**Winner 2024 Amby Awards**
Fiza has everything planned-medical school, a respectable future, and an engagement she never wanted. Determined to escape a loveless match, she creates a checklist to find the perfect husband her father will approve of.
...
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"Hello?" I greeted my mother, my voice sounding thin and strange to my own ears.
"Fiza, are you okay?" Her voice was filled with worry. I realized Farzana had already called them already.
"This is not how we wanted you to find out," my mother admitted.
"Why didn't you tell me?" The question burst out, my voice trembling. "Would you ever have told me?" The woman I had called 'Mamma' my entire life was, genetically, a stranger.
Her voice softened. "It doesn't make a difference. I was your mother from the time you were born. I breastfed you, I brought you up the same as Farzana. The two of you are the same for me." Her voice broke slightly. "I love you. You will always be my baby."
A tear escaped, and I wiped it away with a shaky hand.
Then my father took the phone.
"Pappa," I said, my voice quivering. I needed to hear it from him, directly. "Is it true? Fiza Ammai is my biological mother?"
He took a moment, a silence that felt like an eternity. "Yes," he finally confirmed, the word simple and devastating. "You and Farzana were born two months apart. We adjusted your birth certificate so that we are listed as both your parents."
"Pappa, why do you want me to marry Fahad?" I pleaded, rushing ahead before my courage failed. "He said his father asked you if he could marry Farzana instead, and that you said 'no'."
My father took a deep breath on the other end of the line.
"Fiza," he began, his voice cracking. "Your aunt... your biological mother... fell in love with Ronny Uncle... Your biological father."
I listened, frozen, my fingers clutching the phone.
"When she broke her engagement with Fahad's father, the whole family was angry with her." He spoke slowly, each word dragged up from a deep well of remorse. "I supported her. I believed in their love."
A cold knot tightened in my stomach. I knew this story. I knew its ending. But hearing him tell it, hearing his guilt woven into the narrative, was different.
"You know the rest," he said, but he continued anyway, as if he needed me to hear every painful detail from him. "We didn't know he was an alcoholic. He beat her when he got drunk. It became worse after she became pregnant with you." His voice dropped to a horrified whisper. "He was always remorseful afterward, compensating by being extra loving and gentle... until the next fight."
I closed my eyes, seeing nothing but the image he was painting: my namesake, my mother, trapped in a cycle of violence, hiding her bruises with funny stories.
He paused, and I could hear the tremble in his breath. "And then one day, he called us. That monster. He was frantic." My father's voice broke completely. "He told us that Fiza Ammai had fallen down the stairs and that she wasn't waking up. We rushed there..."
