The Adopted Son: Revenge

2

**Chapter 2**  

**The House That Still Remembered Him**

Raka did not leave the house that same night. It took three days before he finally packed his things, and during those three days not a single one of his eight older siblings asked why he locked himself in his room, why he did not come down for meals, or why his coughs at night sounded heavier than usual.

What finally made him leave was not Bu Wiratmi, nor Bimo. It was Mbak Wulan, who knocked on his door that morning with a face already prepared to look full of consideration.

“Raka, I’ve spoken with the others,” she said, standing at the threshold, not coming in. “We think you need time to find your own direction. This room is actually going to be used as Bimo’s workspace.”

Raka looked at her for a moment. “I understand, Mbak.”

He did not ask why the decision had been made so quickly, only three days after Bimo’s arrival. He had known the answer for a long time—someone who never demanded anything would always be the first person asked to leave, because everyone knew he would not fight back.

All he took was one backpack. Enough clothes, his laptop, and the brown envelope containing the lab results he had not opened again since that day.

---

Wening Asih Orphanage had not changed much in fifteen years. The paint was still the same faded green, the iron fence was still rusted at the bottom, and the mango tree in the front yard had grown much taller than he remembered, yet the bench remained in the same place, under the same shade.

The one who opened the door was Mbah Darmo, whose hair had turned far whiter, but the way he looked at someone was still exactly the same—as if he was seeing something that had been lost and was now found again.

“Raka?” His voice trembled. “Raka, is this really you?”

Raka did not have time to answer before Mbah Darmo had already pulled him inside, calling his wife from the kitchen, “Bune! Bune, look who’s here!”

Nek Sum came out with hands still wet from washing dishes, and the moment she saw Raka’s face, she immediately covered her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes glistening without any attempt to hide it.

“You’ve gotten so thin,” she said after hugging him for a long time—too long for someone who usually kept her distance. “What have you been eating all this time in that house?”

Raka did not answer the question literally. He only smiled, the first smile that did not feel forced in the last three days. “May I stay here for a while, Nek?”

“Stay?” Mbah Darmo cut in, pretending to be stern even though his eyes were still wet. “This is your home. Why are you even asking?”

That night they ate together at the long table usually used by the orphanage children, though now it only held five of them—far fewer than Raka remembered. The dinner was simple—fried tempeh, clear vegetable soup, and still-warm rice—yet somehow it felt far more filling than the luxurious dinners he used to finish alone in the large Wiratama dining room, at a table that could seat twelve but was usually occupied only by him.

In the middle of the meal, the kitchen door opened and a girl walked in carrying a plastic shopping bag, her hair tied carelessly, her face slightly sweaty.

“Nek, I already bought—” She stopped the moment she saw Raka. Her eyes narrowed, as if assessing him. “Who’s this?”

“This is Raka,” Nek Sum said. “He used to live here, before he was adopted by that rich family. You probably weren’t even born yet, Ajeng.”

Ajeng—the girl—set her shopping bag down on the table a little too hard, then sat in the empty chair without being invited, staring at Raka with an expression that was hard to read, a mixture of suspicion and indifference.

“So why are you back here now? Did the rich family already get bored of you?”

“Ajeng,” Mbah Darmo scolded, “be polite to guests.”

“I’m just asking,” she said, looking completely unapologetic. But then she pushed the side-dish plate toward Raka—a small gesture that contradicted her tone. “Eat a lot. Looks like you haven’t been eating properly in that rich house.”

Raka held back a smile. “Thank you.”

“It’s not for you,” the girl quickly added. “It’s just uncomfortable having a skinny guest like this in our house.”

---

That night, after everyone had gone to sleep, Raka sat alone on the orphanage porch, looking out at the dark yard lit only by a single yellow lamp flickering at the end of the fence. He took the brown envelope out of his backpack and opened it for the first time since the day at the hospital, rereading the numbers and medical terms he did not fully understand but understood enough to know what they meant.

He had not decided whether he would tell anyone. Maybe he would not tell anyone at all, at least not now, not when everything still felt too new to explain calmly.

He also did not yet know what would happen with the other emails he had not canceled—the agreements with the distributors, the financing access, all the networks he had quietly maintained for a family that had not even bothered to ask how he was before telling him to leave. But that night, sitting on the porch with peeling paint, with the sound of crickets and the occasional bark of a neighbor’s dog as the only background, he felt something he had not felt for a long time in that large, high-walled house.

He felt allowed to be tired.

The sound of footsteps made him turn. Ajeng stood at the doorway, holding two glasses of warm tea, one of them held out toward him without much talk.

“Can’t sleep?” Raka asked.

“Just normal,” she answered, sitting on the porch floor a little distance away from him. “I heard someone outside and thought it was a thief.”

They sat in silence for a while. No one rushed to fill the quiet with small talk.

“Kakak,” Ajeng finally said, looking toward the yard rather than at him, “if the family over there is really as bad as Nek Sum used to tell me, why aren’t you angry at all?”

Raka stared at his glass of tea for a long time before answering.

“Who said I’m not angry?”

Ajeng turned her head, and for the first time since they met, her expression was neither suspicious nor sharp, but something closer to honest curiosity.

Raka did not continue his sentence that night. But far away in the city, at the head office of Wiratama Group, a procurement manager was staring at his computer screen with a pale face, reading the cancellation email from the packaging vendor that had always given them special prices—a contract that, he only now realized, had never been registered under the company’s name, but under the personal name of someone who had been thrown out of that house three days earlier without anyone bothering to ask why.