Honestly, I already knew what it meant.
Somewhere deep down, buried beneath the noise, I understood. But my brain refused to connect the dots. I kept thinking. Kept processing. Kept lying to myself.
The drive to school felt colder than it should've been. Even with the sun cutting through the windshield, I couldn't stop shaking. My body moved like it had a memory my mind didn't want to recall. Every muscle trembled, my heart pacing to a rhythm I couldn't name.
Mom was humming. Softly. Some K-pop melody she loved — too sweet, too clean, slipping between the silence like a knife wrapped in silk. Her voice carried warmth, but her words didn't.
"Honey, you know me and your father would never hurt you."
"You wouldn't lie about us, right?"
I didn't answer. Couldn't.
The road stretched forever, red lights blooming one after another as if the world itself wanted to hold us still. Each stoplight lingered too long, seconds bending into something unnatural.
Then—one last red light.
Mom turned to me. The smile was gone. Her face was empty, stripped of kindness. Cold eyes met mine — not a mother's eyes, but something else. Something assessing. Angry. Demanding.
If I had spoken then, I think she would have killed me.
But beneath that fury, I saw it — a fracture. Fear. The kind I'd known my whole life.
Something inside me shifted.
I didn't just want to leave anymore. I needed to.
When we reached school, she handed me lunch money. No words. No warmth. I stepped out, the morning air thick with silence.
For a few days, I clung to normality. Emma smiled again. Our friendship grew. She had friends now, laughter that didn't need saving. I tried to help, offered her a note of my observations — patterns, behaviors, the usual analysis. She ripped it without reading.
"Thank you, but I'm fine," she said. "Not everything is a battle, Liam."
Maybe she was right.
But battles were all I'd ever known.
Mom and Dad played their parts — clothes, dinners, soft smiles rehearsed to perfection. It all looked normal. Too normal.
And somewhere deep down, I knew the truth was circling.
Waiting to be spoken.
The only question left was—
whose truth would survive?
My mind wouldn't stop moving. Thoughts crashed into each other like waves breaking against concrete, violent and unrelenting. Every detail I'd ignored before now screamed for attention.
At this point, I knew. We'd been caught.
It wasn't one thing; it was everything. The small cracks that had been forming for weeks finally aligned into a single, awful shape.
Teachers had started asking questions that had nothing to do with school.
"How are things at home?"
"Do your parents ever get time off work?"
Their smiles were too careful, their eyes searching for something they already suspected.
Then there was my dad — walking out every morning in a suit and tie. A welder doesn't need either. The smell of burnt metal used to follow him like a shadow, but lately there was only cologne and silence. He looked cleaner. Straighter. Like he was playing a role he didn't understand.
And my mom… her lies had grown softer, more deliberate. The stories she told about our family life were stitched together like a patchwork quilt of delusion. The details never aligned, yet she told them with the precision of someone building a cage. A mental prison — crafted not to trap me, but to trap herself inside the illusion that everything was fine.
But I could see the fear beneath it. The trembling in her hands when she thought I wasn't looking. The way her smile stretched a second too long, as if she was holding up a mask made of glass. It was all too fragile. Too human.
They were scared.
And that scared me more than anything else.
The people who'd once terrified me, who'd always carried themselves like storms — unstoppable, unbreakable — now looked like children pretending to be adults. They'd been caught in their own lie, and whatever power they once had was slipping through their fingers.
So now it was my turn to decide.
Run?
Stay?
Play along?
Each option built itself in my head like a corridor with no exits. Every path led to something worse. My brain kept moving anyway, desperate to calculate the least painful mistake.
I tried to breathe, but the air felt thin, unreal. Every sound in the house echoed too sharply — the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the clock, the faint creak of the hallway floorboards. All of it louder than my heartbeat, louder than my thoughts.
They knew I knew.
That was the part that broke me. The invisible line had been crossed, and now every interaction was theater. Every glance was loaded. Every smile had a blade hidden behind it.
Dad kept leaving in that same fake suit, pretending there was somewhere to be.
Mom's voice got sweeter, her tone soaked in honey.
And me? I was the ghost walking through it all, pretending to be alive.
At night, I'd lie awake and listen — for footsteps, whispers, anything that could anchor me to reality. But there was only silence. Heavy, waiting silence.
When morning came, I'd watch my reflection in the bathroom mirror and barely recognize it. The person staring back looked tired but alert, a mind burning itself alive from the inside out.
Every instinct screamed that I needed to move, to act, but I didn't know which way to turn. Fear had become a constant companion, sitting behind my eyes, whispering in my thoughts.
I caught myself studying them like strangers — the way my mother's eyes darted to the window every time a car passed, the way my father paused before locking the front door, as if expecting someone to be there. They were waiting for something. Or someone.
Maybe the truth had already arrived, and they were just trying to hold it back for as long as they could.
And me — I was trapped in the middle.
My mind refused to rest. It built scenarios, rewrote them, tore them apart, and started over again. Every conclusion ended the same: they were caught. The lies, the performance, the facade — it was all unraveling.
But still, I hesitated. My body refused to obey the panic clawing at my throat. Maybe some small part of me still wanted to believe this could be fixed, that I could wake up and it would all make sense again.
But that part was dying. Slowly. Quietly.
Because deep down, I understood something they didn't want to admit.
The fear in their eyes wasn't just about being exposed.
It was about what would happen next.
And somewhere in that swirling chaos of thoughts, a single truth began to take shape — sharp and final.
If I didn't act soon, I wouldn't be deciding anything at all.
They would.
And by then, it would already be too late.