Chapter 1
My name is Şilan.
When I said my name, there wasn't a smile on my lips, but a secret wedged between my teeth. They'd call me "Şilan." But after what happened in the village, they never told me my real name. In their words, I was "his father's second wife."When I say father, I don't mean the man who fathered me; I mean the man who shaped my life. While my mother's grave was still bare, the emptiness in my father's eyes was greater than the debt in his pocket. The fields were silent, the animals had died, and the pillar of our house had broken. A widower in the village had two choices: remarry or entrust his home to someone else. My father did both. To save his home, he married me off and found himself a second wife. That wife was me. He used his own daughter as his "wife" to fill his own void.Wedding tables in the village weren't white; they were like a tea stain on a brown tablecloth. Even if you wipe it off, the stain remains. It was the same at my wedding. My father thought he was dressing me in a wedding dress, but that dress was a whiteness borrowed from my mother's shroud. He had entrusted me to his fifty-year-old best friend. A trust was sometimes preserved, sometimes forgotten. I was a forgotten trust.On the wedding night, when there was a gentle knock on the door, the man stood in the doorway and looked me straight in the eye. He approached the rose-decorated bed where I was sitting, lifted my bowed head, and said, "Don't worry... Neither I nor anyone in this house will touch you." In that moment, I realized that some touches aren't with hands; they're with words. And some men keep their tongues clean so as not to dirty their hands.Nights passed, mornings passed, months passed. He didn't offer me a hand, but a pen. He wrote my name, letter by letter, into my childhood, which had been devoid of letters. He taught me the letter "B" as "mine," the letter "A" as "my name"... And the letter "Ş" as "Şilan." That was the first time I read my own name.Two years later, he handed me a suitcase and told me to put my dreams in it, not my clothes. When he said, "We will get back your lost population," I thought about how much those two words could encompass. That day, I got back my name, my age, and my life.At the end of four years, I stood in the classroom as teacher Şilan. I wrote "trust" in large letters on the board, then turned to the children and asked, "What do you think trust is?" Some said "keeping," others "protecting." I replied, "Sometimes, trust means restoring a person's life."Every time I went to the village, the same whispers continued to grate in my ears: "His father's second wife..." But I no longer silenced that voice. Because I knew that some titles are written not on our foreheads, but on the shame of others. And now I was a woman who could speak my own name out loud.Well, now you tell me... Was that man really a hero who saved me, or was he an opportunist who polished his own name to clear my father's dirty conscience?We will be on air very soon with the first episode🕊️
