Chapter 8 Samira
Samira
Shame crucified me.
It was a blunt, merciless thing. It cracked me open and left me there.
I felt it—the shift in the room, the sudden weight of silence where Tone’s voice should have been. She’d stopped moving. Stopped breathing naturally.
Her breath went sharp. Just once, but it was enough for me to know.
Too late, I remembered what she was probably looking at.
I closed my eyes, knowing she’d seen them.
The scars lived along my ribs, my hips, my stomach—thin lines and thicker ones, some pale, some angry, all of them permanent. They weren’t dramatic. That was the worst part. They were brittle. Clinical. Proof of time stolen in pieces.
I didn’t keep mirrors anymore. Once I’d arrived in Italy, I’d stopped looking at my body in the mirror. I’d started to shower fast and dress without thinking. I’d turned away before my eyes could linger. Pretended my body belonged to someone else. Someone untouched. Someone whole.
And it had worked, because I’d forgotten them. But scars didn’t forget their owners.
Tone did something small behind me—and my skin felt like it was burning where her eyes must have settled. I imagined her cataloguing the damage. Wondering what had happened to me. Curious about my past.
Horrified. That was the word that settled in my chest. Heavy and final.
I didn’t turn around. Instead, I hung my head and let my shame do the talking. Even if I could have used them, there were no words that made this better. No neat story that trimmed the ugliness down to something palatable.
I just stood there, arms crossed against my chest, exposed in all my imperfections, every mark screaming what I never spoke out loud.
This was me.
This was what had survived of me.
When you can’t see, your mind fills the space. It drags old ghosts forward and lines them up in front of you whether you want them or not.
I was small again.
Just a little girl standing in the middle of a memory that refused to let me go.
The first thing I remembered was my father.
His voice. That always came first.
Warm and steady, the kind of voice that filled a room and made everything feel safe just by existing. I could hear the low rumble of his laugh, feel the way his hands wrapped around my waist as he lifted me high above his head.
He used to twirl me in circles until the world blurred.
Until the kitchen lights turned into streaks and my own laughter bounced off the walls.
“Higher,” I would demand, breathless and fearless.
And he would oblige. Always.
I remember the smell of him too. Coffee and cologne. Something clean and warm that clung to his shirts. When he hugged me, it felt like stepping into a shield the world couldn’t break through.
He used to tell me I was his brave girl. His little warrior.
And he used to promise—over and over again—that he would never leave me.
Then he did.
Death took him without warning.
Not with violence or chaos.
Just a hospital room filled with grief. Adults whispering in corners like the truth might shatter me if they spoke too loudly.
I didn’t understand any of it.
I was too young to know that bodies fail.
Too young to understand that sometimes people disappear and never come back.
All I knew was that the first man who was supposed to protect me vanished.
And after that, the world never felt safe again.
My mother didn’t break all at once.
It happened slowly.
Like watching a house collapse brick by brick while everyone pretended the walls were still standing.
At first, she cried.
Then she stopped.
The crying faded into something noiseless.
Something colder.
The house felt emptier after my father died. Rooms that used to feel warm turned hollow. The laughter disappeared first. Then the music. Then the smell of food cooking in the evenings.
Grief hollowed her out until there was nothing left but the shape of the woman she used to be.
Eventually she filled that emptiness the way people often do when they’re drowning.
She remarried.
He came into our lives with a smile that stretched too wide and eyes that stayed on me a little too long.
My stepfather.
He brought a son with him.
Older than me.
Bigger.
Meaner.
A boy who had already learned how to take up space like the world belonged to him.
The day they moved in, the house changed.
You could feel it.
The walls seemed closer somehow. The air heavier.
Doors that used to mean safety stopped meaning anything at all.
Every sound became something to listen for.
Footsteps in the hallway.
A door closing.
The low murmur of voices behind walls that weren’t thick enough to hide what people thought they were hiding.
They didn’t hurt me in ways that leave bruises you can point to.
Not at first.
What they did was worse.
They hurt me in ways that grow inside you.
In the way you learn to make yourself smaller.
In the way you stop laughing too loudly because attention becomes dangerous. And you learn that silence is sometimes the only shield you have.
I learned to fold myself inward.
To disappear while still standing in the room.
To read moods the way other children read books.
If his voice sharpened, I held my breath.
If the son’s footsteps echoed down the hall, I closed my door and pretended I wasn’t home.
I became an expert at being invisible.
But invisibility only works when someone is willing to pretend they don’t see you.
My mother saw. I know she did.
But she looked away. And that hurt more than anything else.
Because there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from realizing the one person who should stand between you and the darkness… won’t.
She refused to acknowledge what was happening right in front of her eyes.
Maybe she didn’t want to believe it. Maybe believing it would have meant admitting she’d brought the danger into our home herself.
Either way, her silence said the same thing. I was on my own.
Years passed. I grew older.
And the moment I stopped looking like a child, my stepfather stopped pretending I was a burden he had to tolerate.
Instead, I became something else. An opportunity. A commodity.
He started watching me differently. Evaluating. Measuring.
I didn’t understand it at first.
Not until the day he sat me down at the kitchen table with that same wide smile and told me I was being given a chance.
“You’re lucky,” he explained.
Lucky.
That word still makes my stomach twist.
He told me I was being sent away to a better life.
A place with money. A place where someone would take care of me.
I remember believing them for about five minutes. Long enough to pack a bag. Long enough to hope that maybe—just maybe—this was the moment the world decided to give me something back.
It wasn’t.
The man who took me was twice my age.
He had a house that looked like something out of a magazine. Expensive furniture. Polished floors. The kind of wealth that made people lower their voices when they spoke to him.
He also had expectations.
He didn’t ask me what I wanted. Didn’t ask if I was afraid.
He simply told me the truth.
“You belong to me now.”
And just like that, the last pieces of my old life disappeared.
No one came looking for me. No one fought for me. No one even asked if I was okay.
That was the moment I learned something that took years to fully understand.
Men didn’t protect you. They claimed you.
I survived because I had no other option. I learned how to disappear even when someone was standing right in front of me.
I learned how to endure. How to disappear. How to move through the world like a ghost inside my own body.
And now, standing blind in a stranger’s bathroom, all of it came rushing back.
Every promise that had ever been broken.
Every man who had ever failed me.
Every moment I had believed someone might choose me over their own desires… only to discover I was wrong.
I didn’t know if Marcello was any different.
I only knew what history had taught me.
Miracles were for other people.