Chapter 3: The Heart That Could No Longer Beat

The house was too quiet now.

Lina sat in the parlor, staring at the vase in front of her, its white porcelain surface gleaming under the dim light. It was her favorite piece, the one she had brought from her travels when she was still young and hopeful. She had bought it thinking that it would fill the empty space in her life, that it would remind her of the woman she once was—before marriage, before children, before this family.

Now, the vase seemed like a cruel reminder of everything she had lost.

She hadn’t expected it to be like this. She hadn’t expected to wake up to the heavy silence of a house emptied of her son.

She hadn’t even expected to miss him.

At first, when he arrived—small, hungry, and timid—she had thought of him as a duty. She was expected to love him. She had done so dutifully, almost mechanically. But after years of his quiet suffering, his shadow that lingered too long in the background of their family, Lina had learned to turn away, just as her husband had.

"He's not our son. He is not Wenjie," she'd told herself for so long. Those words had become a mantra. After all, they had adopted him out of pity, hadn't they? They had offered him a home, an opportunity. He had never been truly one of them.

At least, that was how she had rationalized it.

But now… now, it felt like a betrayal.

Lina put down her teacup, the porcelain clinking lightly. She hadn’t noticed how tightly she had been holding it. The scent of jasmine tea filled the room, but it did nothing to calm her. She stood and walked to the window, looking out at the city streets. The sky was clouded over, a faint gray mist hanging in the air. Everything felt suffocating.

Was it always like this?

Her thoughts drifted back to the letter, the words her son had written just before his death.

She should have known. She should have seen the signs. How many years had passed, and all she had ever given him were scraps—cold dismissals, hurried words, empty promises.

He had tried, hadn’t he? In his own quiet way, he had tried to get her attention. But she had ignored him. She had let him become a shadow. He had remained on the edges of their world, never once truly being seen.

And now, it was too late.

She walked to the small desk in the corner of the room, the one that had once belonged to him. She hadn’t touched it in years, preferring to keep her distance. It was still filled with his things—his notebooks, his drawings, his old childhood trinkets that she had packed away so carelessly. The remnants of a life she had never truly wanted to understand.

Her fingers brushed over a faded drawing of a family—a mother, a father, two children, all smiling. At the bottom, in her son’s small, childish handwriting, it read: I wish I was really one of you.

Her heart constricted. The tears came then, unbidden, spilling down her cheeks.

She sank into the chair, clutching the drawing to her chest as if it could somehow hold the weight of her regret. It was a simple wish. A wish that had gone unspoken for so long. A wish she had never bothered to hear.

“Why didn’t I listen?” she whispered, the question hanging in the stillness of the room. “Why didn’t I love you when you needed me?”

Her mind wandered back to the day they had found him at the orphanage. He had been so small, so fragile, his eyes wide with uncertainty. She had been told he was a "special case," a child with no future. He had come to them with nothing but his broken spirit and a small, dusty suitcase.

Back then, she had told herself that he was just a temporary fixture, someone to fill the empty space in their home. She hadn’t known how wrong she was. She hadn’t known that in the end, it would be her who was the one broken.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. She didn’t have to look to know who it was. It was Wenjie.

Her chest tightened at the thought of him. Her perfect son, the one who had never asked for anything, who had always done exactly as expected. She hadn’t seen him cry in years, not even when his brother had been taken from them. She hadn’t heard him speak of him since that night.

Wenjie had always been the child she could depend on. The child who never made demands. The child who always did his best to fit in.

But today, he came through the door with a look that Lina had never seen on his face before. It was one of guilt—guilt, and something more. Something... haunted.

“Wenjie?” she asked softly, her voice trembling.

He didn’t respond immediately, just stood there, staring at the ground. His hands were clenched into fists, and his lips were pressed tight, as though holding something back.

Finally, he looked up at her, and there was a sadness in his eyes that she had never noticed before.

“Mother,” he said, his voice quiet, almost distant. “I… I failed him.”

The words hit her like a punch to the gut. Her son, the one who had been so perfect, so well-behaved, so dutiful, was now standing before her, a shadow of the boy she had once known. The realization swept over her with brutal force.

It wasn’t just her son who had failed. It was all of them.

They had failed him together.

“You didn’t fail him, Wenjie,” she said, but even she knew it was a lie. Her words felt hollow, empty. She couldn’t lie to him anymore. Not now.

“I did,” he insisted, his voice breaking. “I didn’t see him. I never saw him.”

The guilt between them was palpable, a silent weight they both carried, too heavy to acknowledge but too real to deny. They stood there, in the quiet of the house, both of them shattered in their own way.

“Mother, I’m sorry,” Wenjie whispered, his eyes brimming with tears for the first time in years.

The truth hung in the air, unspoken and impossible to erase. They had failed him, and in doing so, they had failed themselves. There was no going back now. The doors to redemption were closed.

And in the silence that followed, Lina realized that the family they had once been—fragile, imperfect, but still whole—was now nothing more than a broken memory.

[End of Chapter 3]

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