The taxi pulled up to the curb of a modest hotel on the edge of the city, far enough from their villa that Tom wouldn't think to look here, but close enough that she could still feel the cold shadow of her old life.
"It's painful how one can live a life full of lies, how one can be deceived into leaving a non existing life, how cruel can that man be," Elena talked to herself while seated at the back seat.
The driver sat there looking at her through the mirror, he saw a woman who was broken, and betrayed, it's like her husband did something she never thought he would do. He shook his head and signed
" Hello ma'am we are here," he said but it seems Elena was lost deeply into her thoughts that she didn't hear him.
"Ma'am we are here already, and please everything shall work out," he said to her.
Because he used a loud voice to call her, she lifted her head and said, "I believe so"
Elena stepped out, holding a sleeping Maya in one arm and dragging a single suitcase with the other. Everything else she owned the wedding photos, the cotton dresses, the memories of six years of service was currently a pile of gray ash in a backyard Tom wouldn't check until morning.
"He actually didn't comeback yesterday night and today the whole day, even by 8:00 PM, he was still not at home," she talked to herself, "He truly never loved me, I was just to blind to see or rather too ignorant to notice," she said
"Welcome to The Grand View, ma'am," the receptionist said, not even looking up from his screen.
'This might be another pretty face, coming here to fish a rich man's she thought.
"Hey you, this hotel is not for people like you, can't you tell the difference between you and those people coming in and going out?" Another young yet arrogant lady said.
"Hey, how date you talk to our clients like that? Can you just mind your words here we are running a business not a beauty pagentt" the lady at the front desk said.
When she lifted her head, he pair of eyes met with Elena's and she asked.
"how may I be of help ma'am"
"A room for two. One week," Elena said. Her voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger. It was dry and cracked, like namib desert.
As she swiped her card, it was a private account Tom didn't know about, meanwhile her mind raced back to the text from her penpal.
'You were never married to this man, but another man.' Who was the other man? So Tom could betray her from the word go, could it be that even the baby in her stomach was another man's child?
The words felt like a physical weight on her shoulder, If she wasn't married to Tom, who had she signed those papers with six years ago?
She then remembered something Tom took her to that dim lights room with the pretense of celebrating her , but there was this detail about that place that she almost missed if not for her sharp memory. "the smell of expensive tobacco," and her own blurred vision from the alcohol Tom had forced on her.
Lost in her own trails of thought, she reached her room and laid Maya down on the available sofa, and used the white hotel sheets to cover her.
The silence here was different. It wasn't the heavy, suffocating silence of Tom's house. This silence was that of a blank page.
She pulled out her phone and looked at the photo she had taken of Tom and Sandra. Then, she looked at the positive pregnancy test she had tucked into her bag at the last second.
"You chose her, Tom," she whispered to the empty room. "You chose the 'no stress' life I hope it's as empty as you are."
Suddenly, her phone buzzed. Not a Phoenix notification not a text from her sister.
It was an email from an encrypted address.
*Subject: The search is over.
Content: We found a match in the city database. Your signature was validated 6 years ago at The Grand View Hotel. Girl should I be happy for you or should I start crying on your behalf, girl you got married to a big fish, while trying to take a sneak quick review my system was crushed, but he has been looking for you all these years, I can't even find his name or you married a ghost. *
Elena's heart stopped. She looked at the door, then at Maya. She had tried to delete herself from the world, but it seemed she had only succeeded in waking up a sleeping giant.
"Do you mean that the man I got married to is the father to Maya?" She asked.
"You silly woman, who is Maya and how will I know, I even don't know you personally," the other person replied.
"Maya is my daughter," Elena replied.
"Hahaaaa, not only did your cheating boyfriend marry you off to another person but he sold you off too? You are unfortunate," the other person said.
"The story of my life," she replied.
"That guy is a black goat," the other person said.
What a small world, so that man from six years is the man from that night the man she was actually married to her and was the father to her daughter , He wasn't just some "rich man" Tom sold her to. He was someone who had been looking for her, he was someone even her friend could not trace, who was he and what was his name?
"If such a powerful man could not find me then Tom must have known his identity that's why he kept me from him and couldn't feel disgusted by me," she said to herself.
Life is a journey let me walk away from this city that deceived me, and look for my own life.