Chapter 6
I looked at my three daughters, drenched from the rain, shivering in their thin clothes despite the deep autumn chill.
Tara, who had once looked down on me, now clung tightly to my sleeve and pleaded, “Mom, please take us away. Fight for our custody. We want to go with you.”
Anna and Kara sobbed beside me, while Tara lifted her sleeve to reveal the bruises beneath, showing me the marks left by Katrina’s beatings as she tearfully recounted the abuse they had suffered.
They were desperate to convince me, to make me take them away.
But I looked at them and said in an indifferent tone, “When I asked you to choose, you firmly picked your father. Now that things have turned sour, you come running back to me. Why?”
Their crying came to an abrupt stop. They stood frozen in place.
Anna stammered, “We… We were just scared back then.”
As if clinging to an excuse, she repeated over and over how terrified they had been.
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I let out a cold laugh. “Scared? Scared of what? That I’d keep raising you in hardship? Or that your dreams of living in wealth and comfort would disappear in an instant?”
My words made them realize that I knew exactly what had been on their minds.
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Tara, humiliated and furious, snapped, “Even if we didn’t want to suffer with you, that’s only natural! Who wants to live in poverty? You gave birth to us, so you’re supposed to take care of us! Now that we’re in this situation, it’s your responsibility to take us away!”
Hearing her speak so self–righteously, I thought bitterly about my past life. I had given them everything and raised them with all my heart, only to end up with three ingrates.
I stared coldly at my three daughters, who were hysterical, as if I were committing some great crime by refusing to take them back.
My voice was icy. “When we divorced, the court granted custody to your father. Legally speaking, I have nothing to do with you. anymore. The same way, whatever suffering you endure with Katrina, that’s something your father should deal with. It has nothing to do with me.”
Rejected by me, the three of them eventually left.
For a long time after that, I only heard bits and pieces about them from Zoe.
When Katrina found out they had come to me for help and been turned away, she mocked them even more viciously. She taunted them for trying to seek refuge, only to be met with rejection. She told them that neither their father nor their mother cared for them, that they were nothing but burdens in this world, and that they might as well just die.
Her cruelty didn’t stop at words. She humiliated them day after
Chapter 6
Zoe told me that one day, they finally snapped. Unable to tolerate Katrina’s abuse any longer, they stood up to her face to face.
The next time I heard anything about them, it was at their hearing.
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