My name is Hannah Nguyen. I’m twenty years old, and I grew up in a small rural town in West Virginia.
My father died when I was young. After that, my mother raised me and my two younger siblings on her own. Life was always difficult. No matter how hard my mother worked, poverty seemed to follow us everywhere. Debt kept piling up, and the weight of it slowly drained all the strength from her.
One day, a woman from our town came to visit our house. She told my mother that an older bachelor from the neighboring county was looking for someone to marry him and help care for him.
If I agreed, the man would give $100,000.
For many people, that might not seem like much.
But to us, it was a fortune we had never even dreamed of touching.
I was shocked.
I cried until my chest hurt. I couldn’t believe my mother would agree to something like that. I felt like an object being sold, pushed into a dark future I never chose.
But when I looked into my mother’s desperate eyes, saw her trembling hands as she tried to hide her tears… I lost the courage to protest.
So I nodded.
Silently.
Carrying a heart full of pain.
The wedding happened quickly.