Author's POV
Twenty four years ago, a soft drizzle blurred the windshield as Sabastian drove down the winding road that led back to their hometown. In the back seat, two-week-old Edward lay bundled in a blanket, his tiny breaths fogging the cool air. His mother, Jasmine, sat on a passenger seat in front of him, weak but smiling faintly, one hand protectively resting on the baby's chest checking if he's cold. She had been discharged from the hospital just that morning, her body still fragile from childbirth.
"You could have left him with my sister," Sabastian muttered, gripping the steering wheel tighter. His jaw flexed, irritation edging his tone. "You need rest, Jasmine. You shouldn't be ---"
"Why would I leave him?" Jasmine shot back, exhaustion heavy in her voice. "He's only two weeks old, Sabastian. How could I hand him to anyone else?"
"You should care about yourself before you care about that child," he said sharply. "Your health isn't strong enough to take care of anyone right now."
Jasmine turned her head, disbelief flickering in her eyes. "Anyone?" she repeated. "He's not anyone, Sabastian. He's our son. You know his condition isn't good either."
Sabastian exhaled through his nose. "Because he came before time," he muttered, eyes fixed on the road.
Her voice rose, trembling between anger and heartbreak. "What's wrong with you? He's our baby! Why do you sound like you hate him? I know you never wanted a child, and everything happened too suddenly, but that doesn't give you the right to treat him like this."
He sighed heavily and glanced into the rear-view mirror. Edward's tiny form was strapped in, sleeping fitfully, the faint sound of his breathing barely audible over the hum of the engine.
"I don't hate him," Sabastian said quietly. "I just… love you more than anything. I'm worried about you, honey."
"Is that your justification for your behavior?" Jasmine's voice shook. "For two weeks you've been distant, cold toward Edward, and not once have you—"
"Sabastian! Watch out!"
Her scream echoes inside the car.
Sabastian's eyes darted to the road, too late. A herd of bulls had burst from the dark forest ahead, thundering straight toward them. He jerked the wheel hard to the left, the tires screeching against the wet ground. The car spun out of control, crashing violently into the trunk of a massive tree.
For a moment, everything fell into eerie silence no movement, no sound, just the faint hiss of the engine. Then came Edward's wail, piercing and terrified, echoing through the cold night air.
Sabastian stirred, blood trickling down his forehead. His vision blurred as he turned toward Jasmine. She was slumped against the seat, her face covered in blood, motionless. Panic seized him.
"Jasmine!" he shouted, fumbling to unbuckle his seat belt. He stumbled out of the wrecked car, half-carrying, half-dragging her limp body toward the road, desperate for help. Edward's cries from the back seat grew louder, but in Sabastian's frantic state, the sound barely reached him. His mind was consumed by one thought, saving Jasmine.
Minutes later, a few villagers rushed toward the wreckage, drawn by the noise. Sabastian was already gone, running toward the highway with his wife in his arms, shouting for help.
One of the men stopped, frowning. "Wait, do you hear that?"
A faint, high-pitched cry sliced through the darkness. They traced the sound back to the mangled car and pried open the back door. There, amidst shattered glass and twisted metal, lay Edward, his tiny fists clenched, his face red from crying.
The villagers carefully lifted the baby out and rushed him to the nearby hospital. The child survived that day.
_________
Five years later
Five years had stretched the hospital's fluorescent light into something permanent. Sabastian had become a regular visitor of hospital, a pale man hunched over a folding chair, watching the slow, mechanical breaths of the woman who used to be his wife. Jasmine lay motionless in a coma, tubes and monitors making a quiet litany of beeps.
Sabastian had lost his job, his house, his savings, everything he once counted on, because every waking hour, every decision, every penny had been folded into the hope that she would wake.
He did not notice that the world around him was shrinking to the size of a ward and that the people inside it were changing him into someone made of worry and routine.
Edward had been handed off to Sabastian's sister, Alice. She took the boy because Sabastian could not, or would not, balance both the hospital vigil and a child who needed more than the hollow echo of his father's footsteps.
Alice's flat smelled faintly of burnt tea and old laundry, she was practical, sharp tongued, and not given to fussing over a small, quiet child.
At five, Edward watched other children run with their parents in the park, their laughter bright as bells. He watched through window glass and iron gates, feeling a hollow loosen inside him like a key in a lock that would never turn. He wanted, with a small, animal desperation, the ordinary tenderness he saw in the way a mother wiped chocolate off a cheek or the way a father tousled hair. He wanted to be called "my son" with gentleness, not with obligation. Those little scenes lodged in him like seeds, some would not sprout. Some would.
Alice took Edward to his dad's house to discuss something.
"Listen… I'm leaving this town. I have my own dreams. I can't stay here raising Edward anymore." Her voice was complicated, equal parts apology and relief.
Sabastian looked up from the cheap tea he'd been nursing. He sounded tired in a way that had more years in it than his face was telling. "Okay," he said, with a distance that tried to pass for calm. "I'll take care of him. I understand. You already did more than you had to. Thank you."
To the five-year-old, those words were sun after a week of rain. He had never had a conversation with his father that felt private or warm, he'd only watched them speak like strangers who shared a street. In Edward's small imagination, this was the beginning of a life he'd only seen on other people.
A father who would return homework, a father who would fold blankets, a father who would, somehow, belong to him. For the first time in years, an unselfconscious smile split his face. He ran barefoot across the worn linoleum, the sound of his small feet like a secret drum, and flung himself at Sabastian's knees.
"Dad…" he said, breathless, the word a bright new coin in his mouth. "We'll live together. I'm so happy."
The hope in him was a fragile thing, naive, urgent, incandescent. He did not know it would break.
Sabastian's reaction was not the gentle catch of arms Edward had pictured. The man's features snapped like a trap. He yanked Edward's small wrist so hard the child staggered, then shoved him onto the floor with a force that made the room tilt. The slap of little bones against linoleum made Edward's ears ring.
"What do you think you are doing?!" Sabastian snarled, voice low and hot. "Do you think you're alive because I love you? I would rather kill you with my own hands."
Edward's breath hitched. The phrase fell into the room like a stone into still water, sending out rings of terror.
"You are alive because your mother loves you," Sabastian continued, his voice cracking into a strange, vicious tenderness. "When she wakes up, if she wakes, she will ask about you. I can't see her sad. It would have been better if you'd died in that accident."
The words slashed at the air between them, heavier than any hands. Edward, only five, had no language for the shape of that cruelty, he had only the sudden, frantic ache of betrayal. He had built a brittle ladder of hope out of his father's single sentence, and Sabastian smashed it down without looking back.
"I never wanted to have you," Sabastian said, each syllable deliberate and cold. "Don't get your hopes high. Stay in your limits. Or I'll show you how to behave."
He raised a hand as if to strike, control trembling like a wire under tension. But Alice, already half-packed, already halfway through grief and obligation, stepped between them without a word. Her shadow fell across the child, a small, insufficient shield.
Edward crawled back to the corner, fingers pressed into the seam. His small body curled around itself as though to hold his heart from spilling out. Tears came, hot and useless, streaking down a face that had just learned the precise measure of his father's capacity for love, zero. All at once, the taste of hope turned to ash in his mouth. The future he had imagined, the quiet domestic scenes he had envied, shattered into fragments he could not pick up.
He hid there for a long time, listening to the sound of Sabastian's clothes as his father walked away, the metallic click of the suitcase, the distant hum of the hospital ward. The room smelled of stale tea and hospital antiseptic, and something inside Edward rearranged itself into a new, smaller shape, wary, watchful, and certain that from that point on he would keep his distance from people who called themselves family.
For five years, Edward learned the difficult lesson that love could be withheld, rationed, or forced into inconvenient corners.
His aunt provided food and shelter, but not warmth. His father provided presence in the way an old photograph provides memory, visible but cold, a silhouette at a distance.
_______
The afternoon sun hung low, spilling a pale gold over the garden where children laughed and chased one another through the trimmed grass. Their giggles rose and fell like the flutter of sparrows, light and careless. On a cracked wooden bench near the edge of the park sat Edward, silent and still, his small hands folded in his lap. The others never asked him to join, they hardly even looked at him.
He watched them build little worlds out of sand, their pockets bulging with candies wrapped in bright foil. Every now and then, one of them would unwrap a sweet, the paper crackling loud enough to echo in
Edward's chest. He could almost taste the sugar on his tongue, almost imagine the burst of flavor, but imagination was all he had.
His father worked long hours at a filling station, his clothes always smelling of gasoline and exhaustion. In a town that measured worth by how clean your hands were, that smell made Edward invisible. The other parents whispered when he walked by, their eyes sliding away from him as if poverty were something contagious. Their children learned that silence and turned it into mockery.
"Don't play with him," he once overheard a mother say. "His father works with grease and oil. He'll make you dirty too."
The words had stuck in his ears, even when the laughter that followed faded away.
So Edward watched, always watched. He sat on the edge of their joy, studying the easy way they smiled, the way the sun seemed to favor them. When they teased him, he said nothing. When they pushed him, he didn't fight back.
There was no point. An eight-year-old boy already knew what most grown men refuse to accept, that money could decide who deserved kindness.
Every evening, as the light dimmed and the air cooled, Edward would walk home alone, his shadow stretched long on the dirt road. The faint hum of traffic from the filling station would reach him before he even saw the flicker of his father's figure, bent over a pump, wiping his hands on an old rag. Edward wanted to ask him, What do candies taste like? But the words never made it past his throat.
He just stood there quietly, watching his father's weary back, and the distance between them felt wider than the road itself.
Edward wanted what every child in that garden seemed to have, a friend. Someone to laugh with, someone who would share a secret, a game, a piece of candy. But no one ever came near him. The other children kept their distance, glancing at him as if his very presence might stain their perfect, polished lives. He wasn't dressed in expensive clothes or shiny shoes, his T-shirt was faded, his jeans patched at the knees. To them, he was something to look down upon, not someone to know.
Over time, their laughter stopped stinging the way it once had. The whispers, "He's poor," "Don't sit with him," "He smells like oil", turned into background noise. The hurt dulled into a quiet, constant ache that he learned to carry without showing it. Eventually, Edward stopped expecting kindness. He had come to understand his place in this so-called society, somewhere beneath everyone else, unseen and unworthy.
One afternoon, sitting alone under a half-dead tree, Edward watched a boy about his age unwrap a candy beside his father. The boy's laughter rang across the park, bright and free, while his father tousled his hair affectionately. The sight twisted something inside Edward's chest, not jealousy exactly, but hunger.
"I want that candy…" he murmured to himself, his voice small and trembling with something he didn't fully understand. "I want to know how it tastes…"
No one heard him. No one ever did.
Just then, a bright red ball rolled across the grass and stopped near his feet. Edward blinked, startled. For a fleeting moment, he imagined it was a chance, a reason for another child to speak to him, maybe even thank him. He picked it up carefully, brushing the dirt off its surface.
A group of boys ran toward him, their faces twisted with irritation. The one leading them, tall, dressed in a crisp white shirt, stopped in front of Edward, his expression sharp and condescending.
"How dare you touch my ball with your dirty hands!" the boy spat.
Before Edward could respond, the ball was yanked from his grasp. He looked down at his now-empty hands, the warmth of the ball replaced by the cold air and humiliation.
"S-sorry," he stammered softly, eyes fixed on the ground. "But my hands are clean… I just--"
The boy didn't let him finish. The slap came so fast that Edward barely saw it, a sharp crack that left his cheek burning. He staggered back, stunned, his small body trembling.
"Don't talk back," the boy sneered. "You're poor. Understand?"
The words fell heavy, final. Edward stood there, silent. His throat tightened, his eyes filled, but no tears fell. Around him, the other children laughed, their faces a blur of cruelty and privilege.
He said nothing, because there was no one to defend him, no father waiting nearby to take his side. Only silence, stretching wide and endless, like a shadow that would follow him for years to come.
To be continued