Losing Echoes [Complete]

7. Torn

Flashbacks are in bold*

Silence often has a noise of its own. The shrieking questions which bore into someone mind. The calculation of what was and what is, the possibility of impossible. There's a storm ensued but on the surface everything is calm, composed, and ordinary. That's the language of silence and it is often louder than the words said, excruciating than the spoken.

Harram couldn't remember for how long she was standing there in that alley. Her mind was devoid of anything coherent; still she could feel it buzzing with questions. The still air around them was forming into an eerie silence, the kind which reminds you of narrow paths, graveyards and the bushes. Waleed hadn't said anything, he was giving her the time to process the possibility he'd just told her about.

She'd opened her mouth to say something, may be ask a question but then she had closed it. Her forehead was scrunching in an expression of being hit by lightning, as if she was under some kind of spell.

The voice of footfalls had broken into the silence and Waleed immediately straightened. Pulling his shades back on he gave Harram a knowing look and ran into the narrow passage on the side of the house they were standing in front of. Harram opened her mouth to ask him to stop but words were surely betraying her after what he had told her.

"Madam, I've been looking for you."

Shahab reached her side and looked around.

"It is not safe to be roaming at this time. Please, get back."

The poor man was pleading her. It was the question of his job. Harram nodded and started following him towards the familiar path leading to Duraid House.

"Did you see your husband's body, Mrs. Zaviyar?"

The question was booming in her ears and she had no hope of tuning it out.

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When she got back home she was relieved to know no one had any idea where she'd been to. There was no one in the living room which was a good thing. She had no stamina to talk to anyone right now. Her hand was slipping on the wooden railing as she was going up the stairs. The duppata had dropped to her shoulders and hair were sticking out of her bun but she cared less. Getting straight to her room she locked the door behind her and slumped to the floor.

She had gone through the soul shattering reality three weeks back that the pillar of her existence was gone. It didn't come easy to her. She had lost a part of herself in accepting that her husband wouldn't be here with her and for as long as she was alive. For past few weeks she was surrounded by his memories and a losing echo of his being. She hadn't accepted that he wouldn't come back ever but she was getting there.

And now out of the blue, a man who claimed himself to be a coworker of her husband was stating that there was suspicion around his death. That there might be a slight chance that, things weren't as they were looking. She couldn't even let herself to explicitly call what he was implying, even in her mind. That'd be too good to be true and truth was right in front of her at this very moment.

That hint in Zaviyar's last letter, the note, his car keys and then that suspicious key he was asking her to protect, his phone call to her father and now this? Was it all making a pattern or she was reading too much into the lines? And what was the surety that Major Waleed wasn't wrong? Did he have any substantial proof to back his claim? What if all this was nothing but just the doing of a messed up mind and at the end she'd be still left heartbroken and vulnerable even more than before?