The Secret Behind the Mask

Was she my hero, hidden behind a mask, trying her whole life to shield me from the truth? I don’t know. The years are like a faded tapestry, its threads unraveling but never revealing the full picture. My mother had wrapped her life in layers of ordinary routine, yet it carried the scent of something unspoken—nostalgia, pain, and a secret heavy as a stone around my neck.

The memory of the truth flickered only once, when I was four years old. It was a sweltering summer day, the air clinging to my skin, a migraine splitting my head like an axe. My mother sat by my bedside, her cool fingers stroking my forehead as if they could pull the pain away. On the nightstand lay Emil of Lönneberga—a book with yellowed pages and the smell of old ink, which I loved her to read to me. She looked at me with eyes full of sadness and something I couldn’t name—resolve, tinged with a trace of fear.

“Now I’ll tell you a true story,” she began, her voice trembling as if the words fought to break free. She sighed deeply, as if gathering courage, and continued: “Soon after you were born, you were very sick. In the hospital where we admitted you, there was a little girl your age. Her name was Daniela Danina. She was an abandoned child. She had eyes like yours—spring rain, gray-green—and your curly hair, shining like chestnut in the sun. She was like an angel.” Her voice softened, as if she were speaking more to herself. “I felt love for that child from the first moment. I asked your father to adopt her…”

Then the phone rang—sharp, like a knife slicing through the thread of the story. She leapt from the bed, her face paling, perhaps because of the story, perhaps from exhaustion. She left quickly. She never spoke of that girl again. I didn’t ask either. I was too young, too immersed in my childish games, to grasp the weight of her words. But the memory lingered like a shadow, following me.

________________________________________

A year later, my brother was born. It was summer again, the heat turning the streets into an oven, and I spent my days at my grandmother Anastasia’s house, my father’s mother. She was a woman with sharp features and an even sharper tongue, especially when she drank. When the hospital called to announce my brother’s birth, her face lit up with a strange, almost malicious joy. “Now we have a boy in the family. Our own, true child,” she said, pulling me to sit on her lap. The smell of rakia on her breath choked me. “You’re not our child,” she added, pushing me off her knees abruptly, as if she’d suddenly changed her mind about being kind.

Her words hit like a blow, but my childish mind refused to accept them. I buried them deep, where they couldn’t hurt me. Or so I thought.

________________________________________

After my brother’s birth, my mother began leaving me with Grandma Anastasia more often. “I can’t handle both of you,” she’d say, avoiding my gaze. I often overheard whispers among relatives that my mother was suffering from depression. I saw how the illness drained her strength, stretched her features until she was unrecognizable, turned her into a stranger. I missed her—not the woman she’d become, but the one from my earliest memories: her embraces, her soft singing as she brushed my hair, the scent of her lavender perfume. But at Grandma’s house, there were no rules. Days passed running through dusty streets with the neighborhood boys, climbing trees, and stealing cherries from neighbors’ gardens. I was free, but a strange emptiness had opened within me.

________________________________________

One morning, while digging for worms in the tomato patch in Grandma’s yard, something happened. She stood nearby, clutching a large stone from the garden. Her eyes were cloudy, blurred by alcohol. “Bastard!” she screamed, her voice shattering the neighborhood’s silence. “I hope you die! You have no place in our family!” She swung and threw the stone at me. My heart stopped, but the stone whizzed inches from my head and thudded into the ground. I didn’t know what had enraged her. I didn’t know why she hated me in that moment. I ran, my legs trembling, until I reached the neighbor’s house.

My best friend’s mother, Aunt Maria, met me at the doorstep. “Ani, what happened?” she asked, embracing me. I curled into her, my tears leaving muddy streaks on my face. I tried to explain, but the words drowned in my sobs. “She said…” I began, but couldn’t finish. Aunt Maria took me to the kitchen, poured me a glass of milk, and sat me down. “Calm down,” she said softly. She had likely heard my grandmother’s shouts, which had shaken the neighborhood. “Your grandma didn’t mean to hurt you. She was just in a bad mood.” She handed me a piece of freshly baked chocolate cake she’d just taken out of the oven. I stayed there until evening, far from my grandmother’s anger.

The years passed, and the incident with the stone and my grandmother’s words faded but never fully disappeared. Grandma Anastasia continued to take me in when my mother couldn’t or wouldn’t care for me. Sometimes she was kind, as if nothing had happened. Other times, she looked at me with empty, cold eyes, as if I were a stranger, an unwelcome intruder in her home.

________________________________________

At thirteen, my life turned upside down again. The diagnosis came like a thunderbolt—scoliosis, rapidly progressing, threatening my life. My spine was curving like an old willow, pressing on my internal organs. In our small town, such a condition was rare, a cause for whispers and mockery. “This shame will ruin the family,” my mother muttered when the doctor told us I needed urgent surgery. Her words stung, but I didn’t know how to respond. I was used to her distance. I felt only endless guilt, as if I’d done something unforgivable that haunted my conscience.

At the orthopedic and trauma hospital where I was admitted, the doctor told my mother, “You need to arrange blood for the surgery. The hospital has no reserves of her rare blood type.” I saw her face twitch, as if something terrifying had struck her. “I’ll buy blood from a blood bank,” she snapped, as if slamming the door on the conversation. I didn’t understand why she seemed so alarmed, but I didn’t ask. I was too scared of the upcoming surgery.

The operation was successful, but recovery was slow, agonizing, and painful. My mother visited every day, but her visits were brief, as if she couldn’t bear to see me in the hospital bed, confined in a plaster cast. My father, who had grown distant from me and our home life over the years, was now even more remote. My presence irritated him, provoked strong annoyance, and made him rarely linger in one place with me. Often, as I lay immobilized in the hospital bed, I thought about the little girl from my mother’s story—with gray-green eyes and curly hair. Where was she now? Why hadn’t my father agreed to adopt her? And why had my grandmother called me a “bastard”? I had plenty of time to ponder all the unanswered questions from my childhood. Perhaps I’d never know the answers.

After the surgery, my life changed. School became a challenge—not only because of the physical limitations but also the taunts. My classmates whispered behind my back, calling me “the hunchback.” I returned home with a heavy heart, and my mother seemed not to notice my pain. She was busy with my brother, who was growing up as the family’s beloved child—cheerful, healthy, loved. I remained on the sidelines, a shadow in my own life.

________________________________________

At sixteen, I decided to escape it all. I enrolled in a high school in a neighboring town, lived in a dormitory, and tried to start anew. But the memories followed me—my grandmother’s words, my mother’s distance, my father’s unattainable love. Sometimes, in quiet nights, I imagined I was that little girl from the hospital, the one my mother had wanted to adopt. Other times, I wondered if, had I been her, I would have received more love. That beautiful girl, Daniela, would never have fallen ill, would never have been a cause for my mother’s worry, might have been more desired than me, might have brought more joy instead of shame and humiliation. It all made me feel endlessly alien in my family.

________________________________________

The years passed, and I drifted further away. I graduated university, found a job in the capital, and rarely returned to my hometown. Soon fate introduced me to my husband, Alexander. I often spoke with him about the things from my childhood that continued to pull me like a black hole.

________________________________________

My mother fell ill and soon after died of cancer. I was twenty-four. In the last years of her life, I could count on one hand the times I’d returned to see her. At her funeral, I stood by her grave, clutching my husband’s hand, but I couldn’t cry. I felt empty, as if a part of me had died long before she passed. After her death, my father moved to live with my brother, and the old house stood empty, a monument to the past. The questions from my childhood hung like cobwebs in the corners of the abandoned home.

“Have you ever considered that there might be a logical explanation for all this?” Alexander asked me once.

I hadn’t sought logic until then. But perhaps it was time to do so.

________________________________________

More than a year after my mother’s death, I decided to return to the house. I didn’t know why—perhaps to prepare it for sale, perhaps to find answers. I stepped inside, and the smell of old wood and dust hit me like a wave. My room was unchanged—the same bed, the same nightstand, even Emil of Lönneberga was there, as if time hadn’t touched it. I began rummaging through closets, pulling out old clothes, photos, letters. In my mother’s bedroom, I noticed something under the bed—a small wooden box carved with clovers, a symbol my mother loved. My heart pounded as I opened it.

Inside was a diary. Its leather cover was worn, but her name—Maria—was written in her elegant handwriting. I opened it with trembling hands. The pages revealed a secret that had dragged her toward an abyss her entire life. She wrote of how my father, as a child, had suffered a severe case of mumps, which for a long time cast doubt on his ability to have children. But after years of waiting and hope, their daughter was born—the real Ani.

Her words about Ani were filled with pain and guilt. She was a frail, sickly child, born shortly before me, who fell ill with dysentery and died at just three months, despite my parents’ and the doctors’ efforts. My mother was devastated, unable to accept the loss. In the same hospital, she saw me—the abandoned girl with gray-green eyes and curly hair. “You were like an angel, sent to fill the void in my heart,” she wrote.

With the help of Dr. Ivanov, a young doctor who sympathized with her pain, my mother and father switched the documents of the two children. I was registered as their biological daughter, and Daniela Danina’s existence was erased from the hospital’s records. My father insisted the secret remain hidden, especially from his family. But Grandma Anastasia found out—perhaps through gossip among the hospital staff, perhaps through her instincts. She never accepted me, seeing in me a stranger who had stolen her true granddaughter’s place.

My mother wrote of the guilt that consumed her. She loved me as her own child but feared my grandmother’s anger, my father’s lack of affection, and the possibility that the truth might break me. So she kept silent, swallowing the pain, carrying it alone. She shared how, when I was nearly two, my biological parents contacted the hospital, seeking information about their daughter. Since there were no documents proving either my adoption or my death, they filed a lawsuit against the hospital for concealing the truth. Dr. Ivanov was forced to lie again but was accused of negligence and faced legal consequences. The young doctor couldn’t bear the pressure and, soon after the trial, took his own life, keeping my mother’s secret.

“I am your mother, my little Daniela, and I always will be,” she wrote in her final lines. “Every sacrifice I made was for you. Forgive me for not telling you the truth. Forgive me for not being a better mother.”

Tears fell onto the pages as I realized my mother might have been my hero. She had hidden the truth to protect me from the world’s rejection, from my grandmother’s wrath, from the burden of knowing I wasn’t their blood daughter. Even when she was distant, she loved me in her own way, sacrificing her own peace to give me a home.

I closed the diary and pressed it to my chest. Outside, the wind whispered through the cracked windows, as if carrying my mother’s voice. For the first time in years, I felt whole. I wasn’t a stranger—I was her daughter, chosen with love.

________________________________________

In the days that followed, I decided not to sell the house. Instead, I cleaned it, repaired the broken windows, and planted clovers in the garden—in memory of my mother. The diary became my faithful companion, allowing me to know her anew. Sometimes I thought of her real daughter and felt a faint sense of her presence. But a new feeling had been born within me—my mother had chosen me, fought for me, forged documents, and lied to the world to give me a family and a life.

I was her Ani, and she was my quiet hero.