"Mom..." I forced the word out like a stone lodged in my throat. "Please. Leave. I can't, I can't do this right now. I came to change and go to work."
She didn't move. She just took a slow, stumbling step forward. Her eyes, red and glossy, searched my face like she was trying to find the boy I used to be. Then her face crumpled, and the years caught up to her all at once.
"Thomas," she whispered, voice trembling. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
She took a shaky breath, her voice cracking.
 "I've been trying to reach you for months, Thomas. I've written, I've called... but you wouldn't let me. Beth wouldn't either. I understand why, I do, but I just needed you to know I never stopped trying. I decided to give you space because I thought maybe that's what you needed. But I'm here now because I can't carry this silence anymore. I just want to talk to you. I want to apologise—properly."
The tears came fast. She tried to wipe them away, but they kept falling, messy and unrelenting. "I know I should've protected you. I know I should've stood up to him but I didn't. I let him fill the house with fear and I let that fear swallow me whole."
She paused to take a breath, but her words tumbled out in a rush, like she was afraid she wouldn't get another chance. "I thought I was doing the right thing. I was making a plan to protect us all from him. From the fallout and I did it behind his back, thinking that made me strong or clever but what I didn't realise until too late was that, by staying silent, I was betraying you. Every time I chose not to speak, every time I let your pain sit unacknowledged, I was protecting him more than I was protecting you.
I've been seeing someone. A therapist, and for the first time in my life, I'm being forced to actually look at the things I've spent decades burying. Things I thought I could outwork or outrun but I can't and now that I see them, the damage, the silence, the fear, I can't unsee them.
"I survived by making myself small," she added, by being quiet. By staying in the corners and never asking for too much, because asking meant risk but in doing that, in disappearing like that, I let you suffer. I let Beth suffer. I left you to carry more than your share of a burden I should have helped you bear and I hate that. I hate that I let myself become that version of a man."
Something inside me cracked, sharp and bitter. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her it was too late. That her sudden clarity didn't erase the nights I'd curled up in bed, too scared to breathe loud. It didn't undo the mornings I woke up already bracing for what he'd say, what he'd do. It didn't unteach the way I'd learned to disappear in a room, to flinch at kindness, to never trust peace when it arrived.
"Mom..." I began, my voice already breaking. "You watched him humiliate me. Over and over. You watched him tear me down until I didn't even know who I was anymore, until all that was left in me was shame, and silence, and this hollow ache that made me feel like I was broken by design."
Her sobs had softened now, like her body couldn't take the weight of them anymore. Like she was collapsing inward, slowly, painfully, as if every word I said cracked something deeper.
"and you never stopped him," I continued, my voice tightening. "You never stepped in. Never raised your voice. You just stood there. As if standing still made you invisible but I saw you. I saw you watching. I saw the way you flinched and then looked away like it wasn't happening, like I wasn't begging for you with my eyes."
I swallowed hard. "I was a child. I needed you. I needed someone to tell me I wasn't the problem. That I wasn't what he said I was and instead, you chose him. Again and again. Maybe you thought staying silent was a kind of peacekeeping but to me, it was betrayal. It told me I wasn't worth raising your voice for."
My hands were shaking now, but I didn't look away. "and what haunts me, what really makes it hard to breathe sometimes is that even then, even after everything, I still wanted you to love me. I still tried to earn it. I tried so hard to be good, to be easy, to be invisible too. Just so maybe you'd look at me the way you looked at him."
The silence that followed was thick with grief. Not just hers. Mine too. All the pain I'd buried under years of pretending I was fine, pretending it hadn't shaped every part of me.
"I don't know if I can forgive you," I said, barely breathing. "Maybe someday. Maybe not. But not today."
She nodded, tears streaking her face. "I understand," she whispered. "I really do. But please, Thomas... just one hug. One last hug. That's all I'm asking."
I didn't move. My feet felt rooted to the floor but somewhere, deep in the bruised part of me that still remembered being small and scared and wanting nothing more than a mother who saw me, I moved.
I stepped forward. She opened her arms slowly, like she didn't believe I'd really come. I wrapped mine around her, tentative at first, then tighter. She smelled like lavender lotion and something else, sterile, like hospital waiting rooms. I felt how small she was, how fragile, and for a moment, I was just a boy again, desperate for a comfort I'd never been given, holding the ghost of the mother I once needed and never quite got.
She pulled back, nodded through her tears, and walked out the door. Quiet. No last words. Just the soft click of the lock behind her. I stood frozen until Beth stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. She didn't say much, just held me, grounding me. I leaned into her shoulder, let my forehead fall there, let my breath shudder out in one long, broken exhale.
"I know," she whispered, voice steady and warm. "I know."
"I want to see him. It's time." I replied.