Chapter 12: Her Mother's Story

I always thought dying at 26 in a car accident was a waste.

Back then, I cursed fate, wondering why I never got to finish my dreams. But my mother only lived to 17 in her last life.

Seventeen—just a girl. She never saw one day of happiness, struggling through 17 years of poverty and pain.

I listened quietly as my mother told her story.

The words came slow at first, then poured out like rain. Only then did I realize: what you read in books is always shallow.

A few lines in the history books—those were their whole lives.

Every paragraph we memorized in school hid a hundred heartbreaks. Only a few people are remembered in the bright pages of history.

Most, like my mother, were crushed under the wheels of history, becoming ashes in the smoke of troubled times.

She was a messenger back then, carrying messages and intelligence for the resistance.

She described hiding notes inside kola nuts, dashing through alleyways as gunshots echoed. “When the fighting first started, I was scared too.”

Her voice wavered. “But my father died, my mother was thrown into a stinking gutter after being humiliated, and my younger brother was stabbed to death, his stomach open.”

I could see the pain etched on her face. “After that, I wasn’t afraid anymore.”

The fire of struggle found her, and she joined without looking back, becoming a messenger.

She spoke of stolen meetings in abandoned compounds, of the coded songs that carried secrets across the city. I asked her how she died.

“They caught me, wanted me to talk about the resistance camp. I refused. So they pulled out my nails, then my teeth, nailed my hands, and finally cut open my belly.”

Her eyes glazed over as she spoke, her voice barely above a whisper. I held her hand tight, feeling the tremors pass through both of us.