The light in the bathroom has always been too annoying but today the way in reflected over those two pink lines made Elena wants to.screem. To anyone else, it was just an object but to Elena,it was a death sentence for her peace of mind. Two pink lines, was he going to accept it or reject it her entire fate depends on the phone call she was going to make.
The TV was playing the muffled sounds of a cartoon downstairs. Their five-year-old daughter, Maya, was safely occupied, blissfully unaware that her mother's world had just shifted on its axis, somethings are about to change.
Though Maya wanted a baby brother or sister but her father was another thing.
To her the news might be meaningful bit to the family and home things might
change.
Elena's hands shook as she pressed the phone to her ear. She waited, counting the rings, her heart thumping against her ribs like a trapped drum.
When the line finally clicked open, she didn't even wait for a
"hello."
"I took a test," she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears.
"I'm pregnant again."
There was a long, suffocating pause. When Tom finally spoke, there was no joy, no concern, not even a hint of surprise. There was only a sharp, jagged edge of irritation. Ad she needed not to be told, she didn't dare listen but she forced herself to hear from him his answers.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah... why?" his voice rasped through the line.
"Why are you people always stressing me out? How did you get pregnant? Weren't you taking care of that?"
Elena felt the air leave her lungs as if she'd been punched.
"Taking care of it? TOM, we were
together. This isn't just on me."
"I took the pills yes, but it just didn't work, what am i supposed to do!" Elena said, feeling irritation and beginning to question whether she was blind or mentally ill to love a man like Tom.
"I can't deal with this right now," he snapped, his tone
dismissive, as if she were a telemarketer calling at dinner time.
"You need to know what to do. Figure it out."
Before she could scream, before she could even breathe, the line went dead.
Elena stared at the screen in disbelief. 'You people.' She replayed the words in her mind. He had talked to her as if she and their daughter were a collective burden, an external problem he was tired of solving.
"Haha, are we now considered 'you people'? Hehee was this fate playing tricks on me or something? No no no! Somebody wake me up, somebody wake me up! Did he just tell me that? A man who has been sleeping beside me for 6 years. Someone to tell me that I am not watching Chinese dramas because I might go crazy. Or wait, are we on a filming set, but I am not an actor.," Elena said to herself, passing from point to point, praying that everything should be a lie.
"Okay, he is going to call me in a few minutes, let me relax, calm dawn, Elena calm dawn, you are alright and he didnt mean it, nothing has happened," Elana didn't realize how much unstable she has become, the didn't realize she was crying, a mother of now two and discarded? No it was all but a dream.
She slowly walked to the top of the stairs, looking down at Maya. The little girl was the image of her father the same stubborn chin, the same deep-set eyes.
Elena felt a wave of nausea, but it wasn't caused by pregnancy. She came toto the realization that she was bound to a man who could throw away her emotions with a single click.
Little did Elena know, Tom wasn't in a business meeting or stuck in traffic.
At that very moment, he was sliding his phone into his pocket and turning back to a candlelit table at a restaurant across town.
How painful this betrayal is, the woman by the name Sandra, who has been working with Tom has his project manager the very woman that, he has been comparing Elena with was the very woman, he has been seeing.
"Hallo darling, how are you," she hugged him and said in a seductive voice.
"Not good at all," he said.
"Don't tell me it's that woman again, and here I thought you were going to abandon me tonight, " she said with a smile behaving like a snake, what's wrong with this woman.
"Hey, darling when are you going to make us official? Because honestly I am tired of hiding in the shadows, it's been 4 years now, tell me, what else are you waiting for, don't tell me that it's that woman?" Sanndra said. To her she didn't know why Elena was clinging to something that is already broken.
She is not loved and therefore she should create that space for her.
"Soon darling soon, everything is going to be in place, but my daughter, " he said.
"What is it that you are afraid of don't forget that the girl in question is not even yours," she said.
'what the hell is happening did they betray Elena?'
"But she saw me and thinks that I am the father, furthermore I was the one with her that night, drinking with her," he said.
"But you sold her off to that man, and furthermore that man will not come looking for you or something, he gave you money that this girl has been enjoying together with the mother, darling you are not guilty, all I want right now is to do away with her," Sandra said.
Tom offered a charming smile to the woman sitting opposite him a woman who wore silk instead of cotton, and
who didn't have the "stress" of a family waiting at home
The betrayal had already begun. Tom had hung up on his past, hoping to bury it. But Elena, standing at the top of those stairs, felt a new kind of strength hardening her heart.
If he wanted to be free of the "stress," she would make sure he
never had the privilege of calling them his family again.