FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 3: THE FORGED SIGNATURE

Dimas Santoso's office was a cramped room above a photocopy shop in Rawamangun, its walls lined with binders and a framed law degree that had faded slightly in the afternoon sun. Arga had known him since high school. A few years ago, when an accident on duty had sent Arga and two colleagues to the hospital and the insurance company had tried to wriggle out of paying, it was Dimas who had fought for them—and won.

Now Dimas sat with his reading glasses pushed low on his nose, turning page after page of the copies Maya had given Arga. He didn't speak for a long time. Occasionally he made a small sound in the back of his throat, or tapped a line with the end of his pen.

"Well?" Arga said finally.

Dimas took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Some of these could become serious legal problems," he said. "If it's proven your signature was used without your consent, that's not a small thing, Ga." He squared the pages into a neat stack. "Here's what you do. Keep any originals you come across. Don't throw anything away. And don't sign a single thing—not a receipt, not a delivery slip—until we get an official explanation. Understood?"

Arga nodded.

Over the following days, Nadira called more and more often. Morning, noon, late at night. Sometimes she was coaxing; sometimes furious. The documents were just business, she insisted. Normal paperwork. Arga was making a mountain out of nothing because he was jealous of Rendra. Because he couldn't stand that another man was succeeding where he had failed.

Arga listened without interrupting. It surprised him how calm he felt. For the first time in their marriage, he was choosing to check the facts instead of trusting her promises, and the choice felt less like anger than like waking up.

"You really don't trust me? After five years?" Her voice cracked upward on the third night, sharp enough to make him hold the phone away from his ear. "I'm trying to build a future, Arga. A real one. And all you ever think about is your job and your salary that's never, ever enough."

As if every double shift had meant nothing. As if every time he had come home with burned forearms and still made her breakfast had simply evaporated.

"I never stopped you from growing, Nadira," he said quietly. "Not once. All I'm asking is that you don't use my name for something you won't even explain to me."

She began to say something about selfishness, about how he had always held her back, and he recognized the shape of the conversation—the way it always curved toward blame, round and round like water circling a drain. He ended the call before it could pull him under.

That night the house was too quiet to sleep in. Arga wandered from room to room and eventually found himself in front of the small desk in the corner of the bedroom where Nadira used to pack her online orders. He hesitated, hand hovering over the drawer. It felt like trespassing. Then he reminded himself whose signature had been forged, and opened it.

Beneath a stack of old receipts and a tangle of charging cables lay a brown envelope. Inside were copies of bank statements and payment receipts bearing the letterhead of Rendra's company. Arga sat down on the edge of the bed and went through them slowly, line by line, the way Dimas had.

Money had been flowing. Not trickling—flowing. Several transfers had gone into an account registered to Nadira's little batik company. One payment was marked as a down payment on a house in Cibubur, on the outskirts of the city.

A house. While he had been patching the leaking roof over their own heads with his own hands, because a repairman cost too much.

He didn't take the originals. He photographed each relevant page with his phone, placed everything back exactly as he'd found it, and called Dimas, even though it was nearly midnight.

"Don't move anything," Dimas said, his voice thick with sleep but instantly alert. "Write down the time you found it. Where it was. Don't alter a thing. If this goes further, the last thing we need is someone claiming you tampered with evidence."

Arga wrote it all down on the back of an electricity bill: *11:47 p.m. Bedroom desk, left drawer. Brown envelope.*

The next morning, while he was eating breakfast standing up at the kitchen counter, his phone lit up with notifications. Rendra Wijaya was holding a press conference to launch a new social program—support for children without families. Education, shelter, a brighter future for Indonesia's forgotten little ones.

Arga opened the video.

Rendra stood at a podium in a hotel ballroom, all warm smiles and polished vowels. And beside him, in a cream-colored blouse, stood Nadira. In the front row, his legs dangling from a chair too big for him, sat Alif in a tiny pressed shirt.

Within an hour the photos were everywhere. I*******m, X, the W******p group of Arga's own extended family. *Mulia sekali hatinya*, someone had commented under a picture of Nadira holding Alif's hand. *What a noble heart.* Hundreds of likes. Heart emojis. Prayers.

Arga stared at the screen. He waited for the anger to come—the hot, explosive kind that made men put their fists through walls. It didn't. What he felt instead was stranger and colder: a kind of vertigo. Here was his wife, presented to the world as a flawless woman of compassion, while at home she had never once given him the chance to understand the biggest decision of her life.

He thought of all the dinners she had skipped, saying she was too tired. All the weekends she'd spent "with friends." All the times he had asked if something was wrong and she had said *nothing, Mas, I'm fine*, and he had believed her, because believing her had been easier than the alternative.

He went to bed early that night, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with his body.

At 11:02 his phone buzzed. The same unknown number.

Just one sentence. It was enough to keep him awake until the call to prayer drifted across the rooftops at dawn.

*Ask Nadira why Alif's name has been showing up in company documents since two years ago.*

CHAPTER 4: THE SECRET BEHIND ALIF'S NAME

Arga didn't confront Nadira right away.

Years of entering burning buildings had taught him that charging blindly toward smoke was how men died. You assessed first. You found the source. So instead of calling his wife, he called the social institution named in the press materials from Rendra's conference and asked—politely, patiently—how an adoption was supposed to work.

The woman who answered had a kind voice and the slightly weary tone of someone who explained the same rules many times a day. Adoption, she told him, required assessments, home visits, approvals, and a legal process under the applicable regulations. It could take a long time. "Being close to a child doesn't automatically make someone the legal parent, Pak," she said. "No matter how much affection there is. The procedures exist to protect the child."

He thanked her and hung up, more confused than before.

If Nadira had only recently begun planning to adopt Alif, why had the boy's name been written into company documents two years ago? Two years. That was before Arga had ever heard the name Rendra Wijaya. Before Nadira had started coming home late and keeping her phone face down.

He asked Dimas to trace the source of the documents—properly, through legal channels. Nothing that could blow back on them.

Two days later, Dimas called. "There's a foundation," he said. "Yayasan Cahaya Harapan. It's tied to Rendra's social programs. A couple of years ago it received a large sum from his company." Paper rustled on his end of the line. "What's on record isn't enough to prove wrongdoing. But the activity reports and the amounts don't match. Not even close."

"So it's fraud."

"So it's a discrepancy," Dimas corrected firmly. "Listen to me, Ga. Don't go around saying that word until we can verify it. People like Rendra have lawyers who eat accusations like ours for breakfast."

That afternoon Arga finally agreed to meet Nadira at a café in Kemang. He arrived first and chose a table by the window. When she walked in twenty minutes late, she was not alone. Rendra followed a step behind her, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, nodding to the barista as if he owned the place. Perhaps he did.

It was a message, Arga realized. She was showing him she had no intention of hiding anything anymore.

"I'd like to speak with my wife alone," Arga said, before either of them sat down.

Rendra smiled and pulled out a chair. "There's nothing here that needs to be kept secret," he said, settling into it with an easy, proprietary sprawl. "We're all adults."

Arga didn't argue. He laid the copies on the table between the coffee cups and watched Nadira's eyes move across them. Her face changed—only slightly, a tightening at the corners of her mouth.

"Alif isn't just a child I want to help," she said at last. She slid her phone into her handbag with deliberate care. "I knew him long before you ever heard about him. And I have my own reasons for protecting him."

"Then tell me those reasons," Arga said, "without making me the last person on earth to find out." He leaned forward. "I'm not going to force you to tell me everything personal. That's yours. But when my name is involved, when our marriage is being dragged into this—I have a right to know."

His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.

Rendra leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, and looked at Arga the way one might look at a mechanic who'd been asked to perform surgery.

"With respect, Pak Arga, you don't understand the world we're dealing with," he said. "Some matters require quick decisions. And people who don't have—" he paused, choosing the word with care, "—the financial capacity, frankly, shouldn't get involved."

The sentence landed on the table like a slap. And in that moment Arga understood: Rendra didn't see him as a husband owed an explanation. He saw him as an obstacle. Something in the road. Something to be moved aside.

Before they left, Nadira admitted one more thing, almost reluctantly, as if it had slipped out before she could stop it. She had met Alif through a social project funded by Rendra. That was all she would say. When Arga asked what project, where, when, she shook her head and said he wouldn't understand.

She was right about one thing, Arga thought as he rode home on his motorbike through the evening traffic. He didn't understand.

The city crawled around him in a river of red taillights. At a stoplight near Mampang, a street vendor wove between the cars selling bottled water and tissues, and a little boy sat on the curb beside her, sorting coins into a plastic cup. Arga found himself staring at the child until the light turned green and the cars behind him began to honk.

Two years, he kept thinking. Two years of Alif's name in documents he'd never seen. Two years of Nadira knowing something and choosing, every single day, not to tell him. He tried to remember what their marriage had looked like back then. Had she seemed distracted? Had she started dressing differently, coming home later, laughing at messages he couldn't see? He couldn't remember. That was the worst part. He had been so busy trying to be a good husband that he had never stopped to notice whether he still had a wife.

By the time he turned into his own street, he was beginning to suspect that whatever lay hidden behind Alif's name was far larger than an affair.

He was reheating leftover rice when someone knocked at the front door.

It was nearly nine. He wasn't expecting anyone. He wiped his hands and went to look through the window. Beyond the low iron gate stood a young woman, perhaps twenty-five, clutching a small cloth bag to her chest. Under the yellow streetlight, her face was ashen.

For a moment Arga didn't move. Every instinct he had, honed on nights when a stranger at the door usually meant disaster, told him to be careful. Then he saw how tightly her knuckles were wrapped around the bag, how she kept shifting her weight as if ready to run, and he opened the gate.

"Pak Arga?" Her voice trembled. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty street, then back at him. "My name is Siska. I used to work at Yayasan Cahaya Harapan. I handled Alif's files."

She swallowed hard.

"Please. I need you to hear what I know—before it's too late."