Zara
Kerem. Ian. Both of you... my dear men:
I just found out about this pregnancy and the decision to continue with it. It wasn't part of the plan for Ian to find out so soon. Paris is beautiful, but to me it's just been a course of going back and forth between gagging and breaking down. I love this city, but in all this time, I haven't been able to think about anything other than my mixed feelings.
Once again, seeing you around me together has had an immense impact. You know how much I appreciate you and to divide myself between one and the other only gets my heart to pieces. In two pieces. Because everyone has their own.
My feelings are so strong for both of you in equal parts that I can't define it. What I'm sure of is that they are not the same. These are two ways of wanting totally different things in essence.
Of course, my greatest interest lies in the way that I wish things had never been like this, but rather differently. But do you know? I am grateful to have found you and to have the opportunity to experience such different loves at the same time.
They are a perfect complement to my life.
Not without the effects of guilt and mental torture that means from the first moment in my life: long nights with nightmares, the idea that I betray both of you and the expectation that you will ever understand me, which would be too much to ask, I know.
And I can't help but confess my reality:
The world that has been subjected to torture for weeks I know what I know. I'm pregnant.
Yes, it is real news, I would never have expected it, despite having taken some precautions, it has happened.
And I ask you to keep my doubts secret and discreet, but if something happens to me, I ask you to look for the answers that my son will need for his life.
Kerem, you are my husband and I would not leave you alone for anything. That's why I decided to continue my life by your side. But Ian, you always deserve the best, I can't be unfair and you deserve to find someone who makes you happy the day that it's not with me, that's why I can't tie you down either.
Kerem, you are the father of my son, but the truth is different: I'm not sure.
That is why I ask both of you, if at any time you come across this note and I, for whatever reason, cannot be the one to deliver it, look for the evidence.
And see that Ali grows up in the truth, something I was not capable of.
Ali deserves to be happy and to know his identity.
Ian, Kerem; I don't know which one is the father of my child.
I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, but that's how it is.
You have to investigate the truth.
I love you.
I love you both.
Now I must leave.
Destroy this letter, I am so sorry... Thank you for everything, always.
With love,
ZARA.
***
Kerem
"Mr? Mr. Deniz, are you still there?"
The words come to me like dull echoes that hit inside my head and try to make me fall back into reality.
I've been lying on the bed at home for a long time looking at the ceiling with my hands at the level of my throat.
I have squeezed hard, I have punched myself cleanly to calm down the torture that this situation means to me a bit, I have tried everything that has been coherent to me in order to calm the spiritual blood loss as little as possible (I can't find any other way to call it, is the name I gave this sensation) do not make my soul completely vanish.
"I-I know...?! Kerem?! Are you there? Please open."
Suddenly she adopts a personal tone. I never authorized Juliet to do such a thing. If it was Neville who gave her the order, it's because he was aware that that would make me end up listening to her.
Still, I can't.
I try, I swear I try, but there is no halo of life that allows me to react. Zara's note remains on the desk. What is this and why are there so many new sensations that invade me and it is so hard for me to explain?
There is silence for a few minutes until it is broken by a key that ends up circumventing the security of my room and the door opens.
It's her.
She has a copy of the key, Neville must have given it to her. At home there are copies of keys that are only available in spaces that I know, it is a habit since I was little. Mom asked me to always keep some space like this because she was afraid that a fit of dad's rage would cause a situation that could not be controlled and an extra key would always be the best alternative. In a place that only I can know.
As soon as Juliet appears inside my room, she closes the bedroom door behind her and watches me awake, looking at my chest. I am sure that the first thing she stops to observe when she discovers me motionless, is if I am breathing. Yes, here I am, but I can't even explain to myself how I achieved such a thing, because it seems that I don't even remember how to breathe correctly.
"Oh Kerem. You're fine," she assures.
I'm fine?
She sits next to me, sitting on the bed, and places her hand on top of mine, on my chest, at the level of my throat. She lowers my hand and incorporates hers.
"Does it hurt a lot?" she asks me. Calm. Calm...
I return my hand to hers and squeeze it hard. I don't know what kind of transformation I feel at the moment that contact finds us, but just one look on her part is enough for me to perceive it and know that I collapsed with horror.
Just her look is enough to know that she won't leave me alone, that she probably understands me. She has no idea what I'm going through, but her presence makes me feel like she understands me. Everyone in my family and everyone I have ever loved or appreciated ended up hurting me. They hurt me with supremacy and I know that tomorrow I will possibly regret deciding to believe in her once again
My eyes are impregnated with a thick, transparent layer, which moistens my eyelids and somewhat disfigures my image.
She also immediately shows that her eyes are watering.
"Jul..." I can't even say her name when my voice breaks, that knot in my chest seems to come out of my eyes and my voice in inconsolable crying.
"Oh Kerem. Kerem, calm down, let it be. Let yourself cry," she says, sitting up against my chest and hugging me tight.
"It... can't... be!" I say, my hair standing on end and with a brutal sensation of losing control of myself. "I'T CAN'T BE!!!"
"That's it. That's it..." she keeps hugging me tightly.
"THEY FUCKED MY LIFE!!! THEY RUINED ME!!!" my voice comes out charged with indignation and fury in dense quantities that boil throughout my bloodstream. "AAAAAHHHH!!!" I let out a throaty cry that tries to express or let out something in the destructive anger that walks in me.
She's still by my side, holding me tight.
Firm, unbreakable. She rests her head on my shoulder with her chest crossed and affirmed in mine, this time with the aim that her embrace has a greater strength so that my soul does not end up draining through the pipes of my spirit that manage to make me undo and it is completely empty.
Empty.
This is how I feel now.
But I can't stop it.
It's that destructive feeling that has settled in my head and in my heart and warns that she won't leave me alone.
Juliet remains hugging me for a moment longer until I finally manage to relax the tension a bit. Just a little, because I find it very difficult to control the disaster that sprouts from my pores like heavenly torture. Or hell.
"I loved her," I say with a small voice between sobs, the pain in my chest and the desire to scream or hit something with all my might. "I swear I loved her and I... I love her... But now I just feel immense hatred."
"Calm down," she tells me. It is understandable."
"No. It is not. Or at least tell me how, because I don't understand it. That person whom I loved is completely... different from the one that today, I hate with all my might."
"Don't hate her, Kerem. Hate is like a hot potato: it can only burn those who hold it. Don't hold that hot potato."
"When it is very hot...it softens and becomes a puree."
"Then make your hate puree."
"It seems to me...a horrible metaphor."
"I understand."
She whines and tries to smile at me, but neither of us comes out genuinely.
"I've rarely felt so bad," I declare. "But you, Juliet...now...you are a great help. One that I didn't have before and I really needed..."
"I'm not going to go. I will be here."
"Don't lie to me because you will leave. Everyone left and you only have a few days left here with us. We too must go and you...you will work with Massera. It is the job opportunity of your life. So don't lie to me too and tell me that you won't leave when I know for sure that you will."
Her lips form a line.
"We don't have to think about that," she says.
And she rests a kiss on my lips.
I don't know how long I've been locked in the room, but it's night outside and my arms wrap around her waist with our bodies facing the moon. A moon that laughs at my sorrows.
She remains wrapped in my arms until exhaustion and sleepiness, the consequence of a tense day, seems to finally arrive and not a pin turns outside.
I don't know how time has passed so fast...
I drag my hand to my phone on the nightstand and pretend to go directly to an image of her to see if I still feel the same or not.
However, the first thing I see on the screen is a recent email notification...
"Sir, we are in full investigation and we found something important that you should know, we suspect that it is just the beginning of something bigger regarding your wife."
And then an extra alert from the lawyers who handle one of my most important cases, that I have tried to ignore for the last time, an alert that leaves me brutally surprised, like a new slap that is hard for me to digest.
"Five weeks after the flight tragedy in the Rockies Mountains, two missing survivors are found, sheltering in an inhospitable town."
Flicker.
And I try to narrow my eyes to clarify.
Or am I hallucinating?
Or tears and burning make me see anything.
From the beginning of the investigation they assured that there were no survivors, to later discover that some bodies were missing and were considered charred after the explosion of one of the turbines.
And now it turns out that two people survived?