Chapter 9 · free to read
In nineteen years my mother had closed that shop twice: the day I sat my university exam, and the day I was hospitalised at nine. This was the third.
November, 2003. A car she had never seen. A driver who never gave a name. A bundle held out of a rear door in the rain, and a woman's voice from inside saying only: keep her, and do not ask the family's name.
The silence-money. She never spent a won of it. She tore it, kept the halves, and signed their paper anyway, because signing was the only way they would leave a four-day-old girl in this alley.
There were two signatures on that page. Hers, in ballpoint, shaking. And above it one in fountain ink that had been struck through so hard the pen had torn the paper.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.