The phone rang when the hostel was still half asleep.
Not early enough to be morning. Not late enough to belong to the night.
That in-between hour always made her uneasy, as if the world itself hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.
She stared at the screen until it stopped vibrating.
Then it rang again.
Mother.
Her fingers felt strangely heavy as she picked it up. For a second, she considered letting it ring out. The letter had already said enough. Whatever her mother wanted to say now would only reopen things she had spent years carefully sealing shut.
But something inside her whispered that if she didn't answer now, she never would.
"Hello?" she said.
"You don't have to come to my house," her mother said immediately.
No greeting. No hesitation.
The words were clean and sharp, like they had been rehearsed.
She sat up on her bed, pulling her knees close to her chest. Her roommate was still asleep, breathing softly, unaware that the ground beneath her world had just shifted.
"I wasn't planning to," she replied.
She surprised herself with how calm she sounded.
"Good," her mother said. "It's better that way."
Better.
That word again. Always better for someone else.
"Then why did you ask me to come?" she asked.
There was a pause. Not a confused one. A measured one.
"Your fiancé called me," her mother said.
Her throat tightened.
Of course he did.
"He shouldn't have," she said quietly.
"He was worried," her mother replied. "He said you're struggling. That your fees aren't fully paid. That you're not eating properly."
Each sentence landed like a small weight on her chest.
So he had noticed. Even from far away.
And instead of asking her again, he had gone straight to the one person she had tried the hardest to protect herself from.
"You knew," she said slowly. "About the fees."
"Yes."
"And you didn't think to ask me how I was?"
Silence.
The kind that answers more honestly than words ever could.
"I have responsibilities now," her mother finally said. "I can't think about everything."
Another child. Another life. Another house.
"And I'm not one of them?" she asked.
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Her mother sighed. "You're grown now. You should learn to manage things on your own."
She let out a quiet laugh, bitter and tired.
"I've been managing on my own since Dad died," she said. "I just didn't know it back then."
Her mother didn't respond.
The silence stretched, uncomfortable and heavy.
"There's something I need to ask you," she said at last. "And this time, I don't want half-truths."
"What is it?"
"The man," she said. "The one people talk about. The one everyone whispers about in the village."
Her mother inhaled sharply. "You shouldn't listen to people."
"I didn't," she replied. "I listened to silence. Yours."
Another pause.
Longer this time.
"You think I don't know what they say?" her mother snapped. "You think it's easy to live with that?"
"I don't care about them," she said. "I care about us."
The word felt fragile between them.
Her mother's voice softened, just a little. "He's family."
Her heart skipped.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Your father's cousin," her mother said. "Your aunt's son."
Family.
The word echoed in her head, hollow and wrong.
"That doesn't make it okay," she said. "It makes it harder to explain. Harder to live with."
"He helped me," her mother said defensively. "When your father died, everyone watched me struggle. He stayed. He helped with the house. With things I couldn't manage alone."
"And when I struggled?" she asked. "Who stayed then?"
Her mother didn't answer.
The silence this time was heavier than before.
"I never asked you to suffer," her mother said eventually.
"But you let it happen," she replied.
Her chest ached now, not with anger, but with something older and deeper.
"I didn't tell Grandma and Grandpa," she added softly. "Because I was afraid. Not of you. Of what it would do to them."
That finally earned a reaction.
"Don't involve them," her mother said sharply. "They don't need to know."
"They already know I'm struggling," she replied. "They just don't know why."
Her mother exhaled. "You shouldn't come to my house anymore."
The words settled between them.
Not the village. Not her grandparents' home.
The city house.
The place that had never felt like hers anyway.
"I won't," she said.
This time, she meant it.
The call ended without goodbye.
Her phone buzzed again less than five minutes later.
His name.
She stared at it for a long time before opening the message.
I'm sorry. I didn't want to cross a line. I just didn't want you breaking alone.
She leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes.
Once, those words would have made her cry.
Now, they only reminded her how exposed she felt.
You told her, she typed. Then deleted it.
What was the point?
He had acted out of care. Her mother had reacted out of distance.
And she was left in the middle, holding the consequences of both.
She didn't reply.
Not because she wanted to punish him.
But because she needed, for once, to hear her own thoughts without anyone else's voice filling the space.
Later that day, she sat in class but didn't hear a single word.
Around her, notebooks filled with notes, pens moved quickly, whispers about assignments passed between desks.
Life went on.
It always did.
She wondered when she had learned to look so normal while carrying so much.
That evening, she stood at the hostel window and watched the city lights come on one by one.
Somewhere out there was her mother's house.
Somewhere else was the village that still watched her from a distance.
And somewhere in between was the life she was trying to build with nothing but effort and silence.
For the first time since the letter arrived, she didn't feel the urge to run.
She felt tired.
Tired enough to stop pretending.
Blood didn't protect you from hurt. Silence didn't erase mistakes. And love, even when real, couldn't always save you in time.
She understood that now.
And with that understanding came something unfamiliar.
Not hope.
But resolve.