The room Ruth had given Mary was large but impersonal.
It smelled faintly of camphor and detergent, like it had been scrubbed too many times and never truly lived in. The bed was soft, but not their bed. The walls were bare, except for a single clock whose ticking seemed louder at night.
Her fever had broken weeks ago, yet her body still felt drained, as if some unseen hand had wrung the strength out of her and left her half-empty. Ruth insisted she was "not yet well" and needed more rest before thinking of going home.
Every day, someone in the family came to check on her. On the surface, it looked like love - hot meals, fresh fruits, herbal teas, whispered prayers at her bedside. But beneath the kindness, there was always a thread of something else.
"She looks better today," her cousin would say.
"Of course she does," Ruth would reply. "She's away from that man."
At first, Mary brushed off the comments. "Daniel has nothing to do with my sickness," she would say. But her protests were always met with the same tight smiles, the same knowing glances exchanged over her head.
They never accused him directly in front of her, not at first. Instead, they asked questions:
"Didn't he start making more money just before you fell ill?"
"Has he ever taken you somewhere at night and told you not to ask questions?"
"Do you remember feeling… watched, in your own home?"
They planted seeds and left them to grow.
At night, when she was alone, those seeds began to sprout in her mind. She would think about the sudden fever, about how quickly it had worsened, about the way Daniel had sometimes come home late from the shop. She told herself it was silly - but the doubt lingered like a shadow in the corner of the room.
And yet… she missed him.
She missed the smell of his soap in the mornings. She missed the way he would cut fruit into uneven slices because he was too impatient to make them neat. She missed the sound of the children's laughter filling the house while he chased them through the hall.
The hardest thing to bear was the silence from her children. Ruth told her they were "doing fine" and "better off without confusion," but she noticed how quickly the subject was changed whenever she asked for details. She suspected Daniel had tried to reach her, but no messages or letters made it into her hands.
One night, after Ruth had gone to bed, Mary found her phone in the bottom of a drawer - its SIM card missing. She sat there in the dim light, holding the useless device in her hands, and felt a hollow ache spread through her chest.
She wasn't sure what to believe anymore. All she knew was that she was trapped between two worlds - one where Daniel was the man she loved, and one where he was the man her family warned her about.
And the longer she stayed away, the harder it became to remember which world was real