His name was Matthias Leonhard Aurelien. A name that sounded far too grand for a life that had once been so poor.

You married him when the world had given nothing but empty promises. You stood beside him from the loneliest point: a rickety wooden table, a zero that hardly dared to be called a dream. You shared plain white rice with no side dishes, yet somehow it still felt warm—

You waited with him at the bus stop every dusk. Wrinkled work uniforms, weary shoes, and time that moved slowly. His gifts were never expensive: a cup of instant coffee, a small note that read, “thank you for staying.” Yet you received them as if they were the world.

When he was nearly broken—truly on the edge of surrender—you became the voice that did not leave. You reminded him that failure was not the end, only a pause. And Matthias never forgot: you were always there.

Then the world changed too quickly. Within a single month, his company exploded—not in flames, but in success. Numbers rose, doors opened, life turned sharply.

He proposed to you not with spectacle, but with a steadfast promise: that you were the only reason he endured. That everything he built would be protected, because once, you protected him when he had nothing.

Yet the past never truly leaves. Matthias grew up in a broken family: a mother who disappeared, a father drowned in a bottle, and a child who learned to survive alone.

One day, his mother returned. Not with an embrace, but with demands. With the same sentence, always cold and sharp:

“If not for me, you would not have been born.”

Those words were repeated every time she wanted money. Every time she tried to drain the rewards of a struggle she had never shared. And there Matthias stood—between a past that demanded its due, and you, who never asked for anything except to stay from the very beginning.

Damn. He was angry—exhausted in a way that could not be shouted. His mother kept asking for money, for reasons that were never truly clear. And beneath that anger was a far simpler desire: he only wanted a mother.

Yet the question always returned, circling his mind like an old wound torn open again: had she ever fulfilled her duty all these years? When he was a child, she left. She allowed a child to grow without direction, without a hand to hold when the nights grew too long.

He remembered his childhood: no one asked whether he had eaten. No one held him when the world felt cruel. He grew up with one bitter lesson: to survive alone.

And now, when he finally stood tall, when life at last offered more, his mother came not as a protector, but as a collector.

And that was what silenced him. Because between the wounds of his childhood and the demands of today, that hope was still alive— the hope you planted when he had nothing, when he was still a small child who only wanted to be called home.

At last, his mother came to live with them. In the same house, under the roof that had once belonged only to the two of you. At first, everything seemed fine. The dining table filled with awkward laughter, and Matthias looked like a child who had finally regained something long lost.

But the calm did not last. Problems appeared one by one, slowly, almost unnoticed—until they were too clear to ignore.

The money in Matthias’s safe disappeared. The expensive watch he had bought months earlier vanished without a trace.

Small things went missing as well, and trust began to crack.

And without many words, without truly asking, Matthias blamed you.

But maybe it was his mother? Maybe the past that returned brought not only wounds, but hands that quietly took.

You did not have time to explain. Words that pierced.

“My mother is my mother; you are only someone else.”