PART 4 – The Sixth Floor
The words echoed in my head as if spoken beneath a glass dome. There's someone else who has been following your every move. Who on earth could that be? My thoughts shot in all directions. Was there a broader conspiracy during those four months in 2015? Was I being blackmailed by the hotel staff, or had someone from my own circle of friends been watching all these years without me realizing it?
The girl pushed a small, black USB flash drive across the tablecloth toward my side. The object slid silently over the wooden top and stopped right next to the open envelope containing my own handwritten letter.
"What is this?" I asked, staring at the small piece of plastic as if it were a venomous snake.
"Evidence," she replied shortly. "Not just of my birth, or of the surgery I have to undergo next week. But of everything you thought you had carefully erased. Every email, every phone call, every receipt reconstruction from your so-called business trips. Someone kept everything, year in, year out."
I felt sweat trickle down my back. My expensive suit, bought for our anniversary evening, suddenly felt like a suffocating straitjacket. "But why now? If you guys have known this for years, why bring up this demand only now, on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary?"
"Because the time for playing hide-and-seek is over," a third voice suddenly rang out behind us.
I jumped out of my skin and turned abruptly in my chair. From the shadows of the restaurant hallway, a figure stepped forward. It wasn't the waitress, nor was it the manager. It was a woman I knew, yet at the same time seemed not to know at all. She wore the same elegant coat my wife had been wearing when she walked away, but her face was tight and inscrutable.
No, wait. It wasn't my wife. It was the woman from the hotel in 2015. The woman with whom I had had an affair for those four months, and whom I thought I had permanently erased from my life all those years ago.
She looked older, her hair was shorter, and her eyes bore the traces of sleepless nights, but the gaze was unmistakably the same. She walked calmly to our table, pulled out the chair on the other side, and sat down right next to the young girl she apparently called her daughter.
"Surprise," she said in an icily calm voice. "Or did you genuinely think you could just vanish after leaving us to our fate back then on the sixth floor?"
