They say healing begins with truth.
But I'm not sure I believe that anymore.
It's been three years since I left the house on Blackwood Lane.
Three years since I buried the last secret.
Three years since the woman who called herself my mother—my bride—vanished without a trace.
Some days I wake up convinced it was all a dream.
A fevered hallucination stitched together by grief and trauma.
But then I look at the scar on my wrist.
Or the red-inked journal I keep locked in a box I'll never open again.
And I remember.
I remember the coldness of her touch the night she whispered,
"You were always mine."
I remember the neighbors' faces after the trial—how they couldn't look me in the eye.
I remember the therapist's quiet voice telling me, "Sometimes, survival looks like madness from the outside."
There are questions that will never be answered.
Where did she go?
What else did she do before me?
Was I truly her only victim… or just the last one to say yes?
I don't know.
All I know is this:
There are parts of me I will never get back.
There are shadows in my mind that speak in her voice.
And no matter how far I run, I carry her with me—in my name, in my blood, in the silence that follows every vow I will never speak again.
So if you've read this far, wondering how a son could marry his mother…
You're asking the wrong question.
The real question is—
what do you become after surviving something that should never have happened?