I Was Born For Their Mistakes, Not For Love Chapter 07
Because of how badly my body had deteriorated, the coroner recommended immediate cremation By the next morning, the faint smell of decay had already started to cling to the room.
My father signed the paperwork himself.
His hand shook so violently that the signature looked like it belonged to a child learning cursive for
the first time.
My mother begged all night long.
“Please… just let me hold her one last time. Please! Just once!”
Her voice had completely given out, scraped raw and broken. She knelt on the cold floor outside the morgue, hair tangled, eyes swollen so badly she could barely keep them open.
Caleb stood in front of the door, blocking her path.
“No,” he said flatly. “You don’t get to hurt her anymore.”
My mother’s shoulders jerked hard, like she’d been struck.
“Caleb… I just want to hold Hazel one last time. I carried her for nine months. She’s my daughter. How could I ever hurt her?”
He let out a cold, humorless laugh.
“You gave birth to her, yeah. Then you spent the rest of her life destroying her.”
My father hid in the stairwell with a cigarette between his fingers.
He had quit smoking over a decade ago. Back then, he’d sworn to my mother he would never touch another cigarette again.
The orange glow lit up the gray in his hair.
No.
Not gray anymore.
White.
Like every strand had lost its color overnight.
I had never seen my father smoke before.
He quit before I was born. Mom used to tell me he did it for me, because babies deserved clean air
and he didn’t want his little girl breathing secondhand smoke.
So this was what he looked like when he smoked.
His fingers trembled around the cigarette. His brows stayed tightly drawn, like he was enduring
some unbearable pain.
He crushed one cigarette into the concrete floor and immediately lit another.
Then another.
And another.
The pile of cigarette butts at his feet grew larger and larger until it looked like a tiny graveyard.
The day my body was cremated, the weather was beautiful.
The kind of bright spring day meant for parks and beaches, not funeral homes.
The cremation itself ended quickly.
One of the funeral directors quietly explained, in that professionally gentle tone people used around grieving families, that because I’d been so underweight before I died, the cremation had been… “very complete.”
Caleb carried my ashes in a polished wooden urn, holding it tightly in his lap from the passenger seat like it contained something fragile enough to disappear at any second.
Maya sat in the backseat with both hands covering her face while tears streamed silently through her fingers.
My father drove without saying a word.
Whenever the car crossed a bridge or passed along the riverfront, Caleb would roll down the window and speak softly into the wind.
“Hazel, we’re taking you home. Look, your favorite river.”
His voice drifted out across the water and open highway.
I stood in the empty space between the back seats, shouting with everything I had.
“I’m here! Caleb, I’m right here with you guys!”
But he couldn’t hear me.
I screamed until it felt like my soul itself was shaking apart.
In the backseat, Maya finally broke down completely, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.
My father’s hands shook violently on the steering wheel.
Then, at last, the tears came.
They fell onto the backs of his hands one drop at a time.
