Chapter 3: Building New Walls
The humidity was a physical presence, a thick blanket that Hana wore every day from the moment she stepped outside. By the sixth month, she’d grown accustomed to the constant sheen on her skin, the way her cotton dresses stuck to the small of her back. Her body was no longer her own; it was a vessel, a landscape of stretching skin and restless limbs. The baby was a vigorous, demanding tenant, kicking especially hard during her Malay lessons.
The tutor’s home was a dim, air-conditioned sanctuary, a stark contrast to the oppressive heat outside. Polished mahogany furniture gleamed in the low light, and faded Malay calligraphy scrolls hung on the walls, the intricate scripts looking like captured whispers. The scent of lemongrass tea lingered like a half-remembered secret.
“Cakap lagi sekali, Chloe,” the tutor, Puan Aisyah, would say gently, her hands folded in her lap. “Saya mengandung enam bulan.”
Hana would repeat, her tongue clumsy around the unfamiliar syllables. “Saya… mengandung… enam bulan.”
I am six months pregnant.
Each new word learned felt like another brick in the wall separating her from her old life with Xavier. The language was a fortress she was building, stone by stone, to keep that world out. She mastered the phrases for the market—berapa harganya? (how much is this?), boleh kurang sedikit? (can it be less?)—and the practicalities of appointments. But the emotional vocabulary, the words for loneliness, for fear, for a love that had curdled into a stubborn, painful resilience, those remained locked inside, untranslatable.
She hadn’t been looking for a job. She would, after she had given birth to the baby. The thought of navigating an interview with this belly, with this fabricated history as Chloe Tan, was overwhelming. Besides, Xavier had been very generous with her pay as his PA. The years of silent devotion had been financially rewarded, at least. She had a lot of savings, meticulously managed, that could let her survive for two, maybe three years without working. It was blood money, in a way, payment for services rendered that went far beyond scheduling and accounting. It bought her this anonymity, this time. She both cherished and resented every ringgit.
One blistering afternoon, she ventured out to the bustling street market near her apartment. The air was dense with the smells of frying shallots, exhaust fumes, and ripe fruit. She needed necessities: ginger for nausea, more loose-fitting clothes, coconut water. Her tote bag was slung across her chest, her sunglasses shielding her eyes. She moved with the cautious, wide-legged gait of the deeply pregnant, one hand instinctively cradling the curve of her belly.
Xavier saw her from fifteen meters away.
He was in Kuala Lumpur for a brutal seventy-two hours. A potential joint venture with a family-owned conglomerate required the personal touch. He was striding through the same market, flanked by two local associates, his mind already on the airport and the flight back to Singapore later that evening. The chaos was an irritant. Then a profile caught his eye—the slope of a shoulder, the dark hair twisted up in a casual knot, a certain precise tilt of the head.
His breath hitched. Hana.
A jolt, electric and painful, shot through him. It was her. It had to be. After months of radio silence, of calls going straight to voicemail, of emails bouncing back, here she was. In Malaysia, of all places. A furious, relieved triumph surged in his chest. She was following him. She must be. Her dramatic exit, her ultimatum—it was all just theatre. She couldn’t stay away.
He excused himself from his associates with a clipped, “One moment,” and began to move toward her, weaving through the crowd. He was already composing the words in his head. The stern admonishment. The faint praise for coming to her senses. The dismissal of her “little stunt.”
He was five meters away when she turned slightly to haggle with a vendor selling sarongs. The full profile of her body came into view.
The pregnant belly was a pronounced, undeniable dome under her simple blue dress.
Xavier stopped as if he’d walked into glass.
His eyes widened, taking in the shape of her. The vendor laughed, handing her a wrapped package. “Terima kasih, Chloe!” the man called out cheerfully.
Chloe.
The name was a bucket of cold water. He stared, disbelieving. The woman smiled—a tired, gentle smile that didn’t look like Hana’s efficient, polished grin—and thanked the vendor in halting Malay. She turned, and for a split second, her face was fully visible. There was a resemblance, sure. But it wasn’t her. The chin was wrong. The eyes were different. This was a stranger, a pregnant woman named Chloe.
He let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. A stupid mistake. A trick of the light and his own persistent, low-grade guilt. Of course Hana wasn’t here. She was back in New York, probably sulking in that minimalist apartment he paid for, her threats mostly empty words. She had quit as a protest, a final dramatic gesture. He knew her. He knew the rhythm of their lives. When he finally went back—after he’d secured things with Lily—and coaxed her, apologized in his way, she would return as always. She always did. She was his compass, resetting to true north no matter how far he wandered.
He turned on his heel, a flush of embarrassment heating his neck. He rejoined his waiting associates, brushing off their curious looks. “Thought I saw someone I knew. I was mistaken.”
Back in the air-conditioned tomb of his hotel room later, the encounter nagged at him. The resemblance had been uncanny. He poured a whiskey from the minibar and scrolled through his phone. Hana’s number was still blocked, her last text message a cold, professional outline of her resignation and the transfer of all her files. James’s number was next. James, who had been weirdly distant, who had outright disagreed with him when he’d called to vent about Hana’s “unreasonable” ultimatum.
He dialed. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
“James. It’s Xavier.” He kept his voice casual, breezy. “Look, I know you think I’m the villain here, but this is getting ridiculous. I’m in KL, of all places. Thought I saw her. Obviously didn’t.” He took a sip of whiskey. “Just… tell her to stop sulking and unblock my number on her phone. This is childish. I’ll be back in New York next month. We need to talk. Properly.”
He hung up, the assurance settling back into his bones. He had a city to win over in Singapore, a woman to gently pry from her marriage. Hana’s temporary absence was a management problem, a hiccup. She’d come back. She always did. He finished his drink and went back to reviewing the merger documents, pushing the image of the pregnant woman in the blue dress completely from his mind.
Across the city, Hana climbed the stairs to her apartment, her feet aching. She unpacked the sarong, the feel of the soft cotton soothing under her fingers. She poured a glass of water and stood at her window, looking out at the unfamiliar skyline.
Inside her, the baby turned, a slow, rolling wave. She placed her hands on her belly, feeling the hard curve of a foot or an elbow slide beneath her palm.
“Saya mengandung enam bulan,” she whispered to the darkening sky.
I am six months pregnant.
The words were no longer just a language lesson. They were a fact. A defiance. A wall, now high enough that the shadow of the past could no longer reach her. She felt a quiet, unshakeable certainty. He would never look for her here. Not in a million years. His world was glass towers and boardrooms. Not street markets and language tutors and a woman growing a new life under the name Chloe.
She smiled, a real one this time, tired and triumphant. The baby kicked again, a solid thump against her hand.
A hello. A promise. A heartbeat all her own.
A heartbeat all her own. That singular rhythm became her anchor through the final, swelling months. It was a secret drum she listened to every night with a cheap plastic Doppler, a sound proof against the silence of her new life. The birth was thirty-seven hours of primal, tearing reality that stripped away every remaining fiction, leaving only a raw, animal love in its wake.
They placed a squalling, red-faced boy on her chest. His hair was a shock of dark silk, his eyes squeezed tight against the bright world. The nurses commented on his perfect features, his strong lungs. But when he finally opened his eyes, blinking up at her with a deep, navy blue that would soon settle into a familiar hazel, Hana felt a surge of pure, undiluted relief. He looked exactly like her. Her chin, her nose, the specific arch of her brow. Only the set of his mouth, when he grimaced, held a ghost of someone else, but it was fleeting. She named him Leo.
Two years passed in a blink of sleepless nights and sun-drenched days.
James visited for the first time when Leo was four months old. He stood in the doorway of her modest apartment, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “Holy crap, Han. He’s… he’s a photocopy.” He sounded almost disappointed.
“Told you,” Hana said, shifting Leo on her hip. The baby studied James with serious eyes.
“Not a single trace?” James pressed, dropping his bag and holding out a hesitant finger for Leo to grab. “I was sort of expecting, I don’t know, a little trademark smirk or something.”
“He has my smirk,” Hana said firmly, turning to put the kettle on. “He’s just a happy baby. Do you want tea?”
The visits became a semi-annual ritual. James would arrive, always unannounced but always welcome, bearing extravagant toys Leo was too young for and stories from a world that felt like a previous life. He was her only tether, and for a while, he pulled too hard.
When Leo was eleven months old, James sat at her small kitchen table, watching her puree steamed carrots. “He should know, Hana. You have to tell him.”
“No.”
“It’s not fair. To Xavier, or to Leo.”
Hana spun around, the plastic spoon in her hand like a weapon. “Fair? You want to talk about fair?” Her voice was low, vicious. “Fair was me loving him quietly for two decades. Fair was him using me as a comfort while he wept for another woman. Fair was him telling me to resign if I couldn’t be ‘professional’ about my own heartbreak. He forfeited ‘fair.’ Leo is mine.”
“He’s looked for you,” James insisted, leaning forward. “He hired people, you know. After he came back from Singapore for good. It was… obsessive.”
A cold trickle of fear ran down her spine. “And?”
“And nothing came of it.” James looked away, a flicker of something hard and satisfied in his expression. “Chloe Tan doesn’t exist in any system that matters. The trail you left was basically a dead end wrapped in a ghost story. He hit walls. Every single time.”
She stared at him, understanding dawning. “You.”
“I might have… nudged a few inquiries in the wrong direction,” he admitted, not meeting her eyes. “A failed database search here, a misplaced report there. He thinks his investigators are incompetent.”
Hana felt a complicated gratitude, stained with shame. “James… you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Yeah, well, I did.” He finally looked at her. “But I’m not your conscience, Han. I’m your friend. And as your friend, I’m telling you this is a time bomb.”
She didn’t speak to him for three months after that. She blocked his number, buried herself in Leo’s first steps, his first words—Mama, never Dada. The silence from James felt like a limb removed. When he showed up on her doorstep again, rain-drenched and holding a wilting bunch of orchids, she let him in.
“I overstepped,” he said, the words sounding rehearsed and raw. “I’m sorry. My job is to be your friend, not your moral auditor. But it doesn’t mean I stop telling you about him. You deserve to know what you’re… what he’s becoming.”
So he told her. Over subsequent visits, the picture formed. Xavier had returned from Singapore empty-handed. Lily had, definitively, chosen her husband. The failure had cracked something in him. The easygoing charm James remembered had been burned away in a ruthless campaign of corporate acquisition. Xavier wasn’t just successful; he was predatory. He built an empire so vast and intimidating that rivals whispered he was the mafia of the business world.
“He’s colder,” James reported, bouncing Leo on his knee. “Zero patience. Fires people for a typo. The only language he understands now is growth. Market share. Obliteration.” He’d pause, choosing his words. “He still asks about you. Once, when he was really deep in a bottle, he told me he kept your last voicemail. The one about the dry cleaning. He listens to it.”
Hana would simply nod, swallowing the lump in her throat. She had found a job by then, a remote administrative assistant position for a tech startup based in Amsterdam. The hours were flexible, the pay modest, but it was hers. It paid for Ilyana.
Ilyana was a tired-eyed woman from two floors down, a single mother whose own child was in school all day. “I see you alone with the boy, miss,” she’d said in careful English at the building’s mailbox. “I am good with children. I need work.” It was a transaction born of mutual need, but it had grown into a quiet, respectful alliance. Ilyana looked after Leo in the mornings while Hana tackled emails and spreadsheets from her laptop at the kitchen table.
Her life now was a mosaic of these small, manageable pieces. Leo’s sticky hands and infectious laugh. Ilyana’s quiet reliability. The rhythmic ping of incoming work messages. The infrequent, anchoring visits from James with his fraught updates. She built her days around this new architecture, walling out the towering, shadowy silhouette of the past.
One afternoon, after Ilyana had taken Leo to the playground, James lounged on her sofa during a video call. He was back in New York, his face pixelated on her screen. “So get this,” he said, crunching on an apple. “The big man just acquired a massive chain of boutique hotels across Southeast Asia. Singapore, Thailand, Bali.”
Hana’s fingers stilled on her keyboard. “Malaysia?”
“Not yet. But it’s the obvious next move.” James’s voice turned serious. “His methods are… aggressive. If he decides to expand here, he won’t just be visiting. He’ll be digging in. Planting flags. Due diligence involves a lot of people, a lot of data.”
“I’m a ghost,” Hana said, more to convince herself than him.
“Ghosts can be found if someone shines a bright enough light.” He took another bite. “Just… keep your head down, Chloe Tan.”
After the call ended, Hana walked to the window. The rain trees swayed in the humid breeze. She thought of Xavier, not as the man she loved, but as the force of nature James described—relentless, consuming, capable of reshaping landscapes to his will. She thought of Leo in the playground, a tiny, joyful piece of her own heart, exposed and vulnerable.
The familiar fear twisted inside her, but it was met now by a newer, fiercer instinct. It wasn’t just about hiding anymore. It was about guarding. She had built this small, good life brick by brick, word by word, in a language he would never speak.
Leo’s laughter echoed from the corridor as Ilyana brought him back in, his cheeks pink from the sun. “Mama!” he chirped, arms outstretched.
She scooped him up, breathing in the scent of his hair—soap and sunshine and boy. He was her fingerprint, her mirror. Her perfect, living secret. The old rhythm of that other heartbeat was gone, replaced entirely by the steady, resolute pulse of the life she had chosen, the one she would protect at any cost.
The old rhythm of that other heartbeat was gone, replaced entirely by the steady, resolute pulse of the life she had chosen, the one she would protect at any cost.
Xavier’s world had calcified into something sleek and brutal.
At work, he was a weapon. His voice, once capable of warm persuasion, now sliced through conference calls with sterile precision. He eviscerated projections, dismantled arguments with a flick of his wrist. “Redo it,” he’d say, his tone devoid of inflection. “I don’t pay for mediocre.” The staff moved through the glass-walled offices like ghosts, whispering updates, afraid to meet his eyes. The scent in his office was no longer whiskey and Lily’s ghostly perfume; it was disinfectant and cold ambition.
He won. That was the only metric. Every acquisition, every hostile takeover, was a trophy stacked on the hollow altar of his success.
Nights in his penthouse were different. The silence there had a texture, thick and accusing. He’d pour a bourbon, the ice clinking a lonely rhythm against the crystal. The city sprawled below, a galaxy of indifferent lights. He’d stand at the floor-to-ceiling window, and the memory would ambush him.
Not of Lily. That ache had been polished into a dull, familiar artifact.
It was the memory of Hana’s face in his office that night, lit by the half-drawn blinds. The raw fracture in her voice when she said, “You need to choose.” He’d replayed it a thousand times. He’d dismissed it as emotional blackmail, a hysterical play from a woman who’d forgotten her place.
What if he’d put down the briefcase?
What if he’d walked around the desk instead of out the door?
What if, for once, he’d seen the person instead of the function she served? The questions were phantom limbs, itching with a sensation he couldn’t scratch.
He’d flown to Lily the very next day. A grand, desperate gesture. She’d met him for coffee in a brightly lit Orchard Road café, her wedding band a glaring declaration. “You have to stop this, Xavier,” she’d said, not unkindly. “My life is here. With him.” The finality in her eyes was the lock clicking shut. He’d flown back, emptied out.
His thumb would hover over his phone’s screen, over James’s name. That voicemail he’d left from Kuala Lumpur hung in the quiet. “Tell her to stop sulking and unblock my number… This is childish.” The arrogance of it now tasted like ash.
He’d called James a dozen times since. Straight to voicemail, always. James’s recorded voice was a time capsule from a friendlier past. “You know what to do. Beep.”
Last week, drunk on a Tuesday, he’d played his own message back. Hearing his own voice, so casually dismissive, so utterly blind to the crater he was standing on, had made him physically sick. He’d deleted it, then scrambled to recover it, a pathetic scramble in the tech trash folder. He kept it now, a digital selferdogation.
The Hana-shaped space in his universe had not remained empty. It had become a negative gravity, warping everything around it. His victories felt like ash. His solitude felt earned. The what-ifs grew teeth in the dark.
One evening, he didn’t pour a drink. He just stood in the center of his cavernous living room, the silence screaming. He pulled out his phone. He opened a new email. He typed in Hana’s old address, the one that always bounced back.
He wrote three words.
I was wrong.
He stared at them, the stark white letters on the blue screen burning his retinas. His finger trembled over the send icon. It was an impulse, a crack in the armor he’d spent years forging.
He deleted the message. Then he typed it again. He deleted it again.
He threw his phone across the room. It skittered across the polished concrete, slamming into the baseboard with a dull crack. The screen went black.
He was left with only the quiet and the voicemail, a monument to his failure, hanging unsaved in the digital air of a room too empty to hold it. The chill of the empty penthouse seeped into his bones, and for the first time, he wondered if this was all there would ever be.