PART 13 – The Last Judgment
The morning sun briefly broke through the clouds, casting a chilly, sharp glare over the canal water. I sat slumped on the bench, a broken man whose entire identity had been wiped out in less than twenty-four hours.
"And that girl?" I asked hoarsely, my thoughts returning to the young woman in the restaurant. "Was that... was she also part of your plan? Is she really my daughter, or is that made up too?"
My wife smiled faintly. It was a smile that frightened me more than any outburst of anger ever could.
"That's the beauty of a well-organized plan," she said softly. "You don't even need to make some things up; you just have to nudge them in the right direction at the moment it suits best. That woman did indeed have a brief encounter with you in 2015, that's true. But the fact that she suddenly needed money for an operation after all those years, and was brought precisely onto your path... let's just say I gave her a small financial nudge in the back to give our anniversary evening's timing some color."
My stomach turned over. Even that sense of guilt, that fear that I had neglected a child, turned out to have been a puppet show manipulated by her.
"You're a monster," I whispered, no longer having the strength to be angry.
She shrugged her shoulders, completely untouched by my words. "No, my dearest. I'm just someone who learned her lesson in the first five years of our marriage when I discovered you couldn't be trusted. The remaining twenty years were merely the execution of a very slow collection process."
She turned around to walk away.
"Wait," I shouted, standing up from the bench. "Where are you going? What's left of me?"
She stopped with her back to me and looked back over her shoulder.
"I don't care," she said with a voice that cut coldly through the morning wind. "Find a job, find a room in a cheap boarding house, or tell all your friends the truth—it doesn't matter. Your reputation, your money, your family... everything you thought you owned is officially mine today."
A she walked away without looking back even once. Her footsteps slowly faded into the rumble of city traffic, until I was left entirely alone on the bench by the water.
In my inner pocket, the plastic bag with the old gold watch rattled, its hands having stood still for years at a quarter to twelve on April twelfth, two thousand.
