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Chapter 5 - Chapter 5

Monday morning is the only day I don't have to get to work, but that doesn't mean freedom. It only means a different kind of obligation. The trailer forgives no one, and if you leave it for a whole week to let life pile up on it, it turns into a small, silent beast that smells of mold, stale alcohol, and unwashed things. I'm the only one who cleans it. Once a week, religiously, I grab my rags and bleach and get to work for a good few hours, until my hands crack and my eyes start to water. I know it's a pointless activity—Mom will bring it back to the same state in at most two days—but I simply can't leave Elena living in those conditions. I do what I can, as much as I can, however I can, and I hope that when things add up, it will be enough to keep us from collapsing. That's true of everything I do, not just the cleaning. It's how I approach work and my life in general: I do everything I can, everything…

It's five-thirty again in the morning, and the light is the color of cinnamon. I sit on the front step with a mug of coffee cupped between my palms and breathe slowly, as if I were trying to hold the moment still. The air is cold, but I'm in no hurry to go anywhere. I daydream with my eyes open—not about what is, but about what could be. And the thought, inevitably, lands on Duca.

Not with fear. That's the part that unsettles me.

I think about his blue eyes, too clear for the kind of man who knows how to move through darkness without getting his hands dirty. I think about the way he looked at me, as if he'd seen me whole in a fraction of a second, without undressing me with his eyes, without reducing me to something easy to understand. That's the confusion. That's the danger.

I acknowledge my fascination without lying to myself anymore. It's there, heavy and warm, like a pressure beneath my sternum. I know exactly what kind of man he is—the kind girls like me should stay away from. The kind who promises nothing, yet leaves the impression he could take everything. And still, the thought of him doesn't leave. It settles inside me and makes itself comfortable.

Maybe because I'm alone.

Maybe because trauma has the bad habit of confusing intensity with connection.

Maybe because my life is a string of days lived on autopilot, and he was a deviation.

My relationships never really had a chance. Not for lack of trying, but because of a truth I could never tell. Asan was always there, even when he wasn't. A shadow. A warning. An invisible thread tied around my throat. Men either pulled away when they sensed something wasn't right, or they wanted me only as an easy role to play. The girl at the bar. The girl who smiles. The girl who asks for nothing.

I hate that.

I hate being reduced to a function. I hate living by a script written by someone else—being predictable, consumable, easy to replace. I want to exist as myself, not as a version acceptable to others. But desires are a luxury, and I've learned to turn them into fantasies.

Fantasies are the only possible escape in a life I don't control.

The trailer I live in isn't mine. It's Asan's. I know it every day, every moment. I know this stability is borrowed—fragile, conditional. And still, I'm grateful. For a roof. For a bed. For the illusion of an anchor.

I stay there a long time, eyes open, dreaming of Duca until the thoughts thin out and reality begins to move around me again.

In the small trailer, the familiar rustle of morning can be heard. Elena is waking up. She opens the door slowly, with exaggerated care, as if she could keep the silence intact through attention alone, and starts getting her things ready for school. She has long, light brown hair, carelessly tied into a ponytail that falls down her back, and a face still soft with sleep, untouched by fatigue. Elena looks exactly the way a fifteen-year-old should look: alive, whole, unmarked.

"Did I wake you?" she asks in a whisper when she sees me.

"No," I tell her. "I wasn't sleeping anyway."

She smiles. Her smile is wide, honest, with a slight crookedness at the corner of her mouth, as if the world hasn't yet managed to teach her how to defend herself.

"You stayed up all night again?"

I shrug.

"I was just thinking."

"About stupid things?"

"Always."

She laughs softly, careful not to make noise, and comes closer. I straighten the collar of her uniform and smooth a rebellious strand of hair—a gesture old and reflexive, one I've always done.

"I have a math test today," she says. "I think I'll do okay."

"I know you will," I tell her. "You always do."

She looks at me a little more seriously for a moment, then rests her forehead against my shoulder.

"That day will come, won't it?"

"Which day?"

"The day when everything will be… normal."

I swallow.

"Yes," I say. "It will come."

I hold her gently, just enough to feel that she's real. Elena is everything I've done right in this life. My light. The reason I'm still holding on.

"I love you," she whispers.

"And I love you too," I tell her, without hesitation. "More than anything."

Her normal life keeps moving forward even when mine stands still.

She tells me about high school, about annoying teachers, about a classmate who got a bigger scholarship than hers, about an essay for Romanian class. A normal life. A safe one. Exactly the life I promised her in silence.

Elena is fifteen. She is light where I have become shadow. I listen to her and swear again, silently, that I'll do anything to keep her that way—that I won't let her fall into the place I'm still trying to climb out of.

I don't tell her anything true about me. Not about the bar. Not about the nights. Not about Asan. I protect her with carefully chosen lies—clean, rounded, harmless. If the truth ever reached her, it would be a pointless wound.

When she finishes talking, silence settles again, but it isn't heavy. I get up and start cleaning the trailer, moving among the objects like in an old dance I know by heart. Elena gets ready for school while I gather, wipe, air things out. We talk over the noise of running water and cabinet doors slammed a little too hard. We laugh.

"You're obsessed," she tells me when she sees how stubbornly I scrub at a stain.

"Someone has to be," I reply.

At some point, she shoos me out of the kitchen and, a few minutes later, hands me a slice of buttered toast and a cup of tea that's far too sweet.

"Breakfast," she says proudly.

I look at her and feel my chest tighten. This is the life I want. Just me and her. Alone. Laughing without worry, without debts, without fear. A simple life, where mornings don't hurt and love doesn't cost anything.

If you're wondering where Mom is—she's around too. Outside, next to the trailer, on the old couch we once dragged from in front of the gate of some wealthier people who decided they didn't like it anymore. What a luxury, to have beautiful, perfectly functional things and abandon them without looking back.

That's where Mom is. On the couch, under the sky, half drunk or half dead. I no longer know exactly where one ends and the other begins, and honestly, I stopped checking a long time ago. At first, seeing her like that scared me. I woke her, shook her, called out to her. Every time, she found a way to punish me for it. Sometimes she hit me. Badly.

So now I let her go her own way. I don't interfere anymore. I feed her when I can, help her wash when she asks for it, and that's all. The rest is no longer within my power.

Dad, although he threatened he'd come a few days ago, still hasn't shown up. Sometimes I hope he's dead, just so I wouldn't have to keep waiting for him or be afraid of the sound of his footsteps.

Mom was one of Asan's girls when she was young. That's what I was always told, with a kind of sickening nostalgia: that she was sweet, beautiful, open, the kind of woman who never said no—and precisely because of that, she brought Asan loads of money. She was desired, she was used, she was praised. And for a while, that was enough.

Then she got involved with the wrong person. With my father. A small-time brute, a dealer of nothing, who didn't sell to get rich, just enough to pay for his next dose. He had no ambitions, no plans—only addiction. And he pulled my mother into it too, slowly, steadily, without looking back.

Together they stole money from Asan. Not a fortune, not enough to disappear, just enough to buy themselves a little more time in their collapsing lifestyle. It was enough. Asan wanted to kill them. He could have. It would have been simple. But my mother was pregnant, and Asan—rotten to the core as he is—has one principle he has never broken: you don't kill a pregnant woman, and you don't abort a child, no matter the cost.

That's how I came into the world. Without knowing. Without being guilty of anything. Born to pay a debt that was never mine.

After that, my mother collapsed completely—a free fall she never managed to climb out of. Drugs became her only constant, the only form of peace she ever knew again. Sometimes I'm surprised she's still alive. Other times, I feel nothing at all when I think about it.

I remember the night my father sold me to Asan, the night he took me with him. Not as an act of direct violence, not as something sudden or loud, but as a filthy agreement, wrapped in words about protection and salvation. It was presented as a necessary sacrifice, as the only way Elena could remain untouched. I understood then, without anyone explaining it to me, where it hurts the most. Asan knew. He still knows.

I send Elena money on her card, for school. Not much. Never enough. But it's mine, and it's all I can offer today.

Then I stand up.

The cleaning takes hours. I scrub, wipe, throw things away. Dried vomit, empty bottles, dirty clothes. Titanic, useless work, because I know that in a few days everything will look the same again. But my hands need something mechanical, something that doesn't think.

In the evening, I still go to work. Maybe I'll make a little extra.

The club during the day is almost bearable, in a way the night will never be. The air isn't yet weighed down by alcohol, cheap perfume, and dirty intentions. The lights are half off, as if the place were sleeping with one eye open, and the music flows low, without biting. It's a world that hasn't put on its mask yet, that hasn't decided what it wants to be. But I know the truth—I know it too well: monsters always appear after nightfall, when no one pretends anymore to be something they're not.

Ima sees me from the far end of the room and smiles. She has the tired body of someone who has danced too much for others and too little for herself, but her kindness is real, rare, unasked for. She's the kind of woman who doesn't ask questions because she knows some answers hurt more than silence. She has my back by instinct, out of that mute solidarity that's born between women like us. A small gesture, but enough to keep me afloat.

"It'll be okay," she tells me.

I don't know if I believe her. In fact, I know I don't. But for one second—just one—I let her words settle inside me like a possible promise.

My inner life burns constantly, too intense, too alive. My reality, on the other hand, is cold, harsh, calculated. Between the fire inside me and this world that refuses to move, I keep walking. Not because it's easy. But because I don't know any other direction.

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