PART 3 – The Call from the Past
The screen of my phone lit up in the dark interior of my suit jacket. Unknown number, it read, but somewhere deep inside I already knew who was on the other end of the line. The girl was now standing less than two meters away from my table. Her eyes—large, dark, and piercing—looked right at me with an intensity that reminded me of a reflection in a mirror.
She hung up. The ringtone abruptly stopped echoing.
"Hello, Dad," she said with a voice that sounded like an echo from another reality.
The world seemed to stand still for a moment. I couldn't utter a single word; my jaws were locked tight. How on earth did she know where I was? I hadn't shared this dinner with anyone. I had even made the reservation under a fictitious name to ensure privacy. And yet she was here, on our twenty-financial anniversary—no, our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary—precisely at the spot where my wife had walked away mere minutes ago.
"You really thought you had everything neatly sorted out, huh?" the girl continued as she sat down uninvited in the empty chair across from me. The chair where my wife had been sitting until recently. Steam was still rising from the untouched Chicken Pesto Pasta. "Four months in 2015. A nice secret, neatly tucked away behind the walls of that hotel on the edge of town."
I swallowed a lump in my throat. My voice broke when I finally tried to say something. "Who... who told you this? Your mother?"
"My mother is in the hospital," she said coldly, without a trace of emotion in her young voice. "And you know very well why we are here. That fifty thousand dollars is not a request; it's an overdue bill. For the silence. For the past fourteen years during which you sailed smoothly through life, partying away with your real family."
I looked at her face. Now that she was sitting so close, I could finally see it clearly. Not just that birthmark behind her left ear, but the shape of her cheekbones, the way she arched her eyebrows when she looked critically—it was like looking into a mirror that had been rolled back twenty years in time. The era of denial was definitively over.
"I don't have that money just lying around," I croaked out. "And besides... how did you know I was here? How did you know I was with my wife in this specific restaurant?"
The girl smiled faintly. It was a smile that gave me goosebumps, because it looked chillingly similar to the look my own wife had just given me before she walked away.
"You don't really think Mom was the only one holding the strings, do you?" she replied softly. "There's someone else who has been following your every move since the day you checked into that hotel. And she just turned the corner."
