Chapter One: Happy Marriage? No Torture.
My name’s Niomi, and I live in Paris, France. By the time I was a year old, my parents were already gone. I never got to know their faces, their voices, their smell. Just empty photo frames and whispers from people who knew them.
Aunt Lila stepped in before I could even remember being alone. She couldn’t have children of her own — the doctors told her so — so I became her everything. She loved me like I was a miracle she’d been waiting for her whole life.
And then she met Matthew.
They crossed paths when I was one, and within nine months, they were married. At first, I was happy for her. She glowed when she talked about him, laughed more, dreamed more. But the glow dimmed fast.
Matthew’s kindness was a mask he wore for her. For me, there was only sharpness. If I didn’t listen, he’d strike — quick, without warning. Some days, no dinner at all. Birthdays passed without gifts, my toys disappearing one by one until the corner of my room was bare.
A few months after the wedding, Lila found out she was pregnant. She was overjoyed, tears streaming as she clutched her belly. I wanted to be happy for her, too — I really did. But then came the move. My room became the nursery, even though there were two empty rooms down the hall. I was sent to the basement that same day.
The air down there was always damp, smelling faintly of mold. At night, I’d lie on my narrow bed and listen to muffled laughter drifting from upstairs. I counted the days until I stopped feeling anything at all.
When I was two, the baby arrived — a girl named Eliza-May. “May,” my middle name. I wasn’t allowed to see her.
Years passed. By the time I reached middle school, Eliza-May was already weaving herself into the role of the perfect daughter — perfect grades (faked), perfect manners (acted), perfect charm (calculated). Meanwhile, I was the real thing: straight A’s, no pretending, no troublemaking. But no one noticed. Not when she was around.
