Silence

- VANESSA -

It started out with sinking despair, lying in a foreign bed and staring at the window, imagining what my mother was feeling when the sun came up Saturday morning and I wasn't home. Imagining my father calling his men, calling Luciano, making orders and demands and secretly panicking inside. Imagining the two babies who are due in a few weeks and the attention and joy that's going to be stolen from their arrivals—all because of me. 

I've hurt my family beyond repair. Me. I knew better.

Then the voices—the ceaseless screams and cries of women who are enduring unfathomable suffering, who are hopeless—they came louder with Ivan's arrival. He stared at me, smiled, tried talking, but all I could hear was those women. All I could see was their faces. So many. I've never encountered anything like it.