"She was always nice to everyone around her. No matter what happened, always kind and sweet," he heard Penny speak, her words coming out m.u.f.fled as her head continued to rest on his chest, "At least that was what I knew about her. Back in the day...there were villagers who would pa.s.s comments on us. Talking about how I didn't have a father and how my mother was a deranged person because of it." 

"Was she?" asked Damien, holding her in his arms. 

"More than that," Penny pulled away from his arms. Sniffing and wiping her face with the sleeve of her right hand. Her eyes were wet, her eyelashes having specks of water in them with her eyes that looked void and lost, "I had wounds on my body. Black and blue which appeared every now and then when I was young. With the hostility between us and the villagers that had formed, they often punished me."

"How so?" his eyes narrowed waiting for her to continue on the thought of what the villagers had done to her. 

"Not letting me go home. Making me stall if I bought something from the forest. Pus.h.i.+ng me to a puddle of mud or taking away things that were meant for the home. All these years, I thought it was them who had hurt me," she exhaled out the air tiredly. The fire in fireplace crackle, a burst of wood due to the possible acc.u.mulation of gas which crackled up before letting the others burn more brightly, "When I was young, I fell sick a lot. Finding myself in the bed often but also because my mother found me pa.s.sed out on the streets but that wasn't what happened." 

Now that part of her memory had returned back, the memory which spoke the truth, she could hardly digest what she had seen. Her heart broke thinking about and remembering the way her mother had sliced the animal's neck. Thrown it on the wall like it was nothing. 

How could her mother be heartless? Everything was a lie? Then what was the truth? Had there not been affection and her mother had never meant to love her as her daughter? She felt her head hurt. 

"It wasn't the villagers who hurt me," she repeated her previous words, "It was my mother who hit me in the house for not listening to her. I guess our relations.h.i.+p wasn't as perfect as I thought it was. In the past, every time I came close to knowing about her using her witchcraft to do something, she tried to stall me. And when that didn't work, she erased my memory in regards to everything that related to the hour and day. 

It isn't that I didn't question what might have happened. Because with the number of times she had cleared the memory I don't think she did a good job at it," a single tear slid down her eye, trailing down her face which fell on her lap. 

Damien raised his hand, wiping the tear away that had trailed, listening to her as she continued to speak, "A few things never made sense in those times of my memory that was erased. She beat me and wiped my memory only to take care of me back when my consciousness returned back."

He could only imagine the toll of emotions that she was experiencing right now. Her heart was shuddering and her mind was far more anxious and in panic even though right now she appeared to look calm as she revealed what she had just found out. 

"I thought she was the world's sweetest mother. Who took care of me, someone who protected me from all the ill people who surrounded us but the truth turned out to be that the person I needed protection from was the same person who I lived with."

When her eyes met him, she closed them, "You don't have to worry about the past, Penny. She can't hurt or erase your memory anymore."

"I know," she nodded her head, opening her eyes back to reveal the s.h.i.+ning green eyes of hers, "I am scared to see what more has happened but yet at the same time I want to know what happened in all those years." 

"You don't have to force yourself if you don't want to," she was already in pain and he didn't know what the black witch had done to her where she was now wanting to kill her. 

"I would want to believe she isn't my mother but my aunt already told us how...strange she was. Sadly she is my mother and I am her daughter."

"It isn't necessary for you to accept it if you can't handle it, but the deeper you go down the rabbit hole, you might find the truth you want to know but it won't be easy," Damien took her hands and squeezed them in his, "We ended up with mothers who were bat s.h.i.+t crazy." 

"I thought you loved your mother," she whispered to see him chuckle. 

"And you love yours too even after what has happened and what you found out," she felt guilty hearing it. She was her mother, someone she had looked up to for years and now she was finding it hard to fit the pieces in her mind, "I love my mother, Penny but that doesn't mean I didn't know she was sometimes swinging from being demented to being insane. You ended up having the worse one."

"It sure is," Penny's voice came out to be dry. 

He brought her hands closer to him, "They might be our mothers but it is alright to take a stand to what is right and wrong. Our situation was different but you need to know when it is right to stop loving a person. Love like that is not love at all, if you are trying to find reasons to hold on to the past which you knew of, then you should rethink because that wasn't the truth."