My Ten Years of Silence: Whispers of the Dead

When I was sixteen, a killer broke into our house, tortured and murdered my mother, and burned the place to the ground, erasing all the evidence.

I was there. I watched the whole thing.

My dad, my uncle, the cops—they asked me over and over what happened that night.

I kept my mouth shut.

They thought the trauma had made me mute, so they handed me a pen and paper, asking me to write down what the killer looked like.

I still stayed silent. I didn’t move a muscle.

Ten years later, I’m twenty-six.