“You threw me out of the house when I was fourteen, and now you expect me to care for you in your old age? Dont hold your breath!”
Margaret Elizabeth didnt just drop the teacupit was as if she had shattered a fragile shard of the past, something she thought had long ceased to exist. The porcelain exploded with a deafening ring, scattering into hundreds of sharp fragments across the faded linoleum, like the remnants of a long-lost luxury, dulled and forgotten. A murky puddle of lukewarm tea spread slowly across the floor, tracing the outline of an imaginary continentforeign, unfamiliar, filled with pain and broken promises.
“How dare you?” Her voice trembled like a string stretched to its limit, each word forced out as if carrying the weight of all the years between them. “I gave birth to you, fed you, raised you Youre my son!”
“Kicked me out,” William snapped, his arms crossed like armor shielding his soul from old wounds. “Thats the word that matters. Not raised, not fed, but get out.”
The lean thirty-five-year-old man, his face lined with time and bitterness, leaned against the doorframe. His gaze was heavy, almost painful, boring into the woman who had once been his mother but now felt like a stranger. His thick brows knit together, his eyes cold and unforgiving.
“My boy” Margaret tried to stand, but her knees gave way. She remained among the broken pieces, as if part of her soul had shattered too. “You dont understand Things were different then The circumstances”
“Youve been saying that for years,” Williams voice wavered, but he clenched his jaw, suppressing not just anger but pain. “Ninety-eight, the recession, crime in the streets, no money And you decided a fourteen-year-old boy should fend for himself? And now, when you need help, you expect me to crawl back and take care of you? No. Thats not happening.”
He pushed off the doorframe and paced the cramped kitchen, as if trying to fit into a space that had suddenly grown too small. The ceiling was low here, forcing him to duck slightly. The flat where hed once lived now felt like a dollhouseas if it belonged to someone else, someone long forgotten.
For Margaret, everything had started with the crashthe moment her world collapsed. Her husband, a factory engineer, hadnt been paid in six months. She barely scraped by, working as a shop assistant. And then George disappeared. No note, no goodbyenothing. Just gone, as if hed dissolved into thin air.
Three days later, the police called. Theyd found a body near the railway tracks. Officially, an accident. But Margaret knew the truthher husband couldnt bear the weight of poverty, the despair, the impossibility of feeding his family. Hed given up. And left her alone.
With a fourteen-year-old son. With debts. With nothing.
“Youll have to stay with Gran for a while,” shed told William as she packed his things into an old, battered suitcase. Her voice had trembled with the lie she tried to pass off as hope.
“How long?” The boy had tugged at his sweater sleeve, as if trying to hold onto something from his old life.
“Not long. Just until I get back on my feet.”
Hed nodded. Silently. Gran lived in a village two hundred miles away. The bus only ran once a day.
William remembered that day in painful detail. How his mother wouldnt meet his eyes. How tightly shed gripped his hand at the station. How shed pressed an envelope of money into his palm and kissed his cheek in a hurry.
“Ill come for you soon. Listen to Gran.”
Hed boarded the bus and taken a seat by the window, staring into the future. His mother stood on the platformsmall, lost, alone. The bus pulled away, and she was left behind. Forever.
Gran, Edith May, lived in a tilting old cottage at the edge of the village. She hadnt been expecting himMargaret hadnt even called ahead. When William knocked, the old woman had squinted at him, as if trying to place him.
“Billy? Maggies boy?”
He nodded.
“Wheres your mother?”
“Said shed come later.”
Edith frowned but let him in. The house smelled of damp, herbs, and neglect. A kerosene lamp sat on the tableelectricity in the village was rationed.
“Make yourself at home,” Gran had said, pointing to a sagging sofa. “But dont think this is a holiday. Theres work to be done.”
And so his village life began. His mother never called. Never wrote. Never came. For the first week, William walked to the road every day, scanning the horizon. By the second week, he stopped.
Gran was strict. She enrolled him in the village school, but every other moment was filled with chores. He chopped firewood, fetched water, helped in the garden. His hands, once used to notebooks and video games, grew calloused.
“Youre not a guest here,” Edith told him. “You want to stay? You work.”
So he did. And at night, he cried into his pillow, silently, so Gran wouldnt hear. And waited. Waited for his mother to come and take him back to the city. Waited. Waited. Waited.
A month passed. Two. Six. A year.
Then, one day, he found an envelope in the mailbox. Inside, a few sparse lines in his mothers handwriting:
“Billy, Im sorry. I cant take you back. I have a new family now. My husband wont accept another mans child. Stay with Gran. Ill explain one day.”
That day, something inside the fourteen-year-old boy broke. He tore the letter into tiny pieces and scattered them to the wind. Then he ran into the woods and screamed until his voice was raw.
“Gran showed me your letter,” William said now, looking down at his mother, still sitting among the broken china. “Not right away. Three years later. After I ran away from the village.”
Margaret looked up at him.
“I wrote to you So many times.”
“One letter, Mum. One. And its the one you shouldnt have sent.”
She shook her head.
“That cant be. I sent money every month, letters”
William scoffed.
“Then Gran lied. I never saw any of it.”
Something like understanding flickered in Margarets eyes.
“Dear God” she whispered. “I thought you were ignoring me because you were angry.”
“I was angry,” William leaned against the table. “Every day, every minute. Do you have any idea what its like to live knowing your own mother threw you away like rubbish?”
Edith May was a woman of the old ways. Believed children needed discipline, that hard work cured all ills. She never hugged him, never spoke a kind word. But she fed him, clothed him, made sure he went to school.
And she despised her daughter. Margaret, in Ediths eyes, had always been spoiled and flighty. Left the village, moved to the city, married in haste. And now shed dumped her son on her.
“Just like her father,” the old woman muttered. “All promises, no backbone.”
She intercepted Margarets letters at the post office. Pocketed the moneysmall sums scraped from a meager wageand told William his mother had forgotten him.
“Dont wait for her, Billy. Youve no mother now. Just me.”
At first, he didnt believe her. Then, eventually, he did. Life in the village hardened him. He grew stronger, tougher. Excelled in schoolhis ticket back to the city. But not to his mother. Just away.
At seventeen, he ran. Packed his few belongings, took his exam results, and boarded the bus. Before he left, Gran, in what might have been a rare moment of remorse, gave him that one letterthe only one shed kept.
“She abandoned you,” Edith said. “But youre still my blood. Dont hold it against me.”
The city greeted him with indifference.
William arrived with twenty pounds in his pocket and a determination never to return. He didnt go to his motherpride wouldnt allow it. Instead, he found work as a stock boy at the same supermarket where Margaret had once worked.
He slept in the storeroom among crates of potatoes and onions, the air thick with earth and damp. Every night, curled between the shelves, he dreamed not of warmth but of a future that felt as distant as the stars. He saved every penny, denying himself even a cup of tea if it wasnt in his budget. His life was harsh, but it was a fair lessonthe school of survival.
In the evenings, after work, he attended night classes at the polytechnic. There, under flickering fluorescent lights, he found refuge. His maths tutor, recognizing his talent, stopped him after class one day.
“Keep coming. No charge. Because what youve got in your head isnt just skillit
