“My … Mother, uhm.” He lets out a long sigh. “She was sick.”
“Sick how?”
“I didn’t know back then, but growing up, I realized that Father had her on a steady diet of pills. No wonder she lost herself.”
“Oh my God,” I gasp, unable to believe the disgusting action.
“I don’t know if she was already crazy before that, but by the time I was born, she was beyond reach.” His eyes sink to the floor, as if he’s ashamed to look up. “She didn’t love me. She couldn’t. Whatever she was, it wasn’t a mother anymore.”
“Why do you think that?” I ask, my eyes welling up.
“She loved them—the others. I knew it because I watched it, rotting with jealousy.” He lets out a hollow laugh. “I used to sneak into her room like a stray, begging for a glance, a word, anything. She never gave me shit.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I remember the sadness … that fucking, soul-crushing sadness when she told me she didn’t love me.” His voice thins. “I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t. What kind of fucked-up world asks a seven-year-old boy to understand that his own mother looks at him and feels nothing?”
“I’m so sorry,” I mumble as tears finally consume me.
He jerks his head, eyes hollow and wounded. “When I grew up, I changed my last name.”
I hesitate. “Mitch?”That was a dumb question.
His eyes snap on mine. “Manson.”
“Manson isn’t your father’s last name?”
“Nope. My father was a Ford. My mother was a Manson.” His jaw tightens. “My brother took her name. He said he wanted something to remember his precious mommy by.” A bitter laugh slips out. “I guess I wanted the same. A reminder. A fucking scar I could wear, so I’d never forget where the rot came from.”
My heart is hammering, and my head is splitting apart. I didn’t know—God, I didn’t know. I wish I had. I wish he hadn’t been forced to drag it all back into the light in front of me. Hearing it feels like watching someone reopen a wound that never healed, just to prove it was real.
“You know …” He lets out a cracked laugh. “Despite all that shit, I still spent years making excuses for her in my head. Even after I wished she’d die. Even after I caught myself smiling when she finally did.”
He swallows hard. “At her funeral, everyone played their little grieving show. Only Cain and Grayson were actually broken.”
“And what about you?”
“Relieved. Disgustingly, unforgivably relieved.” His jaw tightens. “And still … I took her name. Like a sick joke I played on myself. Like I needed to keep her poison in my blood, so I’d never forget what she made me.”
I want to hold him until the anger shakes itself out of his bones. I want to kiss him and tell him he’s wrong. So damn wrong. That he isn’t her failure, her cruelty, her poison. That whatever she saw, whatever she tried to carve into him, didn’t stick the way she wanted. He’s not what she believed, and he’s sure as hell not what she tried to make him believe. He survived her. And that alone proves she was wrong.
“I grew up hating my father,” he says, voice tight and venomous. “Hating him for being the worst kind of monsterI’d ever met. A manipulator. A sadistic piece of shit. A fucking demon wearing a human face.”
He exhales sharply, like it hurts to keep going. “For years, he was my Satan. The villain. The easy one to blame. But then I got older, and I realized I hated my mother more. Because she’s the one who made me this. Her neglect. Her absence. Her complete, goddamn failure to be a mother to her own child.”
He laughs once.
“He broke her. But she broke me.”
My heart aches for him. It hurts to see him like this—but worse than that, it hurts knowing it’s all real, that it’s still clawing its way through his mind after all these years.
I’d made my peace with being unloved by my parents. I’d learned how to live with that hollow space. At least, I think I did.
But he hasn’t. He’s still reaching backward, still starving for her approval, still desperate for something—anything—to tie him to her. Even now, even after everything, part of him is still that child begging to be seen, and that’s what breaks me the most.
He’s just a neglected kid who spent his whole life chasing his mother’s attention even after she died. Not even her love. Just proof that he existed to her.
Just like me.
That’s the cruelest part. You don’t outgrow that hunger. You just learn how to carry it quieter. You tell yourself you’re fine, that you’ve accepted it, that it doesn’t hurt anymore, until you see it bleeding out of someone else and realize it never really left.
