FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 8: THE MASK OF RENDRA WIJAYA

The new evidence came from a woman named Ratna, a former finance officer at Rendra's company, who agreed to meet Dimas only in the food court of a crowded mall, where the clatter of a hundred conversations swallowed theirs.

She brought a flash drive and a thick envelope. The documents inside showed that several of the foundation's transactions didn't match its reported social activities. Money marked for school supplies had gone somewhere else. Money for shelter renovations had gone somewhere else. And the forged power of attorney bearing Arga's name had been used to support an application for a partnership deal—lending the project the respectability of a married couple and a firefighter's clean public record.

"It's not enough to say who's responsible," Dimas told Arga afterward, spreading the papers across his desk. "Not yet. But it's enough to hand to the authorities. Enough to make them look."

Arga stared at the pages for a long time.

"I don't want this to turn into a personal war," he said at last. "I don't want to destroy anyone. I just want my name back. And I want that boy safe."

"Then we do it by the book."

So they did. Arga gave Dimas the copies and asked him to file the report through the proper procedure, including a formal request to investigate the suspected use of a signature without consent. Dimas warned him the legal process could drag on for months, maybe longer. "And be ready for pressure," he added. "Men like Rendra have resources. They don't just sit and wait."

The pressure came sooner than either of them expected.

Three days later, an anonymous post appeared on social media. It accused Arga of sabotaging a children's charity out of spite and of trying to profit from Nadira's adoption plans. Attached was a photograph of Arga at a fire scene, helmet under his arm, face blackened and exhausted—stripped of all context so that he looked sullen, even menacing. Within hours, it had been shared thousands of times. Accounts with no profile pictures piled on. *Suami iri*, they called him. The jealous husband. Threatened by a successful wife. Bitter. Small.

At the station, his colleagues began fielding calls from strangers—reporters, or people pretending to be reporters. Some of the men at other posts believed what they read. Others, the ones who had stood beside him on rooftops and inside collapsing stairwells, closed ranks around him without being asked.

"They don't know you, Mas," Yoga said, slamming his locker so hard it rattled. "Anyone who's worked with you for one week knows this is garbage."

Arga was grateful for it, more than he could say. But it still hurt—in a way physical injuries never did, a slow, sour ache under his ribs. And still he didn't strike back. He could have. He had the photograph from the restaurant. He knew about the lie about Bandung, the house in Cibubur. One post of his own, and the internet would have turned on Nadira like a pack of dogs.

He didn't do it.

"You have to defend yourself," Dimas said that evening, finding him sitting silently in front of his phone. "I'm not saying air every problem in your marriage. You don't have to tell the world anything about Nadira. But the evidence that involves your name has to be handled officially. Silence isn't the same as innocence, Ga. Not online."

Arga considered this for a long moment. Outside the window, the evening call to prayer rose from the mosque at the end of the street, and he waited until it faded before he answered.

"All right," he said. "But only what's mine. I won't drag her through the mud with me."

Dimas nodded slowly, as if that was exactly the answer he'd expected.

The next morning he went to the police with Dimas and filed a formal report regarding the suspected unauthorized use of his signature. He handed over every document he had gathered. He also saved screenshots of every post attacking him—not to retaliate, he told Dimas, but so a lawyer could judge whether any of it crossed the line into something that should be reported too.

* * *

Meanwhile, something was shifting in Nadira.

She had begun to question Rendra—small questions at first, then larger ones. When she asked to see copies of the foundation's documents relating to Alif, she expected a shrug, a promise to send them over. Instead, Rendra's face darkened.

"After everything I've done for you?" he snapped. "The apartment. The car. The project you're so proud of. You think those came from nowhere?"

He said it as though every kindness had been a loan. As though help were a debt to be repaid in obedience.

A week later she went to his office on the thirty-second floor. She had rehearsed what to say in the elevator, but when she stood in front of his glass desk, her voice still came out smaller than she wanted.

"I only want to make sure Alif's documents are correct," she said. Then she made herself straighten. "If everything's clean, Rendra, you wouldn't need to get angry every time I ask a question."

It was a courage she hadn't known she possessed—one that had only appeared after she'd seen Arga's evidence laid out across a dining table under a single lamp.

Rendra regarded her for a long time. The city glittered behind him. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft and pleasant, and somehow that was worse than shouting.

"I made a mistake," he said. "I thought you were smarter than your husband."

Then he told her, very calmly, that if she continued to have any contact with Arga, he would withdraw all financial support from the project she had been running. Every rupiah. Her name would be finished in this city.

She thought of Arga in the hospital three years ago, his arm in a sling, telling her not to worry about the bills because he'd work extra shifts once he healed. He had never once reminded her of what he gave. He had never kept score. Rendra, she realized now, had been keeping score from the very first day—every dinner, every gift, every introduction to someone important, written into an invisible ledger she was only now being asked to settle.

Nadira walked out of his office on trembling legs. In the elevator she held on to the brass rail and watched the floor numbers count down, thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty, like a fuse burning toward something.

But this time—for the first time—she didn't do as she was told.