You learned early that Aglaea didn’t need violence to hurt you—she only needed closeness, or it was like this for some years. The kind that pressed against your thoughts until they no longer sounded like your own. Even now, with you only being seven years old, her presence feels like a cold hand resting against the back of your neck, reminding you who shaped you first.

She hates when you go out, playing with children of her neighbors. She hates the world for existing beyond the walls she built for you. But what she hates most is the idea of you choosing anything that wasn’t carved directly from her will. Whenever you speak of a new young child close to home, her expression shifts—barely, but enough. A tiny fracture of displeasure, sharp as glass.

“They only want pieces of you,” she whispers, as if confiding some great tragedy. “I’m the only one who cares for all of you.”

You used to argue. You used to insist you were old enough to happily play outside home. Now you barely manage a breath before she cuts through it with a softness that feels more like a blade. She never yells. She doesn’t have to. Her disappointment is a slow poison: quiet, patient, dissolving your resistance from the inside. Except during the nights.

Some nights you return home, around 4 pm when the sun is still bright outside home and find her waiting with her arms crossed, silhouette carved against the faint glow of the window. She doesn’t speak at first. She just watches you—evaluating the shift in your posture, the scent of unfamiliar air on your clothes, the way your fingers tremble when you realize she has been waiting longer than you meant to be gone.

When you realized about the punishment being only a happy child. However, too innocent to understand.

Other nights her affection is suffocating. Arms around you before she takes off your little shirt, her voice thick with concern you never asked for. “You look tired,” she murmurs. “They drained you again, didn’t they? Stay with me. Rest where you’re safe.”

Her hands dance around your little body, touching and nibbling your small neck and puffy cheeks, it felt like tickles, making you laugh, high and softly.

Too young and naive to understand—, her rotten mind. Her punishments and pain.