Chapter 5: The Silence Before the Storm

Pegi, 2025 – In the Land of Second Chances

She had a house now.

Not an apartment, not a borrowed room, not someone else's couch — a house. Small, quiet, with cracked siding and stubborn windows that groaned in the wind. The kind of place you have to fight for.

It sat on a slope in a town that didn't know her name, surrounded by trees that reminded her of the Albanian forests she had once prayed to as a child. It was hers — mortgage and all. Her name was on the deed. Her soul in the walls.

Inside, nine cats claimed the sunlit corners and windowsills, weaving between furniture like sentries of a hidden kingdom. Each one had a story. Each one had been saved. Just like her.

Pegi was twenty-seven.

Her mother, fifty.

Together, they had survived the impossible.

And yet, some mornings, Pegi still woke with a scream stuck in her throat.

America was supposed to be the fresh start.

No whispers.

No insults hidden in smiles.

No eyes watching her body like it was public property.

No uncles drunk on arrogance and rakia.

She had dreamed of it her whole life — a land where hard work could erase shame, where her mother's pain could finally rest, and where maybe, just maybe, she could be someone new.

But freedom was not a switch.

It was a slow, brutal climb.

And she was still climbing.

She worked every day since landing on American soil.

Doubled shifts. Late nights. Burned-out feet.

She didn't complain — not once.

Because she remembered her mother scraping coins together just to buy her notebooks.

She remembered birthdays forgotten by both sides of the family.

She remembered being called "too sensitive" when she cried, and "too cold" when she didn't.

She remembered hiding in school bathrooms when her father forgot to show up.

She remembered being told "he's just confused" — as if that excused abandoning a daughter.

So she became everything he wasn't.

Reliable. Responsible.

The "perfect daughter."

The "good girl."

But it came at a cost.

She never screamed.

Never cried in public.

Never told anyone about the nights she watched her mother sob quietly in the kitchen, head bowed over cold tea, trying to make one dinner stretch into two days.

Pegi learned early that survival meant being small, being quiet, being soft enough not to upset anyone.

And it hurt. Every day, it hurt.

But she swallowed it.

Smiled anyway.

Held the broken pieces of her mother's heart in her hands and whispered, "I'll be good. I'll take care of us."

Now, from the outside, she looked like success.

A woman with a home.

A clean credit score.

A row of healthy plants on her kitchen windowsill.

But inside?

She was a battlefield.

Because the war hadn't ended when they left Albania — it had only changed shapes.

Now it was inside her —

in the way she apologized when she hadn't done anything wrong.

in the way she flinched at loud voices.

in the way she felt guilty for being angry.

But oh… how much rage she held.

Not just for herself.

For her mother — who was cast aside like garbage after doing everything right.

For her younger self — who never once heard "I'm proud of you" from anyone but the woman who bore her.

For the girls back home — still being silenced, married off, erased.

For the women now, in this new age of digital defiance, who were rising — rising loud, rising angry — and being mocked for it.

In the Albanian community, a new war had begun.

Men, shaken by the shift in power, lashed out.

Women, no longer silent, fought back.

It wasn't on battlefields.

It was on TikTok. On group chats. In whispered conversations and fiery posts. In therapy rooms and poetry readings. In protests and anonymous forums.

Women saying:

"We are not your honor.

We are not your property.

We are not your shame."

Pegi watched it all.

And inside her chest, something cracked.

One night, after feeding her cats and folding laundry, she stood at the back door, looking out at the dark.

She whispered a name she hadn't spoken in years:

Ajkuna.

She didn't know why.

Maybe it came from a dream.

Maybe from the blood.

Maybe from something deeper — the part of her that had always known she wasn't just this life.

The wind blew hard that night.

And in the rustle of the trees, in the way the leaves danced like fire, she thought she heard it:

"We're still here."

And the rage she had buried for 27 years?

It rose.

Not like an explosion.

Not like a scream.

Like a tide — slow, massive, unstoppable.

It was time.

The silence before the storm was over.

And Pegi?

She was the storm.