FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 5: THE WOMAN WHO VANISHED

Siska sat on the edge of the sofa with both hands wrapped around a glass of warm tea she hadn't touched. Her fingers were shaking so badly that the tea trembled at the rim.

Arga sat across from her and waited. He had seen this kind of shaking before—in people pulled from smoke, in mothers waiting outside hospital doors. It wasn't cold. It was fear, finally allowed to surface.

"Alif used to live at a shelter," she began. "A rumah singgah in North Jakarta. Then he was transferred to a facility run by Pak Rendra's foundation." She looked down at the tea. "Bu Nadira did come to visit him. Several times. But her visits were never recorded as part of a formal adoption. Not like the news is saying."

"Then what were they recorded as?"

"Sponsor visits." She shook her head. "Nothing that gave her any legal standing."

She told him the rest haltingly, as though each fact had to be pried loose. Two years earlier, the foundation had received a report about a little boy who had lost his family. According to the intake form, it had been a road accident. Soon after, his file was moved to a special administrative section—a locked cabinet only senior staff could open—and several important pages disappeared from the archive that ordinary employees like Siska could see.

"I don't know who ordered it," she said. "I swear I don't. But I remember the cover letter that came with the transfer." She lifted her eyes to his. "Bu Nadira's name was on it."

Arga sat back. The ceiling fan ticked overhead.

"Why are you only coming forward now?" he asked, not unkindly. He had already looked her over the way he'd been trained to: no visible injuries, breathing fast but steady. She didn't need a hospital. She needed someone to believe her. "If you have important information, we have to take it through the proper channels. Otherwise you could end up in danger. And so could Alif."

"I was afraid of losing my job," Siska whispered. "Afraid for my safety." She pressed her lips together. "I only found the courage after I heard your name was being used in the company's documents. Because then I knew—you're being made part of something you don't know anything about. Just like I was."

Arga reached for his phone and called Dimas. Within the hour his old friend was sitting at the dining table in rumpled clothes, a legal pad in front of him, gently taking Siska through her story from the beginning. He asked for dates. Names. Who had keys to the cabinet. He wrote everything down.

When she finished, Dimas set down his pen. "Information from a former employee needs to be verified," he said. "Especially when it concerns a child's identity and rights. So let's agree on something now, all three of us." He looked from Siska to Arga. "No one contacts Alif directly. No one posts anything about him, anywhere. That boy should not become a casualty of a fight between grown-ups."

Arga nodded. Siska, eyes wet, nodded too.

The next day, Dimas arranged a meeting with an official at the child protection agency, a soft-spoken man named Pak Yusuf who listened more than he talked. From his initial review, they learned that Alif's status had never been verified, and there was no evidence that Nadira had completed—or even properly begun—any adoption process.

And there was something else. Two years ago, a family had filed a report about a missing child. A boy named Alif.

Pak Yusuf turned a file around so they could read it.

Arga went very still.

According to the record, Alif's father had worked for a contracting company caught up in a massive warehouse fire in an industrial zone in Bekasi. Not a road accident. A fire.

Arga knew that fire. He had been there. It was the operation in which he had lost one of his own—Fajar, who had gone back for a trapped worker and never came out.

The memory rose in him like heat off asphalt. A night thick with black smoke. Sirens bouncing off corrugated steel walls. And a man—Arga could still see him—a man with a bleeding forehead, clutching at the arm of every firefighter who passed, screaming at them to find his family. *Anak saya! Anak saya masih di sana!* My son! My son is still in there!

Arga had no way of knowing whether that man was Alif's father. But the date and location on the report were too close to dismiss. And for the first time, the work Nadira had always brushed aside as a pointless distraction—his "little hobby with the hoses," as she'd once called it at a family dinner, to laughter—was threading itself straight into the mystery in front of him.

Before the meeting ended, Siska drew an envelope from her cloth bag. Inside was a photocopy of an old letter that had once been kept in the foundation's files. It was brief and formal. It stated that Alif had living relatives, and that a request to reunite them had been submitted. Beneath that, in someone else's handwriting, a single word: *Ditunda.* Postponed.

No reason given.

Arga handed the letter to Dimas so it could be followed up officially. His hand, he noticed, was not quite steady. Somewhere, a family had asked to see their child, and someone had decided, with one word and no signature, that they could wait.

That night he dragged a cardboard box out from under his bed. He kept everything—every operation log, every incident summary, every list he'd ever been handed at the end of a long shift. He told himself it was habit. Nadira had called it hoarding.

He found the Bekasi file near the bottom, its edges soft from the humidity. He turned the pages under the lamp, scanning the names of victims and witnesses, workers accounted for and workers not.

Then his finger stopped.

His heart began to pound so hard he could hear it in his ears.

*Bima Mahendra.* Alif's father. The man who had begged Arga's team for help that night—and then, before anyone could take his statement, vanished from the scene without a trace.