The Golden Mending

CHAPTER 8 - The Paper That Screamed

The wait was a slow, agonizing torture. Three days. Three days of sitting at the same table with Roy and Putri, watching them play "happy family" while I carried a ticking time bomb in my heart.

Roy had stopped talking to me entirely. He treated me like a shadow, a ghost that happened to share his address. Putri, on the other hand, had become emboldened. She didn't even hide her smirk when Roy kissed her forehead in front of me.

"Lala, I think it's time we talked about a more permanent arrangement," Roy said over breakfast, his eyes cold. "Putri and Intan need a stable environment. Maybe it's best if you... take some time away. At your mother's house."

I didn't answer. My phone vibrated in my pocket. An email notification. Subject: Laboratory Results - Confidential.

My heart hammered so hard I thought it would crack my ribs. I stood up, leaving my untouched coffee. "I have an errand to run, Roy. We'll talk when I get back."

"Always running, Lala," Putri mocked, leaning back in her chair. "Running away from the truth you can't handle."

No, Putri, I thought as I walked out the door. I'm running toward the truth that will destroy you.

I opened the PDF in the sanctuary of my car. My eyes blurred as I scrolled past the legal jargon and the technical charts. Then, I saw the bolded text at the bottom.

PROBABILITY OF PATERNITY: 0.00%

The air left my lungs. Roy wasn't the father. The "mistake" he was so desperate to protect, the "legacy" he had traded our seven-year marriage for... it was a lie.

But there was more. I looked at the second comparison—the DNA from the pacifier and the tissue.

PROBABILITY OF MATERNITY: 0.00%

My hands shook so violently the phone nearly fell. Putri wasn't the mother either.

Intan wasn't their child. She was an orphan, a prop in a twisted game. But why? Why would Roy pay for an oncology wing? Why would they fake a family?

I looked at the oncology bill again, my mind racing. Dr. Herman. Surgical wing. Six months ago.

And then, it hit me like a lightning bolt. Six months ago, Roy’s younger sister, Maya, had disappeared from the family group chat. Roy told me she had gone to study abroad. But Maya had always been the black sheep, the one who struggled with...

I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. Roy wasn't protecting a mistress. He was covering up a tragedy. And Putri? She wasn't a mother. She was a paid actress, a nurse hired to play a role in a house of cards.

I started the car, my tears finally falling. Not for my broken marriage, but for the innocent baby sleeping in my house. And for the man I thought I knew, who had turned our home into a theatre of lies.

The ghost was done wandering the halls. It was time for the ghost to scream.