Pieces of Us

Chapter 10

"Eda..." Serkan suddenly spoke, turning to his side to face Eda. "Are we ever gonna talk about what happened in Italy?"

"Hayır." She answered, still looking at the ceiling.

"Tamam." He sighed. "O zaman, let's talk about the house."

"Tamam." She answered, turning to her side to face him.

"Nasıl?" He directly asked.

"The day after I came to you..." Serkan clenched his jaw at the mention of this particular time, feeling the guilt of telling Eda to leave. "Ceren...she told me that you were selling the house."

"I couldn't bear to see it be sold to someone else...but at that time,  I didn't have that much money...so, Ferit bought it...under someone else's name so as to not leave any trail." She continued.

"Ferit?" He said in disbelief.

"Evet." She nodded. "He and Ceren didn't also want to see the house go so they decided to help me out. And after I got my first big project, I was able to buy it from Ferit...finally having it under my name."

"Then when I decided to move back here, I started doing the renovations...and here we are now." She added.

Serkan nodded, but then sighed. "Eda...I didn't mean to sell the house." He said.

"Biliyorum. Ceren explained it to me...you didn't want to do it, but you had to." She sighed before putting on a forced smile. "Ama it's all in the past now..." However, her smile didn't match the pain in her voice, and this made Serkan look at her with sadness to which she looked away from.

"What's important is that we're doing better for Kiraz." She noted, looking back at him as he nodded in response.

Eda was about to turn back to her back when she stopped midway and turned to face Serkan again. "Bu arada, çok teşekkür ederim for picking up Kiraz." She smiled at him sincerely.

"I was so busy with the move that the time slipped through my mind, then I left my phone in the car so I wasn't able to hear any calls." Eda rambled, but suddenly she realized something. "Wait, didn't you have a meeting during that time?" She asked.

"Evet." He answered.

"Did you cancel the meeting?" She asked, shock in her voice.

"Yok, I couldn't. I was about to leave when the client arrived. I just passed them to Engin and told them I couldn't be in meeting then left."

"Hayır ya..." She said in disbelief.

"I'm pretty sure they're not happy that I wasn't able to meet them since they came all the way from America to just have a meeting with me in person." He said as a joke.

"Çok özür dilerim. Çok çok özür dilerim."

"There's no need to be sorry, Eda."

"But the meeting—"

"...is just a meeting." He cut her off. "There will be other more opportunities."

"It's their loss." She said confidently. "O zaman, I'm just really glad that, that morning, I added you as an emergency contact at Kiraz's school." Eda admitted, shyly smiling at him.

"Is that why they called me?" He asked, surprised.

"Evet."

"I thought that they googled my name to get my phone number." He said, making Eda laugh.

As Eda's laughter died, she smiled at Serkan. "Gerçekten, çok teşekkür ederim, Serkan."

He only smiled back at her, silence engulfing them. The atmosphere started to warm up around them as the scent of the cherry blossom candle surrounded the room with their eyes locked at each other, unable to look anywhere else.