Finding Tine Teepakorn

Chapter 8: I want to believe in Tine, again

As I moved the boxes away to make space for the groceries, I came across a locker deep inside the cabinet — A safe with a fingerprint scanner and a number keypad on it.

"What the hell is this?"

Tine's POV

Inside the locker were bundles and bundles of cash — More money than I had ever seen in my whole damn life.

"Dammit, I knew you were rich old Tine. But seriously, this rich? Did you really sell your soul to the Devil or some thing. What did you even do with so much cash?"

I tried counting the money a bit, but quickly lost count when I realised it was way too much money that I could ever spend

"Wait, Max told me to pay in cash at the cafe yesterday. May be that's why old Tine kept most of his money in cash — to avoid being tracked. Oh god, this goes way too deep than I think it does, doesn't it?"

I moved the cash bundles on the side and checked the other things in the locker — a phone, a laptop, some documents marked confidential, and.. some polaroid pictures of Sarawat and me. Pictures that I didn't remember taking, so they were probably taken sometime before our breakup.

Looking at how happy Sarawat and I looked in the pictures, I couldn't help but regret how my life had turned out. "I don't know why you did all this old Tine, but I hate to break it to you — I don't think you made the right decision. You pushed him away and broke his heart. You were miserable and you made him even more miserable. I don't think it was worth it, at all."

I wiped off the tears that had unknowingly fallen on my cheeks and took out the phone and laptop from inside the locker. The old iPhone only had a few apps on it and it seemed like Tine mainly used it to contact Max, and someone called Tul. Where have I heard that name before? I think he was Max's coworker.

There were frequent phone calls made to Max's phone. There were also some messages exchanged — all of them brief and to the point, just to discuss the time to meet at the cafe.

Apart from Max and Tul, there were only a handful of contacts saved on the phone although I had never contacted them, at least not from this phone. It included my parents, Fong, and Sarawat.

I sat down right on the kitchen floor and started up the laptop, which thankfully had a fingerprint scanner just like the phone. The first thing I saw when the laptop opened up — was a blown up picture of Sarawat standing under the moonlight, looking right at the camera.

"That picture... That was taken at the college music festival last week. No I mean 3 years and one week ago. Dammit old Tine, you could at least try to pretend you didn't miss him so much."

I shook my head and looked inside old Tine's laptop. The first thing I found was a folder full of all legal documents, divided by every case and organized very meticulously. Every folder had details about the cases old Tine had handled, the main case documents, old Tine's personal notes about the case, and the videos from the court room.

I gasped right when I played the videos, one after the other. The person in them looked a lot like me, but didn't feel like me. I looked so refined, cold hearted, and brutal in the court room. I couldn't even recognize this man on the screen. If I wasn't completely sure I was an only child, I would have believed I had an evil twin.

I had finally understood why First was so scared of me and why he said I never smiled — because old Tine never did. He was cold, very cold.

There was another folder I found on the laptop marked as 'S' which was full of pictures of Sarawat. His old pictures from college where he was still happy and where he was still smiling.