My Mom Was the Other Woman

It wasn't until the absolute chaos erupted in our living room that I finally understood the vicious rumors at school weren't just empty gossip.

Men in sharp black suits pinned my mother to the cold hardwood floor. A woman stood over her, her face twisted in pure disgust, screaming that she was going to permanently ruin the seductive face my mother prized so much.

My father stood a few feet away. He watched the entire scene with dead, detached eyes, like a spectator at a play. He didn't say a single word.

That was the day I learned the truth. My mother really was a homewrecker.

Before this, I had heard the whispers in the school hallways. Once, a boy in my class shouted it right in my face. I was shaking with so much rage I shoved him into a desk. Back then, I naively believed they were just bored teenagers spreading toxic rumors.

The wealthy woman adjusted her designer coat, her high heels clicking sharply against the floor as she prepared to leave with my father in tow.

Before walking out the door, she looked down at my mother with absolute contempt.

"I bought this house with my money. You aren't getting a single dime. By tomorrow morning, you and your bastard daughter need to pack your trash and get out. If you ever contact Marcus again, I will end you."

Marcus was my father. He was a gold-digger, a man from a dirt-poor background who married his way into a wealthy family. He was their kept man.

And today was the day I found out my mother was nothing more than his side piece.

Her beautiful face, the one she was so incredibly proud of, was bruised and scratched.

My father's legitimate wife, Victoria, was absolutely ruthless. She didn't even wait until the next morning. A few hours later, a crew of massive security guards showed up to physically throw us out on the street.

My mother collapsed on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. I was the only one left to pack our lives into a few suitcases. I barely managed to grab our clothes before they started shoving us toward the door.

My mother refused to leave. The mix of tears and fresh scratches on her face made her look terrifying. But these men didn't care about being gentle. We were no longer the pampered mistresses of the house.

She was practically thrown out the front door.

She pounded her fists against the heavy wood, screaming at the top of her lungs. "Why are you kicking me out?! This is my house! I'm calling the cops!"

The banging echoed down the hall. Neighbors peeked out of their doors, but no one inside our old apartment answered.

"Mom, let's just go. They aren't going to open it," I said softly.

She shoved my hand away. "No! Marcus is the one who screwed up! Why do we have to pay the price?!"

She had a point. But screaming at a locked door wasn't going to fix anything. Eventually, the building security guards forcibly escorted us off the property.

The entire thing happened so fast I barely had time to process it.

My first priority was getting my mother to a clinic to treat the cuts on her face. My second priority was finding a cheap place to sleep. Between the two of us, we had exactly four hundred dollars to our names.

When my mother followed my father to this city years ago, she had no friends, no family, and absolutely no work experience. She was a full-time kept woman. Her only hobby was playing card games with the other housewives in our upscale complex.

Marcus had treated us well. At least financially, we never wanted for anything. He was always "traveling for work," so he wasn't home much. But whenever he did visit, he brought expensive gifts and exotic food.

Nobody would have ever guessed what he really was. Looking back, his "business trips" were just him going home to his real wife. Coming to our apartment was the actual trip.

Later that night, my mother lay in her clinic bed, aggressively tapping on her phone to play a mobile poker game.

I sat in the plastic chair next to her. "Mom."

"What?" she muttered.

"Did you know he was married?"

She didn't answer. Her eyes stayed glued to the glowing screen.

That told me everything I needed to know. She knew. She knew he had a family, she knew he had a terrifyingly powerful wife, and she knew he had a son two years older than me.

I pulled my knees to my chest and started chewing on my fingernails.

I managed to find a tiny, run-down studio apartment tucked away in a sketchy alley. Rent was two hundred bucks a month.

My mother threw a massive fit the second we walked in.

"What is this dump? It smells like rotting garbage!" she shrieked. "Oh my god, is that a cockroach?! Are there rats in here?! I am not staying in this hellhole!"

I set our bags down on the stained carpet and just stood there, letting her scream it out.

After a solid ten minutes of crying, she finally wiped her eyes. "Fine. But stop looking at me like that."

The apartment wasn't just old. It was incredibly loud, the hot water barely worked, and the power grid was a joke.

I had to drop out of my expensive private boarding school and enroll as a day student at the local public high school. I was in my freshman year.

At ten o'clock on a Tuesday night, the power went out again. It was the third time that week.

I calmly lit a cheap candle, pulled my math textbook closer to the flickering light, and kept solving equations.

I had always been a calm person. Even with my entire world imploding, I didn't feel like the sky was falling. Success always comes with a few detours. That was the lie I kept repeating to myself, even if I didn't fully believe it.

But I knew one thing for sure. The only way out of this miserable alleyway was studying. I needed a scholarship to a good college. A stupid power outage wasn't going to stop me.

But bad luck usually travels in packs.

My mother's sudden, blood-curdling scream pierced through the dark apartment.

"Mom? What's wrong?" I yelled.

I heard her gasping for air. I dropped my pencil and sprinted into the tiny living room.

A dark shadow darted away from the window, disappearing into the alley before I could even shout. I ripped the curtains shut and locked the latch.

My mother was sitting on the floor, trembling violently. I knelt down next to her.

"Did you see his face? What did he look like?" I asked.

Her voice shook. "It was a man. Short and skinny. I didn't see his face."

We lived on the ground floor. Whoever was looking through our window had done it on purpose. Ever since we moved in, the entire block knew this apartment was only occupied by a single mother and her teenage daughter.

There were no security bars on the glass. We definitely didn't have the money to install them.

I grabbed a stack of old test papers and taped them directly to the windowpanes, completely blocking the view from the outside. I knew it was a temporary fix, but I didn't expect the real test to happen so soon.

A week later, I had a massive state-wide placement exam. In our district, this test determined if you got into the elite magnet high schools for your sophomore year. I needed that golden ticket.

I stayed up reviewing my notes until two in the morning. Just as I was grabbing a glass of water before bed, I heard a faint scratching sound coming from the window. It would stop, then start again.

Then came a soft, rhythmic tapping on the glass.

It was cautious. Testing the waters to see if anyone inside was awake.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I silently grabbed the heavy metal baseball bat I had found by the dumpsters and stepped into the shadows beside the window, gripping the handle tight.

The tapping stopped. I heard the faint whistle of wind pushing through a crack.

The window was sliding open.

I tightened my grip. The moonlight spilled onto the floor, stretching the silhouette of a man climbing through the frame.

Now.

I swung the bat with every ounce of strength I had in my body.

There was a sickening thud of metal hitting bone, followed by a muffled, agonizing groan. The man collapsed onto the floor like a sack of bricks and didn't move.

I dropped the bat, my hands shaking violently. I nudged his leg with my foot. Nothing.

All the adrenaline completely drained from my body. My knees gave out, and I slid down the wall until I hit the floor, gasping for air.

My mother definitely heard the commotion. A second later, a frying pan clattered to the kitchen floor. She rushed out of her room, eyes wide with terror, and threw her arms around me.

"Are you hurt? Did he touch you?" she frantically checked my face.

I shook my head. "No. But Mom, I think I hit him too hard."

I had completely cracked his skull open.

When the police arrived, my mother shoved me behind her and stood tall.

"I hit him, officer. It was me," she told the cops at the door.

They took both my mother and the unconscious creep to the station. I went with them, but they kept me in the waiting room.

The next morning, a police officer actually drove me to school so I wouldn't miss my placement exam. When I finally got home, my mother was sitting on the couch, completely unharmed.

The cops had found chloroform in the guy's jacket pocket. His intentions were obvious. Busting his head open was ruled as clear-cut self-defense.

My mother immediately went back to her usual complaining.

"Look at your hair, Harper. It's a mess," she nagged. "And that uniform is huge on you. You look like you're wearing Marcus's clothes."

She stopped abruptly and looked down at her hands.

"Mom," I said quietly. "Thank you."

She turned her face away. "I know you're furious with Marcus. Go ahead and curse him out. I hate him too."

"You don't understand," she muttered, her voice breaking. "He lied to me. He played with my feelings. He swore he loved me, but when Victoria was literally dragging me across the floor, he just stood there. He didn't even try to stop her."

I knew her story. My mother grew up in a dirt-poor Appalachian coal town. She was the oldest of five kids. In places like that, the oldest daughter is basically born to suffer and sacrifice.

She had no education and had never seen the world. Marcus had come to her town as a corporate land developer. He played the charming, wealthy city boy, and she fell for it instantly. She ran away with him to the city.

She stayed with him for sixteen years.

He had spoiled her rotten, effectively turning her into a woman who couldn't survive on her own. After a decade and a half of luxury, she had zero practical skills. She was entirely dependent on him.

These past few weeks had been a living nightmare for her.

I walked over and hugged her tight. "Mom, you still have me. We're going to survive this. We're going to be okay."

She turned her head into my shoulder and quietly began to cry.

The stress of the break-in messed with my head. I missed the cutoff for the elite magnet school by a few points, but I scored high enough to get into Oakridge High, the second-best school in the city.

It wasn't perfect, but Oakridge was known for its academics, which meant I could skip the mandatory evening study halls if I kept my grades up.

My mother had no degree and a massive gap in her resume. Finding a traditional job was impossible. So, she bought a secondhand food cart and started selling late-night smashburgers near the local university.

Since I didn't have to stay at school for night study, I rushed over to the cart every evening to help her.

She didn't understand modern marketing, but I did. I made an Instagram account for the cart, ran student discount promotions, and posted mouth-watering videos of the food.

Sales skyrocketed. Sometimes jealous food truck owners would try to start turf wars with us, but my mother was relentless. Nobody could out-argue her.

Month by month, our savings account grew. We finally had enough cash to move out of that dangerous alley.

We rented a decent two-bedroom apartment near Oakridge High. It was an older building, but it was in a safe, quiet neighborhood filled with retired city workers.

"I'm buying you a bicycle before school starts," she told me proudly as we unpacked. "It's only a five-minute ride to campus. You can sleep in a little later."

Things were finally getting better.

On my first day at Oakridge, my mother walked me out to the street to see me off.

At my old school, everyone knew my business. People would stare at me in the hallways and whisper, "That's her. Her mom is a total homewrecker."

Whenever I heard that, I would confront them. If words didn't work, I used my fists. I usually got blamed for starting the fights, and they would just sneer at me afterward. "She thinks she's untouchable just because she gets straight A's. Her mom is still a whore."

But Oakridge was different. Nobody knew me here. The students actually cared about their futures. Instead of throwing chairs around the classroom, they debated math problems in the halls.

Every Monday, a different homeroom hosted the morning assembly. Our class was up first, and my teacher randomly selected me to be the student speaker.

It was my first time doing something so public, but I wasn't nervous. The speech went perfectly.

High school let out at four, but the library was open until nine. After studying, I would usually ride my bike to the university district, help my mom pack up the food cart, and we'd go home together.

But tonight was different.

When I walked out to the bike racks, both of my tires were completely slashed.

This was a brand-new bike. Somebody had done this on purpose. I racked my brain, but I hadn't offended a single person since I transferred. I kept my head down and did my work.

By the time I realized I couldn't fix it, the campus was completely deserted.

I pushed the broken bike down into the underground parking garage to use the shortcut to the main road.

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered wildly, buzzing with static before completely dying. The garage plunged into pitch blackness.

Footsteps echoed from the darkness behind me.

With every heavy step, the motion-sensor lights clicked on, one by one, illuminating the path toward me.

I slowly turned around.

Standing in the harsh light was a face I didn't know, but recognized instantly.