"She once had a child?" I thought to myself and my body stiffened a bit. Surely never expected that update.All text ? N?velD(r)a''ma.Org.


    When could this have happened? Was it during those three interminable years when she had vanished without a trace? But despite the amount of questions I had, I still tried to actposed and I schooled my expression into one of indifference.


    I focused on the almost invisible ripples forming on the surface of my coffee. as I slowly stirred the steaming liquid.


    "I don''t want to hear it," I said tly with nonchnce.


    To be honest, I was mostly not interested in hearing any stories about her murky past even though at some point before, I used to be interested in it. What purpose would it serve to dredge up all of those stories anyway?


    In the background of where we both sat I could hear voices and clinks of cutlery, but it all faded like far away murmurs as Be''s eyes drove like nails. into me. Her fingers curled around her own cup and she slowly took a sip before rolling her eyes.


    "I''m going to tell you anyway," she shrugged.


    I also shrugged as I sipped my own coffee, turning my attention to the view outside the café window, I tried to lose myself in the bustling cityscape, hoping Be would take the hint and spare me the sordid details of her tale.


    "Isaac deceived me into eloping abroad with him and shortly after that I found out pregnant."


    Though outwardly impassive, I was suddenly hanging on her every word with morbid curiosity.


    "We both stayed in a shabby rental we had called home. I even had to survive on terrible... terrible food I tell you. But in spite of the hardships, I still felt happy and proud," she was now looking somewhere far away behind. me, "Knowing I had bravely escaped the shackles of our family''s


    arrangements and taken cor


    someone control my life and


    of my own fate without having to let future.


    Did she just say ''our family"? I took a second to scoff silently, but I still listened.


    "The good times didn''tst however," Be continued; her voice was growing somber.


    "It was only when I started running out of cash that I


    discovered Isaac''s true nature. He got very abusive with me. He always gambled, and most heartbreaking was that he even flocked around with prostitutes."


    What a story.


    I was human too and what she was narrating to me was quite sad, that was if it was true. But I mean, she''d chosen him anyway. Maybe I would have been extremely pitful had she been forced on Isaac or vice versa.


    "Every time he came back to the rental, it was to demand money from me. Thest time he appeared was even a week before my due date." Her voice trembled, but she pressed on. "He ignored all my pleas and took all my remaining money that I''d intended on using for my childbirth. Things got very physical on that particr day and I got pushed to the ground..."


    She frowned like she was reliving the memory.


    *...I started bleeding immediately after I''d copsed, powerless on the floor and needing urgent help but he didn''t even bat an eye at me. He just walked away!" She gestured the ''walked away'' with a flick of her hands in the air.


    "By the time the neighbors found me, I had already lost consciousness. And when I came to, I was already lying on an operating table,pletely weak. But the ordeal wasn''t over, the doctors told me the baby inside me had died, but I still needed to deliver the dead fetus urgently to save my own life."


    A lump worked its way up my throat as Be described her excruciating ordeal of herbor which got prolonged because the stillborn was unable to move up the birth canal on its own.


    Charter s


    "Like other mothers, I went through a painful and longbor, even longer because a dead fetus does not move through the birth canal on its own. I had just be a mother and then immediately lost my child," she whispered and I saw her hands clench tighter around her cup that I thought it was going to break in her grip any second.