Not a scream. Just absence. As if his voice had stepped into the shadows and refused to come back out.
Doctors called it selective mutism triggered by profound trauma.
They said the words carefully, gently, like handling a fracture that might splinter further if touched too roughly. I called it what it was.
A wound that refused to close.
I tried everything.
Specialists flown in from Zurich and Vienna.
Child psychologists with soft eyes and softer voices.
Music therapy—tiny fingers on piano keys that never quite pressed down. Art sessions where he painted the same image over and over again: a black storm swallowing a small white boat. I watched from behind one-way glass as professionals failed him politely.
Nothing brought his voice back.
That silence haunted me more than Maria’s death itself.
Because silence meant he was still trapped in that moment—still standing in the doorway of his childhood, watching his world burn and not knowing how to scream for help.
I swore then that I would find the woman who murdered his mother.
Not just for vengeance, though God knew the craving lived in my bones like hunger. Not just because blood demanded blood. But for him.
So that one day, if the words ever returned—if he ever grew tall enough to look me in the eye and ask the questions children eventually ask—I could tell him the truth without shame.
I found the one who ended your mother’s life.
The one who took her from us.
She can rest in peace now, knowing justice was done.
And now... so can you.
Because no child should carry the weight of a butchered mother.
The autopsy photographs still lived behind my eyelids, uninvited, merciless.
Maria’s abdomen sliced open with surgical precision. Not frenzy. Not chaos. The cut was clean, deliberate. The eight-month fetus—small, fragile, unmistakably human—stabbed through the tiny chest with terrifying accuracy.
Her left eye gouged out, as if the killer didn’t want to be seen, even by the dead. Her throat slit so deeply the blade had kissed bone.
The rest of her body had been carved like meat laid out on a slab.
There was no rage in the wounds. No jealousy. No passion.
Just cold, methodical cruelty.
A woman had done that.
The forensic psychologists were certain. The angles. The restraint. The absence of sexual violence. The controlled brutality. Women, they said, killed like this when the motive was deeply personal—but emotionally contained.
The thought still turned my stomach.
No one deserved to die that way. Not even an enemy. Not even the wife who never loved me. I had hated her at times—hated the distance, the resentment, the way she looked at me like I was the prison she could never escape.
But hate did not mean she deserved to be dismantled piece by piece.
