a tight hug that I didn't respond to. I wiped my eyes and tried to calm down, ready to snap at her to get off me until she spoke.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice thick with tears. "I'm sorry for overstepping and hugging you, I'm sorry." Then she just kept saying it, "I'm sorry for not being your mother. I was your pain, I was your torture, I'm so, so sorry, Maria." Her tone was so genuine and true that I couldn't even speak, the tears took over and despite my wishes, my body went against me and I continued sob.

"I don't want your forgiveness," she wept, her hand beginning to stroke my head. "I don't want your kindness, I don't deserve anything from you. I won't ask for acceptance." Then she started to rock me slightly, as if I was a massive baby in her tight arms. I sniffled, inhaling her familiar scent and feeling even more overwhelmed at the fact that my mother was holding me.

"But Maria," Mamma moved away, her distraught eyes meeting mine again. "I wish you knew how much I do love you, and that has never once ended."

"The happiest moments of my life were the days that I met you and Luna. The days you both were born."

"And I'm sorry," Mamma's tears ran down her cheeks as she spoke. "I'm sorry that I never showed you how much I love you," she delicately whispered. "I know my words are pathetic and useless. Nothing will make any of this right. Nothing will change your story and your experiences in this life. I'm so, so sorry, Maria, from the bottom of my heart, I apologise."

"Whatever you want, I'll do. Whatever it is that can make you feel better, I'll do. I'll do anything." She sniffed, wiping her cheeks. "But I know that I don't deserve a relationship with you or Luna. You both deserve better."

I hated it. I hated how sorry she was, how she seemed repentant, how she had accepted her fate. I hated that I couldn't continue to believe she had no remorse, that I couldn't believe that my mother died and never apologised for what she did. I hated that things couldn't change because of her apology. That no matter what, I couldn't revert the past, I couldn't make myself feel better through an apology. Like she had said, it was useless.

But I hated that I was glad she apologised and understood that she was wrong, that she didn't expect anything from me.

I wasn't sure if I believed that she loved me. But I wasn't sure if I could continue to tell myself that she didn't, because it would be a lie to say that my mother didn't once love me. We had good times and that was what cause my conflict inside on how to feel about her. My mother wasn't always awful to me. But the bad things she did outweighed her goodness.

I looked away from the window and met her eyes again. I had managed to stop myself from crying. I wiped my face once more and swallowed, still trying to piece together everything.

"I have so many questions," I admitted, remembering that all I knew was that she was dead the day before. I didn't want to keep it inside. Mamma was right there, alive and able to finally answer all that was inside for so long.

She sat back down opposite me again, a willing and open look on her face.

"I want to know everything," I truthfully told her, "everything about you." Her eyes expanded as she looked at me in astonishment. "Me?" She was in disbelief. I nodded, wanting to form a full picture of her in my mind.

"From the beginning," I added, "before me, before Luna, before everything." I realised I didn't know enough about my mother as I thought I did after she died. Her past was a mystery to me, one that was never fully explored.

"Oh," she let out in surprise. She looked slightly nervous and confused. Then she nodded, her hands going back onto the table as she clasped them together slowly. "Okay." She slowly said, looking as though she didn't know where to start. "Well..."

"I only had my father," Mamma told me, licking her lips slowly. She lightly let out a small laugh to appease her awkwardness. "I grew up with his wife and their family."

I immediately knew from the choice of words, 'their', that she wasn't welcome in her own household.

"I was a result of an extramarital relationship. My own mother died shortly after birth. She killed herself." I blinked a couple of times at the revelation. I continued to carefully listen and let her share her story.

"So then I was stuck in a house where I wasn't wanted." Then she held a small smile on her face as she said, "I was mistreated. Dance was my only escape so I held onto it."

"Then when I turned eighteen they sold me off to..." She initially couldn't even say his name. Mamma slowly exhaled, "Zeno..." It looked difficult for her to mention him again. She took a drink of her tea before her, gripped onto the handle. "I got married the day after I turned eighteen. I never wanted to." Then I remembered a piece of my past. One thing my mother didn't agree with, that my father controlled was my short lived engagement with Leonardo. She was always against the arranged marriage.

"I didn't love him at the start," Mamma honestly told me, "I hated everything and everyone. I didn't want to get married, I didn't want to be a wife."

"You were only eighteen," I lamented quietly as I gazed at her. I remembered how she used to look, even younger, even more vulnerable. She had her whole youth stripped away from her.

"Not to mention, he was a decade older than me, and he was..." Mamma sighed, "he was difficult to live with, especially at the start."

Then I thought of something. I grew up with the two of them hating each other. Things only started to change between them just before Luna was conceived, the baby that was actually planned.

"What about me?" I asked feeling slightly apprehensive for the answer I was looking for. "Was I planned?"

Mamma could only smile for a moment. Her eyes left mine and went back to her mug, where she used her teaspoon to stir the rest of the tea inside. "You were...from the start. They all wanted me to have a child even before I was married to him. So in some aspects, you were planned."

Then my eyebrows lowered slightly as I realised the openness was misleading if I didn't press further, "was it willing?"

She didn't speak to answer at first. Her face gave it all away, like I had brought up a hard and painful memory. Mamma blinked a couple of times before her arms wrapped around herself. "I got you in the end and that's all that matters." I wasn't even surprised at that point. I let out a breath and closed my eyes for a few seconds. If I felt unwanted before, I definitely felt worse after hearing that.

She then continued, "and I loved raising you, being your mother. Things got better after you were born but..."

"I ruined things when the pressure started. Zeno was just...he was getting promotions and got more involved with the mafia, alcohol drugs, dealing. I got more and more desperate for my dreams and..." Her eyes regretfully met mine, "I took out a lot of my internal struggles and what he was throwing at me on you. That wasn't right. That wasn't okay."

"There was a time that I did love Zeno. There was. But just before Luna came, everything got so..." She trailed off and I realised it was because she was struggling to continue. She swallowed, blinking rapidly to hide away the tears forming in her eyes. I seemed to be unlocking memories she had kept hidden away for a long time. But I had to know, I wanted to know everything there was to know about my mother.

She didn't dive deeper into that. In fact, when she was explaining a lot of the past, she didn't disclose everything into detail. Almost as though she wasn't just protecting herself, but me. Mamma was still keeping things from me, heartbreaking things that I didn't know or that she didn't want so I wouldn't feel sympathy for her.

But I could remember the amount of bruises I would see on her back then, the countless trips to the hospital when her stomach was huge, the emergency to the hospital when Luna was born early, her change in personality. I remembered her being weak and sick a lot afterwards, being married but taking care of the two of us alone.

"They all wanted a boy," Mamma let out a small but empty chuckle. Them, her parents, his family. The people that controlled her entire marriage.

"Eventually, when we were involved with the Romanos, that was when I really was at my lowest." That was when the tears began to spill down her cheeks. "Sorry," she gently let out another unhappy laugh. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and sniffed. "I'm being ridiculous."

I wanted to tell her that she wasn't but instead, I kept silent, attentively listening as she continued, "I mistreated you despite being a neglected child myself." She shook her head at herself, clearly trying to compose her face but struggling to contain her tears. "I must've been so crazy about making a name for myself, for wanting to have a place in this world that I forced you to do it for me. I've always reflected on my past life and I regret every single thing that I did. I will never excuse what I did. I hurt you, Maria." I stiffened a little when the attention was back on me. I drank some more of the honey tea before me, trying to relieve the tenseness inside of me.

"I turned to alcohol and other bad habits to distract me and in turn, it only made my mental state worse, which affected you. You were innocent," her voice had grown lower and tearful. "You didn't do anything to deserve what I did to you."

"What he did to you," she added, "and I wish you were never left with a man like him." There was an emptiness in the house after she died and the only person that my father could take his anger out on from there was me, so I avoided his house, I was out dancing every single day.

"Was it true that you slept around with other men?" I finally asked her directly.

She didn't hesitate to answer truthfully. "I did many things that I'm not proud of voluntarily and involuntarily to climb up the ladder." It was a vague but telling response. There were various different ways to make a person known in such an industry, many ones that I rejected myself to keep my dignity. Some of them would've been through Francis or Giovanni. I knew how easy it was to be taken advantage of, to be brought to your knees, by people at the top, and stripped from your integrity. But based off a few incidents that I had slowly come to remember, a lot of the time, my father instigated it.

Then Mamma came onto the night that she died. "That was the day I finally realised how much I had..." Her eyes became distant, tearing up again. "I ruined you."

"Because I was with a man alone in my room?"

"No," Mamma said before delicately saying, "because of your eyes."

"My eyes?" I repeated in confusion.

She nodded, squeezing the tissue in her hand. "Your eyes. It was like I could see every single thing I did wrong to you in your eyes when you spoke to me. Everything I was blind to." I was always told that my eyes were expressive by Leonardo. I didn't completely understand or see how it was possible to change just by a look but nonetheless, I continued to ask, "what did they look like?"

Mamma seemed to remember like it was yesterday. "Broken and drained and...filled with hatred." I looked down and could only let out a breath. Thinking back to how I was back then was an unpleasant thought. I hated remembering my childhood when it didn't include Leonardo.

"So I impulsively decided to leave." That was the first time she had realised the mess that we were living in and decided to act on it and leave. I always wondered what life would have been like if we had left that night. "The plan was to take you and Luna away from him and he didn't like that. He always had to be in control."

She took in a breath before saying, "so he didn't like the fact that I was leaving. I was owned by him, so to him, I didn't have a right. He was mad about a bunch of others things too." Mamma looked thoughtful, as though she could recount every single thing if she could to me right there. "It was such an explosive argument. Like everything we ever disagreed on and kept inside just came out in one. It got violent, it got uncontrollable." Then another few tears ran down her cheeks that she quickly wiped away. She took her time, keeping herself calm before adding the rest.

"And when..." Her wavering voice cracked and then I could feel it, the building pressure in my chest once she was getting to that particular part. My eyes became teary upon hearing the pain in her voice. "When he threw me over that balcony..." I turned my head away slightly, unable to look at her eyes filled with anguish and fear. I could tell it was taking a lot for her to be able to speak about it.

"I saw you and I just—" her fragile voice stopped and she squeezed her eyes closed, deeply inhaling and wiping her flushed face. Mamma swallowed, blinking over and over as she tried to compose herself. "I regretted everything. I just knew that I was going to die. I was going to die by the hands of a man I never escaped from." The level of fear in her voice was enough to shed a light on how she felt being at the face of death.

"Why did you never leave?" I asked her in an earnest voice, "why did you never leave that man? Your family? Why didn't you just go? You had your career, you had enough money of your own."

"I couldn't. Zeno controlled a lot of my life after I was sold to him. And if it wasn't him that would, then it would be my father. But I should've. I should've left the moment I noticed that I was changing. That would've protected you and Luna if I just had the guts to leave. But I had a lot of chains keeping to them, too many that would get me, you and Luna killed if I tried to break them," Mamma explained, blinking back the tears in her grey eyes.

"So how did you get here?" I wanted to know more. The more she spoke, the more she shared, the more I could come to some form of closure hearing her.

Mamma then went on, "I woke up in a hospital bed alone, after having my first surgery, with a note. One of Zeno's men was my life's saviour. He sent me away from here to be treated and I never saw him. I only knew his name."

As I attentively listened, she further told me, "after being discharged, all I wanted to do was stay hidden. I was paranoid that Zeno would find me. I went crazy thinking about what would happen if he found me. I knew my name was everywhere on the news, on magazines so I stayed in hiding. I wanted the world to believe that I was dead so Zeno believed I was dead."

She was terrified of him, I thought to myself. Despite keeping an appearance of being strong, Mamma was truly scared of her husband.

"Then, after being afraid of living for so long, I met John." For the first time in that conversation, Mamma looked happy speaking about her past. A small smile came up on her face. Her hands finally relaxed on the table, her shoulders lowering as she talked about her husband, "I changed my last name, I got treated and it was then when I received therapy and found out that I had bipolar and a hell of a lot of other conditions going on with me." That explained a lot.

"PTSD?" I asked and she nodded, gently sighing. Then I wanted to know, "what about Luna and I?"

"I think about you and Luna every single day," Mamma's voice was too strong and genuine for me to disagree with. "Seeing you in the news..." She looked down and sniffed, holding back her tears.

I wasn't comfortable talking about Giovanni so I was glad when she didn't push further.

"I just—" I began, about to speak again until the kitchen door opened.

"Mama, is the food ready yet?"

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~ Author's Note ~

Maria hearing her mother's side of the story has finally answered many questions she had for her mother for a long time.

Should this change her perspective on her mother?

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