Chapter Text
She wanted to be the wind that carried her mother to freedom, but she was only ever the anchor that kept her from drowning. And in that quiet, terrible truth, the daughter wept—not for her own captivity, but for the sea her mother never got to cross.
The cool mountain air brushed against her sweaty face as she ran; her lungs were burning for air, and her legs were aching now, but she didn't stop until she collapsed on flat ground. Alice looked up at the sky, watching the sun rise slowly, painting the horizon in a beautiful hue of orange. In the mountains of Chiang Mai, everything seemed slower, trapped in a quiet stillness that she desperately tried to emulate within her own mind. That was the only reason she ran so early in the morning—to not think, to outrun the suffocating thoughts that threatened to consume her the moment she stood still.
But today was different. The rhythm of her footsteps couldn't drown out the reality that she had only one week left before she packed her bags, moved away from these peaks, and started a new phase of life at the university in Bangkok. As she lay there, a sense of immense determination ran through her veins, hot and uncompromising. She knew that now that she was finally moving away, she would make sure to slap the truth of everyone’s pathetic life right into their faces before she left. She hated everyone in her family, hated the facades they maintained, and she would make sure to tell them that before she moved out. She was eighteen years old, and she had tolerated enough of their suffocating illusions.
She got up from the ground, her breathing now much calmer, the cold air soothing her burning throat. With her jaw set, she began the walk back toward her house to face the very first person on her list: her own mother.
When she pushed open the door and stepped inside, the familiar warmth of the house greeted her, alongside the delicate scent of brewing herbs. She saw Lena already in the kitchen, her back turned as she quietly prepared some tea. Hearing the door close, Lena turned around, her face softening into a gentle expression.
"You're up early, Alice. Did you have a good run?" Lena asked, her voice carrying that habitual, quiet grace.
Alice forced her lips to curve, a hollow mimicry of affection. "Yeah. The air was nice," she replied, greeting her mother back with a nod. She didn't even bother asking where her father was; the house felt empty of him anyway, reduced to just the two of them navigating the quiet spaces of the kitchen.
Alice loved her mother. She probably loved her more than anything in the entire world, and it was precisely because of that fierce, consuming love that she saw the things no one else saw. She understood the fractures in Lena that everyone else ignored. Her mother was always kind, polite, and deeply loving, but Alice knew the hollow space that existed beyond that perfect exterior. She looked at Lena pouring the tea, and the determination inside her hardened into something sharp. She decided that maybe it was finally time to say some harsh truths.
"You look tired, Mom," Alice said, stepping closer to the counter, her voice dropping the casual pretense of a morning greeting.
Lena offered a small, dismissive smile, keeping her eyes on the porcelain cups. "It's just the morning light, sweetie. I slept fine."
"No, you didn't. You never do," Alice countered, the edge in her tone causing Lena’s hands to pause for a fraction of a second. Alice leaned against the counter, staring intently at her mother's profile. "You spend your whole life acting like everything is perfect, like this house, this life, and Dad are exactly what you wanted. But it's a lie. You’re miserable, and you’ve been miserable for as long as I can remember."
Lena finally looked up, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and hurt, the gentle mask slipping slightly. "Alice, that's not true. You shouldn't say things like that—"
"Why? Because it's the truth?" Alice interrupted, the resentment she had harbored for years finally spilling over into the quiet kitchen. "I’m eighteen, Mom. I’m not a child anymore. I see how you look when you think no one is watching. You gave up whatever life you wanted to live a lie with a man who isn't even here half the time, and you expect me to just sit back and pretend your pathetic life is normal. I hate what this family has become, and I hate that you just accept it."
Lena stood frozen, the teapot still hovering over the cup, the silence between them heavy with the weight of things left unsaid for a lifetime.
Alice took a deep breath, the anger vibrating in the small space between them. Lena watched her daughter’s chest rise and fall, misinterpreting the source of the fire burning in the girl's eyes.
To Lena, it was the ache of a daughter neglected by an absent parent. She set the teapot down with a soft, careful click and looked at Alice, her voice dropping to a gentle, probing whisper.
"Do you miss your father, Alice?"
Alice just rolled her eyes, a cynical, humorless scoff escaping her lips. She had stopped caring about that man years ago; his absence was a hollow space she had long since mapped and abandoned. "No," she said, the word flat and final.
Lena shifted, her fingers tracing the edge of the kitchen counter as she fell back on the practiced defenses she had used for nearly two decades. "He is just busy with work, sweetheart. Everything between your father and me is perfectly fine. You're just overthinking things, as usual."
Alice completely ignored her mother’s empty platitudes. The deflection only fueled the frustration simmering beneath her skin. She stared directly into Lena's guarded eyes, stripping away the politeness. "Why are you even putting up with all of this? Why stay?"
Lena blinked, a defensive wall snapping into place as she looked at her daughter with a mixture of confusion and mild offense. "What are you even talking about, Alice?"
Alice looked at her mother’s face—so beautifully composed, yet so thoroughly terrified of the truth—and realized there was absolutely no point in continuing this conversation. The wall was too thick, the denial too deeply entrenched. She stood up, the chair scraping sharply against the floor, and turned around, ready to walk away to the sanctuary of her bedroom. But before she took a step, she paused, glancing back at her mother over her shoulder. Her voice was quiet now, but it carried the weight of a heavy blade.
"If you think that you are giving me a family by staying in this, then you are completely wrong," Alice said, her eyes piercing through Lena’s fragile composure. "You need to stop using your daughter to justify your own cowardice."
Lena stood frozen in the center of the kitchen as Alice’s footsteps faded down the hallway. The words hung in the air, sharp and unyielding, leaving a physical ache in Lena's chest. She let out a long, trembling sigh, pressing her fingertips against her temples. Alice's words hurt deeply, cutting into the rawest parts of her soul. Lena felt a profound wave of exhaustion wash over her; she did everything in her power to be a good mother, to protect her daughter, to maintain a semblance of stability, but nothing ever seemed to be enough. Lately, Alice had become a complete fireball, always picking fights, always pushing the boundaries until everything struck a nerve. Lena closed her eyes, genuinely lost. She didn't know what was happening to her little girl, and she couldn't begin to comprehend what Alice was so bitterly disappointed about.
Down the hall, behind the locked door of the bathroom, Alice stood under the spray of the shower. The steam rose around her, blurring the edges of the room as the hot water cascaded over her shoulders, mixing with the tears that finally fell freely down her face.
The anger she had thrown at her mother was merely the armor shielding a far more devastating truth. Deep down, Alice was drowning in a sea of guilt. It was a suffocating weight she had carried for years, a persistent, haunting question that kept her awake at night: if she had never been born, would her mother have had a better life?
Alice loved Lena so fiercely that it manifested as this volatile, aching rage. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted nothing more than for her mother to be truly happy, to smile with her eyes instead of just her lips. And the realization tore at her from the inside out—the sickening belief that maybe she, Alice, was the ultimate shackle that had bound Lena to this lifeless marriage. Maybe her very existence was the anchor that kept Lena from ever choosing her own freedom. Alice leaned her forehead against the cold tiles of the shower wall, sobbing quietly against the roar of the water, hating the crushing weight of the feeling, and hating herself for being the reason her mother’s life had stood still.
The bedroom was quiet, filled only with the rustle of clothes and the hollow thud of books being settled into the depths of a suitcase. Alice packed her things slowly, piece by piece, as if each folded garment were a fragment of the life she was leaving behind. Her hands trembled slightly as she smoothed down a shirt. She couldn't shake the heavy, suffocating thought that had anchored itself in her mind for years: it was the ultimate tragedy of every daughter to see their mother's pain so clearly, yet never be brave enough to do anything to fix it. Every child eventually looked at the fractures in their home and wondered if they were the sole reason their mother couldn't make a choice—if their very existence was the anchor forcing a woman to hold onto a razor-sharp life just to provide a fragile illusion of stability.
It made Alice angry, a bitter heat rising in her throat. It was her tragedy that she was a daughter, bound to witness this slow dissolution, and it was also Lena's tragedy that she was a daughter too, once forced to bend to the iron will of a dying father's wishes.
Yet, beneath the anger, the truth remained unyielding: Lena loved her with everything she had. Her mother was a fiercely devoted protector, supporting Alice through every stumble, every triumph, and every quiet crisis. Her father was merely a ghost in the background, a man who existed somewhere in the periphery of a busy career, having long stopped being present enough to care about the intricacies of Alice's life. It was Lena who had stood by her, unwavering and solid. Alice felt a sudden, desperate urge to run back down the hallway, to throw her arms around her mother and hold her tight, but the suffocating mixture of guilt and misplaced rage overpowered the impulse, freezing her in place.
Lena had stopped being Lena a long time ago. She had entirely ceased to exist as an individual, leaving behind only the tireless, hollowed-out shell of a mother. Alice had watched the slow erasure happen in stages. First, Lena had erased herself to be a dutiful daughter; then, she had surrendered her spirit to be a compliant wife; and finally, she had poured the remaining fragments of her soul into being a mother.
Alice closed her suitcase, the snap of the locks echoing sharply in the silent room. She leaned against the heavy luggage, staring out the window at the distant, mist-shrouded peaks of Chiang Mai. She had spent her adolescence wondering how a woman could completely sell her soul just to be a mother, and how, even after giving up everything, that same woman could still love her child so endlessly, without a shred of resentment. A deep, aching wish bloomed in Alice’s chest, one that she had never spoken aloud. She wished, with every fiber of her being, that someone out there in the vast, unforgiving world loved Lena just the way Lena loved her daughter—fiercely, completely, and without a single condition.
As she pulled her coat from the hanger, the bedroom door creaked open. Lena stood in the doorway, her eyes tracing the packed bags with a quiet, devastating sadness. She carried a small plate of sliced fruit, a universal maternal offering meant to bridge the chasm her daughter had dug between them.
"I brought you something to eat before you finish packing," Lena said softly, her voice devoid of any lingering anger from their morning confrontation.
Alice looked at the plate, then at her mother’s tired, beautiful face. The anger flared up again, a desperate shield against the guilt that threatened to break her down. "I'm not hungry, Mom."
Lena stepped into the room, setting the plate down on the desk. She reached out, her hand hovering over Alice’s shoulder for a second before she gently squeezed it. "You need to eat. You have a long journey to Bangkok ahead of you next week. Don't let your anger make you neglect yourself."
Alice pulled away slightly, the touch burning through her coat. "Why do you do that? Why do you act like everything is fine, like I didn't just call you a coward this morning? Why don't you ever yell back at me?"
Lena let her hand fall to her side, a faint, melancholic smile touching her lips. "Because you are my daughter, Alice. No matter what you say when you're angry, or how much you push me away, my job is to love you. Nothing you say could ever change that."
Alice stared at her, her jaw clenched to keep from sobbing. It was exactly this—this unconditional, crushing devotion—that made Alice feel like she was suffocating. She turned her back to her mother, pretending to double-check the zipper on her bag. "Just leave it, Mom. Please."
Lena stood there for a long moment, the silence stretching between them like an unbreakable wire, before she turned and quietly left the room, leaving Alice alone with the unbearable weight of a love she felt she didn't deserve.
All hell broke loose on the final afternoon, when Alice went to visit her maternal grandparents before leaving for Bangkok the next day. They welcomed her with the stiff, practiced warmth they always reserved for her, but Alice had never been fond of them—yet another silent, bitter charge she harbored as a daughter protecting her mother. She had never been close to any of her grandparents from either side; the only person she truly inhabited a universe with, the only person she cared about, was Lena.
Her mother had insisted on this farewell visit, a customary obligation meant to smooth over the edges of a fractured family before Alice moved away. Alice had gone alone, watching from the window as Lena dropped her off at the gates of the pristine house before heading to her own design studio. For the first hour, a fragile peace held. The air in the living room was thick with the scent of old wood and loose tea, everything was fine until her grandfather took a slow sip from his cup, set it down, and shifted his posture. He began schooling her, his voice heavy with patriarchal authority, reprimanding her for the way she had been fighting with Lena over the past few weeks.
Alice felt the familiar heat rising in her chest, but she gripped her hands into fists, trying desperately to control her anger. "Please don't interfere between my mother and me," she said, her voice strained, a final warning wrapped in a taut thread of politeness.
But her grandfather was not a man accustomed to being silenced by an eighteen-year-old. He leaned forward, his brow furrowing with a self-righteous gravity. "Lena is my daughter, Alice. I have every right to be worried about her, and I have every right to speak on this. I love her."
The word broke something inside Alice. The hypocrisy of it was a physical blow. She stood up abruptly from the sofa, the sudden movement causing the porcelain on the table to rattle. A cold, mocking laugh escaped her throat, sharp and entirely devoid of joy, as she looked down at her grandfather's face. "You? You love her? You never cared about your daughter."
Her grandfather's face flushed a deep, furious crimson, his hands trembling against the arms of his chair. "How dare you speak to me—"
"Edward, please, calm down," her grandmother interrupted quickly, her voice frantic as she reached out to touch his arm, trying to soothe the gathering storm.
But Alice had already crossed the line; the floodgates were open, and she spat nothing but venom with her words. "If you actually loved her, you would have never made her choose," Alice hissed, the decades of her mother's invisible grief fueling her voice. "You would have loved her exactly the way she was, for who she was. Instead, you forced her into a life she never wanted, into a marriage she never asked for, just because you felt it was right. Not because it was right for my mother, but because it fed your own twisted pride."
Her grandfather opened his mouth to roar, but Alice stepped closer, her shadow falling over him. "You made her feel like she had to be a certain way, like she had to erase herself just to be accepted and loved by her own parents. If you loved her so much, why were there always conditions applied to her existence?"
The room went dead silent, the weight of the accusation hanging like an executioner’s axe. Without waiting for a response, Alice spun on her heel and walked toward the front door. But before crossing the threshold into the afternoon light, she stopped. She turned back to face them one last time, her eyes burning with an ancient, inherited rage.
"You deserve to feel like a father who completely failed on his deathbed," Alice said, her voice dropping to a lethal, quiet register. "Because every single day, my mother lives her life feeling like a daughter who was never enough. If she dies holding onto that hollow ache, then you deserve to die feeling like an absolute failure."
Her grandmother let out a horrified gasp, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes wide with terror. "Alice! Are you saying you want your grandfather to die?"
Alice looked at the fragile old woman, her expression hardening into stone. "No. I wouldn't want that at all. My mother sacrificed her entire youth and happiness when you were supposedly dying last time, so it would be a shame if you left so easily. You need to live long enough to feel the guilt of what you did to her. You need to live long enough to suffer through the realization that you destroyed your own child."
She grabbed the door handle, throwing one final, venomous smile over her shoulder. "So please, Grandfather, take excellent care of yourself. Eat well, rest, and make sure you live for a very, very long time. That’s the absolute least you can do to repay my mother for what you put her through. Live a long life, and choke on it."
With that, Alice stepped across the threshold and slammed the heavy wooden door behind her, leaving the old house trapped in the suffocating ruins of the truth she had left behind.
Alice knew this was coming. Of course her grandfather would call; of course he would pour his wounded pride into Lena’s ear the very second the front door had slammed shut. So, she sat quietly on the living room couch, the shadows of the late afternoon stretching long and cold across the floorboards. She listened to the distant hum of her mother’s car pulling into the driveway, the sharp kill of the engine, and then the hurried, heavy footsteps approaching the house. When the front door swung open with a violent click, Alice didn't flinch. She just looked up at the wall clock, silently counting the remaining hours until the early morning, calculating exactly how long she had left until she could permanently escape this place.
Lena stormed into the house in absolute fury. She had never been a woman who yelled; her anger had always been a quiet, suffocating frost. But this time, Alice had crossed a sacred line. Lena had tolerated the venom thrown at her own chest; she had spent weeks letting herself believe Alice’s outbursts were merely the displaced rage of a daughter whose father was never around. But this was different. Lena was completely untethered, no longer certain what her daughter was truly angry about, only knowing that a fundamental boundary had been shattered.
"How dare you?" Lena yelled, her voice trembling, cracking with an intensity Alice had never heard before. She stood in the center of the living room, her hands clenched into tight fists. "How dare you speak to your grandfather like that, Alice? I did not raise you to be a monster. I did not raise you to be cruel to a sick old man who has done nothing but love this family!"
Alice remained perfectly still on the couch, her gaze steady, almost detached. "You’re angry as a daughter," she said quietly.
Lena stopped, her breath catching in her throat, her face twisting into deep confusion. "What?"
"You're standing here, screaming at me, not because you're my mother right now, but because you are being a daughter," Alice explained, her voice remarkably flat despite the storm brewing inside her. "You are a daughter who is furious because someone finally dared to hurt your parent. You’re defending him."
Then, the armor began to crack. The coldness in Alice's chest dissolved, and the tears she had been fighting all day finally broke through, flowing freely down her flushed cheeks. She stood up to face Lena, her chest heaving as the raw, bleeding truth of their existence filled the space between them.
"But you need to think about how much it hurts me, too," Alice sobbed, the anger giving way to a devastating, ancient grief. "If you are standing in front of me as a daughter defending her father, then look at me, Mom! I am standing here as a daughter, too. And as your daughter, it kills me. It kills me every single day to watch you live a life that you never wanted!"
Lena flinched, her mouth opening slightly, but no words came out as Alice pressed forward, the words tumbling out like broken glass.
"I spend every night wondering how happy you would be if none of this had happened," Alice cried, her hands shaking at her sides. "If you hadn't been forced into this house, into this marriage, into this prison. I look at you and I don't see a person. I see a ghost."
And then, Alice uttered the words that cut the final thread holding Lena together—the words that tore through Lena’s soul with an unmitigated, fatal precision. "I wish I was never born," Alice whispered, her voice breaking into a ragged sob. "Because maybe if I didn't exist, you could have found just an ounce of courage to choose for yourself. Maybe you would have left. Maybe you would have actually lived."
Lena collapsed into tears, the anger entirely evaporating from her body, leaving her looking small and shattered in the middle of the room. She looked at Alice through a blur of weeping, her heart breaking into pieces at the realization of the agony her child had been carrying. "Alice, no... how can you say that? You are the one thing in this world that I love the most. You are my entire life."
"And that is exactly why I hate this so much!" Alice shouted back, a fresh wave of tears spilling over. "That’s why it breaks me! Because you love me so much that you refuse to be selfish. You sacrificed your whole soul for me, and it destroys me because I would give anything—anything—just to see my mother be truly happy. Not content. Not surviving. Happy."
Lena stepped forward, her hands reaching out blindly to grasp her daughter's shoulders, her voice desperate, pleading. "But I am happy, Alice! I am happy with you. Being your mother is enough for me."
Alice slowly shook her head, pulling back out of Lena’s reach, her eyes filled with a profound, final pity. "No, Mom. You aren't happy. You just forgot what happiness feels like. You stopped being yourself a long time ago. You gave her away, and now you’re just a mother, a wife, and a daughter."
With that, Alice turned away from the weeping woman in the living room. She walked down the short hallway into her bedroom, closed the door, and turned the lock, sealing herself inside the quiet darkness with her packed bags, leaving Lena alone in the echoing silence of the truth.
Lena sat on the couch in the empty living room, the quiet of the house settling over her like heavy stone. The echo of the slammed bedroom door still vibrated in the air, but the silence that followed was far more violent. She stared at the floorboards, her mind drifting back to an old truth she had heard long ago—that a child always knows. She had always been terrified of that exact phrase. For eighteen years, she had carried the paralyzing fear that Alice would one day peer through the heavy curtains of their life and realize that Lena was merely existing, surviving through a clockwork routine of duty and shadow. She had known that the only thing keeping her anchored to this earth, the only thing keeping her in this place, was Alice.
So, Lena had hidden. She had hidden so deeply and so well that she had eventually forgotten the shattered, broken version of herself that once wept in the dark. She had methodically dismantled her old identity and rebuilt herself from the ground up, solely for her daughter. She had promised herself that she would give Alice everything her own childhood had lacked—above all, a love that was absolute, vast, and entirely unconditional.
But now, she was forced to look at a devastating reality. Despite the walls she had constructed, despite the flawless smile and the fierce devotion, her daughter had still managed to notice every single crack. Alice had traced the faint, hidden fissures of her mother's unhappiness to the point where she believed her own non-existence would have been a blessing. It was a crushing realization that made Lena gasp for air in the dim light of the room. How was Lena supposed to explain the unexplainable? How could she find the words to tell Alice that her birth was the singular miracle that had kept Lena alive and breathing?
Alice was not a shackle. She was the only reason Lena found the strength to open her eyes and face the dawn every single day.
Lena buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking as a fresh wave of weeping took hold of her. She wondered, bitterly, where she had failed. What misstep had she taken for her daughter to harbor such a poisonous, suffocating weight of guilt? She had spent eighteen years trying her absolute best to ensure that Alice would never feel the way she had felt—trapped, erased, and bound by a duty that bled her dry. She had sacrificed her own ghost to protect her child from that exact tragedy. But in trying so hard to hide the wounds, she had inadvertently allowed Alice to inherit the phantom pain of them. She had tried to save her daughter from becoming like her, and in the end, she had failed to do even that.
Driven by a desperate, maternal instinct that refused to let the night end in such ruin, Lena stood up from the couch. Her limbs felt heavy, but she walked down the dark hallway until she stood before Alice’s locked door. She leaned her forehead against the cold wood, knocking softly, a fragile sound in the quiet house.
"Alice," Lena whispered, her voice thick and ragged from crying. "Alice, please open the door. Just listen to me for one minute, please."
From inside the room, there was no sound, only the heavy, suffocating silence of a daughter who had checked out of their world.
"Alice, you have to hear me," Lena pleaded, her hand resting flat against the wood as if she could reach through the barrier to touch her child. "You think you were a shackle, but you are the only reason I am still here. When everything else in my life turned to ash, when I thought I would never breathe again, you were born. You didn't ruin my life, sweetheart. You gave me one. If you think I wake up every day out of cowardice, you're wrong. I wake up because of you. You are the only piece of this world that is truly mine, and you are the only thing that makes any of it beautiful."
She waited, her breath hitched, praying for the click of the lock. But the door remained firmly shut, a stubborn boundary between a mother who had given too much and a daughter who felt she had cost far too much to love.