Broken Wings

Sasha "Sash" Torres stared at her phone, heart hammering in her chest. The news flashed across the screen—Mara "M" Williams found dead in alley, overdose suspected. The words hit like a physical blow, and she felt the room tilt around her, the floor beneath her feet becoming a distant memory.

It wasn’t as if she’d expected anything different. Not from a woman who had spent years disappearing, coming and going like a ghost in and out of Sasha’s life. But that finality—those six words, felt like something she hadn’t prepared for, something she hadn’t anticipated feeling so deeply.

Her hand shook as she reached for her coffee, but the cup felt heavy, almost foreign in her palm. She set it down without taking a sip, a dull ache forming between her ribs.

Mara had left when Sasha was four. Four years old. There were stories she clung to, memories of a mother who promised the world and failed to deliver. Promises of starting over, of running away together, escaping the mess of their lives, but the words always felt hollow.

Don’t cry, don’t cry. She told herself, even though her throat was tight.

But here she was, frozen in place, unable to escape the gravity of it. Her mother, the woman who had been supposed to be her safety, had become the source of every insecurity, every wound she’d carried since childhood. The uncertainty, the never-knowing. How was she supposed to move forward now?

Sasha pulled up the article again, scanning the details, finding herself pulled in despite herself. Mara “M” Williams, an alias. It didn’t even feel real, the idea of her mother being someone else. Of course, Mara had never been straightforward. Even after everything, she still wore a mask, hiding behind different names, different lives. But Smith? The truth was stranger than the fiction Sasha had spun in her head.

She had found pieces of her mother’s history in the attic a few months back, documents from the old, dusty box. But she hadn’t wanted to know. Hadn’t been ready. The truth had always seemed more unbearable than the fiction she had built around the woman who was supposed to have been her hero.

As much as it had hurt, it was the lie she’d lived in for so long that was more comforting than the truth.

And now it was all gone.

Her eyes stung, but she refused to let the tears fall. She refused to feel it. Not again.

But deep inside, something twisted in her chest. The more she thought about it, the angrier she became. Anger she hadn’t even known was still there. Not just at her mother, but at the whole damn thing. Her childhood, the lies she had believed, the mess that had been her life.

She ran a hand through her hair, pulling herself up from the couch and pacing around the apartment, desperate to make sense of the chaos inside her.

Her phone buzzed again. It was a text from Maya.

“Sash, you okay?”

Sasha wanted to respond, to say yeah, I’m fine—but she knew it wasn’t true. How could she explain to someone who hadn’t lived through it what it felt like to carry around the ghost of a mother who never once tried to show up? The absence wasn’t even the worst part; it was the empty promises that filled the space she left behind.

You’re better than this, Maya’s voice echoed in Sasha’s head. You’ve worked so hard to get to this point.

Maya had been there, hadn’t she? Through everything. Through the spiraling, the silence, the constant cycle of hope and disappointment. She had picked up the pieces when no one else would, when Sasha was too broken to even see straight. But even Maya couldn’t erase what was left behind.

Sasha glanced at the photo of her brother, Eli, on the wall, one from a few years ago, when he still had hope in his eyes. Before prison. Before everything went sideways. It had been hard enough for Eli to accept the truth about their mother. He had been the one who’d kept hoping she’d return, that one day she'd show up at the prison gates, ready to make things right.

He had been wrong.

And now? Now, all he had was this same feeling of emptiness that was slowly consuming her, too.

There was a bitter sense of finality in the air as Sasha set her phone down. She couldn’t keep living like this. Living for a woman who had never once shown up for her. She couldn’t keep holding onto a ghost and pretending that it was real.

But where did that leave her? How did you untangle a lifetime of pain and self-doubt? How did you heal from a wound you couldn’t even see?

She looked at the photo again, the smile frozen on Eli’s face, and the guilt came rushing back. She was angry at him too for being right, for never letting go of the woman who’d never deserved his love. But she was also angry at herself for not being able to protect him from the lies, for not realizing sooner that the woman they had both mourned for so long was never going to return.

What now?

she didn’t know. She didn’t have the answers, the closure, or the clarity. But for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel so desperate to fix everything at once. For once, she just needed to sit with it. Sit with the hurt.

Her phone buzzed again. This time, it was a message from Maya:

“Sash, let’s talk. I’m here. No matter what.”

Sasha stared at it for a moment before replying with one simple message:

“I’m scared, Maya.”