FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 11: THE PRICE OF TRUTH

Once Arga was past the worst of it, the investigation into the company and the foundation kept moving—slowly, the way such things always moved, but forward.

Former employees gave their statements one after another. Siska. Ratna. A driver who had once been asked to deliver envelopes he was told not to open. Transactions were traced to find out where the money had gone and who had authorized it. The evidence pointed toward possible misuse of documents and reports that didn't match reality. But the legal conclusions, Dimas reminded everyone, would have to wait for the official process to run its course.

Meanwhile, Rendra Wijaya's world began to crack.

Business partners stepped back. Two companies suspended their joint ventures pending clarification. The foundation's board announced an internal review of how its social programs had been managed. Rendra issued a statement through his lawyers denying every allegation and insisting the truth would vindicate him. He did not appear in public. The press conferences stopped.

Nadira, too, had to face questioning, since her name was written across so many of the documents. She arrived at the investigators' office with her lawyer and handed over everything she had, including the letters she had once hidden from Arga in a desk drawer. When they asked about Rendra, she didn't try to lay all the blame at his feet. She could have. It would have been easier. But she had come to understand that some of those decisions had been her own—signatures given without a single question, because asking would have been inconvenient.

* * *

In the hospital, Arga slowly mended.

His colleagues came in shifts, bringing fried bananas, terrible coffee in plastic bags, and stories from the station—who had fallen asleep on night watch, which new recruit had backed the engine into a fruit stall. They filled his room with noise and laughter and the familiar smell of men who worked with smoke. Yoga came every single day, sometimes still in uniform.

Lying there, Arga realized he had always had another family. Not the one he'd built at home, which had come apart in his hands. This one. The people who ran toward danger beside him every time the siren sounded. He had never thought to count them as family before. He did now.

* * *

Lestari finally got the chance to meet Alif, under the supervision of a social worker from Pak Yusuf's agency.

The first meeting was short. Alif sat on a small chair in a playroom painted with clumsy suns and rainbows, gripping his red toy fire engine, watching this stranger with wary eyes. He didn't know who she was. He didn't understand why she kept smiling at him and wiping her cheeks at the same time.

Lestari didn't ask him to call her anything. Not Bibi. Not Tante. She simply sat on the floor at his level and opened a small photo album. "This is your Ayah," she said, pointing to Bima's grinning face. "He liked kites. And spicy noodles. And he loved you more than anything in the whole world." She spoke in short, simple words, the kind a five-year-old could hold on to.

Alif looked at the photograph for a long time. Then, very slowly, he reached out and touched it with one finger.

Nadira was there too, sitting quietly in a corner of the room as someone who had been close to Alif for a long time. She watched him lean toward the album. She watched him begin, little by little, to recognize something in the stories about his family. And she had to press her nails into her palms to keep from crying out loud.

Because she understood now. Loving a child gave her no right to stand between him and the blood ties that could still be restored. For the first time, Nadira chose to take one step back—for Alif's sake, not her own.

* * *

A few weeks later, Arga was home, walking with the help of a cane.

Nadira came by one evening with a folder of updates on the investigation. When she'd told him what she knew, she asked—carefully, as if each word might break—whether they could talk about their marriage.

He took her out to the front terrace. Two old rattan chairs sat side by side, the same chairs where, years ago, they used to sit on Sunday evenings talking about the future: the house they'd buy someday, the children they'd have, the trip to Lombok they never took. Before distance and lies changed everything between them.

"I'm not asking for us to go back to how we were," Nadira said quietly. "I just want to take responsibility for what I did. And accept your decision. Whatever it is." She stared out at the little yard as it slowly filled with darkness.

Arga was quiet for a long time. A gecko clicked somewhere on the wall. A neighbor's radio played dangdut, faint and far away.

"I don't hate you, Nadira," he said at last. "I want you to know that. I tried to, for a while. I couldn't." He turned the cane slowly in his hands. "But love by itself isn't enough to hold a marriage together once the trust is gone. We've been through too many lies to pretend it can all heal overnight."

She nodded. She didn't argue. Perhaps that was the clearest sign of how much she had changed.

They talked for a long time, late into the night, more honestly than they had in years. And when they finally rose from the rattan chairs, they had agreed on something: to consider separating—properly, with dignity—and to settle the legal matters without trying to destroy each other.

* * *

That night, after she had gone, Arga stood in the hallway looking at his firefighter's uniform, hanging on its hook beside the door where it had hung for five years.

His leg still ached. It would ache, the doctor said, for a long while yet. But something inside him had changed. The burning need to prove he was better than Rendra—richer, smarter, more worthy—was gone. He couldn't remember exactly when it had left.

He was beginning to understand that his worth had never been decided by who chose him. It would be decided by how he chose to live, now that he had been betrayed.