Chapter 2: A Name of My Own

2

Mama was a nurse at Savannah Memorial, the kind of woman who always smelled like hand sanitizer and peppermint. She once cared for the old matriarch of the heir’s family for three months.

Later, when the old matriarch got gravely ill again, the young heir came in person to ask for my mother’s help.

But Mama had already died in childbirth. I was just ten years old then.

I stammered, timid, forced by my stepmother to kneel by a bucket, my frostbitten, cracked, festering hands scrubbed raw with a rough cloth.

"Useless child, did you do this on purpose? These ruined hands are so clumsy, snagging my skirts and staining towels with blood. Today, I’ll scrub the skin right off you!"

The pain made me cry out silently, tears streaming down my face.

The young heir lashed out with a riding crop.

He rescued me, then turned my life into something I barely recognized.

He sent me to a country house and forgot about me.

The world beyond that farm felt impossibly far away. Sometimes, I’d stand at the edge of the woods and watch the highway in the distance, wondering where all those cars were going, what kind of lives the people inside them had.

When I was fifteen,

the young heir’s beloved had been married for two years. He refused to discuss marriage or take anyone else.

Rumors around town said the young heir was impotent, and the family was eyeing the title, hoping to adopt an heir.

The old matriarch was furious, searching the house, the estates, and even foster homes for all the young girls she thought might be suitable.

Over a hundred women waited for his selection.

The old matriarch said: "As long as you give the family a descendant, I won’t interfere with you anymore. You’ll have your freedom."

The young heir drank, full of resentment toward his mother.

"If you hadn’t hated the Shaw family so much and forced us apart, Lillian would have married me long ago. How did it come to this?"

The old matriarch clutched her chest in anger.

"Lillian Shaw is manipulative and pretends to be weak. A wife should be virtuous; she can’t handle the responsibility of running this family."

Their argument got heated.

The old matriarch, nearly fainting with rage, threatened to throw herself down the stairs to join her late husband.

The young heir relented. He looked up and swept his gaze over the women in the room.

I had been watching him all along.

He looked at my face among the crowd, his gaze complicated.

After a while, he suddenly smiled.

"Mother, as you wish." He called me over. "You, take off your clothes."

The air in the parlor was thick with perfume and sweat, the hush broken only by the creak of floorboards as the women shifted in their seats. Surrounded by onlookers, I felt chilled to the bone.

He looked down at me from above.

"I said take off your clothes, did you hear? The rest of you, turn around."

That day, I earned the right to stay, but also became the joke of the entire house.

I bit my lip hard, my back pressed against rough oak bark, my body exposed to the sunlight in humiliation.

The laughter and whispers seemed to echo through the halls long after everyone had gone. In a small southern town, word travels fast; shame has a way of sticking to you like the August heat.

He despised my tears.

"Women like you, aren’t you all eager to sell yourselves for money? Even if you look a little like her, you’ll never be even a thousandth of what she is. Shut up. Don’t cry."

My back ached in waves, wounds seeping blood, my skin torn—just like my stepmother’s handiwork years ago.

The person I had thought about for five years turned out to be like this.

Afterward, I stayed.

The third night he came to sleep with me, looking at my face, he realized I had no name.

"From now on, you’ll be called Pearl."

He called me Pearl, as if a new name could polish away the cracks in my life.

Fish eyes mixed with pearls.

I was the dead fish eye, pretending to be a precious pearl, just like his first love.

I shook my head gently. "No, I have a name. My name is Cassie."

He punished my disobedience harshly.

I hurt so much that tears filled my eyes, but I kept insisting.

"My name is Cassie." My voice trembled, but I held on. “My name is Cassie.” Even if it cost me everything.

Cassie, the name you gave me yourself when you saved me—have you forgotten?

Cassie, as in the bells and drums that sound at night, waiting for morning.

It means, as long as you wait, things will get better.

Back then, I’d lie awake on that creaky mattress, hands folded over my chest, whispering my name over and over to remind myself that I was still real, that I could still hope for more.