"In a house built of curses, a single violet still dared to bloom."
They told her she was born on a night the storms wouldn't stop.
Lightning split the sky above Lausanne, rain flooding the streets, thunder shaking the glass windows of the hospital as her mother screamed and the doctors' voices turned frantic. Two hearts, they said, beating in the same womb. Two lives pressing against each other in that small, dark space.
Only one survived.
She never saw her brother, the twin who died before he could cry, before he could breathe the cold air of this world. She never felt his hand in hers or saw the color of his eyes. But she carried him everywhere, like a shadow she could never shake.
"You were the reason he died," her mother told her, over and over.
At first, Élise thought it was a mistake, a misunderstanding, something she could fix if she was good enough, quiet enough, small enough. But as the years passed, she learned that it was the only truth her parents would ever agree on.
She learned the rules of the house early:
i)Don't cry.
ii)Don't speak unless spoken to.
iii)Don't look them in the eye.
iv)Don't ask questions.
And above all else, never, ever expect to be loved.
The first memory she could recall was the sound of glass breaking. She was small, curled under the kitchen table, clutching a chipped porcelain rabbit in her tiny hands. Her mother's screams were sharp, slicing through the air, followed by the heavy slam of a door and her father's footsteps like thunder across the floor.
They would argue for hours about money, about the child who lived and the one who didn't, about who was to blame for the empty cradle that was left to collect dust in the corner of the room.
When they were finished arguing, they would find her.
Her mother's hands were cold, even when they slapped her. The first time she hit Élise, she was only four. She remembered the sting, the heat in her cheek, the way her mother's eyes looked distant and dead as she said:
"You should have died with him."
At five, she learned that silence was safer than sound.
Her father's anger came in waves, crashing down on her in the form of hard hands and kicked chairs, the crack of a belt across her back, the bruises that bloomed purple and yellow like rotten fruit.
She would crawl under the bed at night, pressing her small body into the floor, muffling her cries with her hands so the walls wouldn't betray her.
At six, she stopped asking for food when she was hungry.
At seven, she stopped asking for warmth when the cold crept into her bones.
At eight, she stopped asking for love.
School was a temporary escape, a place with heating and meals, even if the other children avoided her, whispering about the strange girl with white hair and violet eyes who wore the same clothes every day, who smelled like mildew and fear.
She would sit by the window, tracing the rain with her finger, imagining herself small enough to slip between the drops and disappear.
Sometimes she would catch sight of her reflection in the glass: pale skin, hollow cheeks, eyes too large for her thin face, the violet color vivid against the exhaustion that painted her features. She looked like a ghost. A mistake that somehow kept breathing.
She learned to patch her own clothes, sewing the tears with clumsy stitches using old thread she found in a drawer. She learned to clean the blood from her cuts so it wouldn't stain the sheets. She learned to braid her own hair, to scrub the floors until her fingers cracked, to disappear into the walls of the house.
She was twelve when she realized she had not felt warmth in so long that she no longer remembered how it felt.
But violets saved her.
She found them in the cracks of the sidewalk on her way home from school, small and trembling, their purple petals defiant against the cold wind. She would kneel, fingers brushing against the softness, eyes wide with wonder, holding her breath as if the simple act of touching them would break their fragile beauty.
She would pluck one, pressing it between the pages of her old book, hiding it under her pillow at night, the scent so faint but enough to remind her that softness existed somewhere, even if it wasn't for her.
At fourteen, her father began to call her "Ghost."
"You're nothing," he would sneer, pressing her against the wall, his breath hot with alcohol. "You're just a ghost that killed your brother."
She learned to agree, to nod, to let her eyes empty so he would leave her alone.
At sixteen, she tried to run.
She saved coins for months, hiding them under a loose floorboard, counting them each night under the moonlight filtering through her window. When she had enough for a train ticket, she packed a small bag with two shirts and the book with her violets inside.
She made it as far as the train station before he found her, pulling her back by her hair, screaming about ungratefulness, about worthlessness, about how she was nothing without them.
That night, he broke her wrist.
She remembered staring at the angle of the bone, the pain bright and sharp, the sound of her mother's laughter from the kitchen as she screamed.
She learned not to run again.
Eighteen came like a quiet curse.
She was old enough to leave, in theory, but leaving meant living, and she wasn't sure she knew how to do that anymore. She stayed because staying was survival, because survival was all she knew.
She worked small jobs—cleaning, serving, folding clothes—handing over every franc to her father, hoping that maybe if she gave enough, he would stop taking from her in other ways.
He didn't.
And then the debts came.
Her mother's gambling. Her father's drinking. The loans taken from people who did not forgive.
They shouted louder now, pushing her against walls, demanding more, screaming about the debt she was born with, the debt she would pay with her life if she had to.
And then he came.
Lorenzo Moretti.
She saw him before he saw her, standing in the cold outside the small, crumbling house. His black coat was too fine for this place, his posture too calm, his dark blue eyes scanning the rotting facade as if it were nothing, as if everything in this place was beneath him.
When he stepped inside, the world seemed to shrink. Her father shrank, too, into the stained armchair, stuttering, trembling.
But Élise stood in the doorway of the kitchen, clutching her chipped mug, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to hide.
His eyes found her, dark blue like a winter sky, sharp, precise, alive.
And for the first time in a long time, she felt something crack inside her.
She did not look away.
That night, she lay awake in her small room, pressing her hand to her chest, feeling the fragile thump of her heart, the reminder that she was still here, still breathing.
The violet petal beneath her pillow was crumbling, but it was still there.
And for the first time, she whispered into the darkness, a wish she had buried deep inside her for so long she had almost forgotten it was there.
"Please, let me live."