The untold story ch 2

"I saw the dream again, Amma," I whispered.
My mother didn't turn around. Her hand paused, the spoon scraping softly against the iron pan. For a long moment, the only sound was the steady hiss of oil and the low hum of the morning. When she finally looked back, her face was tight, shadowed by a dread I knew by heart.
Ever since I was fifteen, that nightmare had wrapped its cold fingers around my mind—pulling me back to a nameless, suffocating place, a village trapped in fog and shadows that I had no name for. Whenever the weight of it broke me down, her answer was always the same: dragging me to the local temple, pressing my palms together in front of stone idols. And whenever I tried to ask about my father—back when I still had the courage—her face turned to stone.
“It’s none of your business, Anu. Just go and study. He was a bad person.”
It was the wall she had put up for ten years, locking the door on any questions until I finally learned to stop asking.
The heavy routine of the day rolled on. I pushed the dread down, walked through to the attached studio, and spent hours recording a grueling true-crime episode—dissecting the cold-blooded secrets of strangers while my own life remained completely buried.
By evening, my mind was fried, the studio lights too bright. I told Arun I was done for the day and stepped through the connecting door into the residential side of the house, needing a hot shower to wash off the phantom dust of the work.
The water pounded against my shoulders, but it couldn't quiet the static buzzing in my head. Wrapping a towel around my damp hair, I walked over to my bedroom closet to grab a change of clothes.
My fingers brushed against a stack of old storage boxes tucked deep in the back corner. Behind them, wedged into a dark gap I had never noticed before, something hard and leather-bound caught my wrist.
I pulled it out into the dim light.
It was an old, thick diary, the cover cracked at the edges and smelling faintly of old paper and damp earth. My thumb trembled slightly as I flipped to the first page.
The handwriting wasn't mine. It was my mother's.