FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 1: THE WIFE WHO NEVER CHOSE HIM

Five years. That was how long Arga Pratama had been married to Nadira Maheswari, and for every one of those years he had tried to be the kind of husband a woman would be glad to come home to.

It had not always been easy. He was a firefighter in Jakarta, which meant nights that ended at dawn, a uniform that never fully lost the smell of smoke, and a salary that stretched only so far before the end of every month. Nadira had never said outright that it wasn't enough. She didn't have to. He heard it in the way she sighed over grocery receipts, in the way she scrolled past photos of friends' holidays in Bali and Singapore and then set her phone face down on the table, as though the screen had insulted her.

Still, Arga believed in patience. He believed that loyalty, if you kept giving it, eventually became a kind of foundation, something a marriage could stand on even when the rest of the ground felt uncertain. He believed that right up until the night it all gave way beneath him.

The call had come in just after nine: a fire on the twelfth floor of a luxury hotel on Jalan Sudirman. By the time his unit arrived, the lobby was a chaos of guests in bathrobes, shouting staff, and the sharp chemical stink of burning upholstery. Arga spent the next three hours climbing stairwells, checking rooms, guiding an elderly couple down through the smoke one careful step at a time. When the last guest was confirmed safe and the flames had been reduced to a hissing, blackened ruin, he finally pulled off his helmet and let the night air hit his face.

He was walking back toward the engine to retrieve equipment someone had left behind when he saw her.

Nadira was stepping out through the hotel's revolving doors. Her hair was done the way she only ever did it for weddings. Beside her walked a man in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than Arga earned in three months, a man who carried himself with the ease of someone who had never once had to ask the price of anything. Arga would learn his name soon enough. Rendra Wijaya.

But it wasn't the man that stopped Arga's breath. It was the boy.

He couldn't have been older than five. He walked between them, his small hand folded comfortably inside Nadira's, as if it belonged there. As if it had always belonged there. Then Nadira bent down to straighten the boy's collar, and she smiled at him—a soft, unguarded smile that Arga realized, with a lurch in his chest, he had not seen directed at himself in a very long time.

"Mas Arga?"

A hand landed on his shoulder. It was Yoga, one of the younger men in his unit, soot streaked across his forehead. "You've been standing there forever. You know that woman with the guy in the suit?"

Arga opened his mouth. Closed it. Then he shook his head and kept watching as the hotel doors swung shut behind the three of them, sealing them inside a world he had not been invited into.

He finished his shift early and drove home through streets still slick from the evening rain. The house was lit when he pulled into the yard. Inside, he found two of Nadira's suitcases standing open in the living room, half packed with her clothes, her shoes, the silk scarf her mother had given her on their wedding day. Nadira herself was curled on the sofa, scrolling through her phone, as though nothing in the room required explanation.

"Who was the man at the hotel?" Arga asked. His voice came out quieter than he intended. "And the boy?"

Nadira exhaled through her nose—the long, weary sigh of a woman interrupted by something trivial.

"His name is Alif. He's the child I'm going to adopt." She didn't look up from the screen. "Rendra is helping me with the paperwork, because he actually has connections. Unlike you, who's always too busy with your own work to help with anything."

Arga stared at her. At this woman he had spent five years thinking of as home.

"Why am I only hearing about this now?" He kept his tone level, though his hands had curled into fists at his sides without his permission. "We're husband and wife, Nadira. A decision like that—we're supposed to make it together."

She stood then, finally, and zipped one of the suitcases closed with a sharp, decisive motion. When she looked at him, her face was cool and composed, like a pane of glass.

"That's the problem, Arga. You're too simple to understand what life actually requires." She pulled up the suitcase handle with a click. "Rendra can give me comfort. Connections. A future. What can you give me? Overtime and a pension?"

She didn't ask whether she could go. She simply told him she would be staying at Rendra's apartment for a while, and then she rolled her suitcases out the door, across the small tiled porch, and into the back of a car that had been waiting at the curb all along.

Arga didn't chase her.

He stood in the doorway until the sound of the engine faded into the ordinary noise of the neighborhood—a motorbike somewhere, a television, a dog barking at nothing. Then he went back inside and sat down in the living room, which suddenly felt like a room in someone else's house. The photographs on the wall were the same. The curtains were the same. Yet everything had shifted a few degrees off true, like a picture hung slightly crooked.

His phone vibrated on the table.

An unknown number. A single message, and beneath it, a photograph: Nadira and Rendra seated across from each other in a candlelit restaurant, her hand resting over his on the white tablecloth. The date stamped in the corner was three months old.

Arga read the message once. Then again. Then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder.

*Tomorrow, ten o'clock. Come to the notary's office on Jalan Sudirman. Bring your marriage certificate. If you want to know who your wife really is, don't be late.*

He set the phone down. Outside, the rain started again, soft against the roof.

For the first time in five years of marriage, Arga let himself ask the question he had always been too afraid to ask: had the woman he loved ever really loved him at all?