Chapter 1 - The Guilt That Keeps Me Awake
My name is Rosa. I am sixty-eight years old, and the passage of time has not been kind to my body. My knees ache with a deep, grinding pain every single day, a constant reminder of the long years I have spent on my feet.
But physical pain is a fleeting, manageable thing. You can take a pill for aching joints; you can sit down and rest a weary back. What truly hurts, what keeps me awake in the dead of night staring blankly at the ceiling, what weighs so heavily on my chest that I sometimes struggle to draw a full breath, is the guilt.
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It is a suffocating, dark guilt that wraps around my heart like vines. For my entire life, I always believed that a mother’s love was the purest, most incorruptible force in this world.
I foolishly thought that any woman who carried a child in her womb and gave birth would automatically possess a primal, unbreakable instinct to protect her children, even if it meant sacrificing her own life. I believed it was a universal law of nature. How profoundly, tragically wrong I was. The reality I was forced to witness within the walls of my own home shattered that naive belief.
