Home of Secrets

Liana got into the same car that her abductor had used to bring her to the horror she had just faced. This time a skinny man with so little to say was driving her. She didn't have a choice. Her mind shifted from the scene in the darkroom to her house. She had left her baby asleep in her room.

Her mother had just nagged about her single motherhood and fell asleep on the chair saying something about finding her a husband out in the streets. She most probably spent the night on the living room chair. Her dad wouldn't be coming back that night since it would be his first night shift since landing a job at DCI.

She tried to recreate how her daughter ended up in the hands of the bloodhounds. Did they do something to her mother?

"Buckle up"

Those were the only words he said. He would have said so much if she had the guts to ask the dreaded questions. Maybe she finally figured out she needed to ask him things. His face wasn't so suggestive of a mean person.

"Does it bother you that you work for such a man?"

He kept his eyes on the road. Those rural Kenyan roads that only one blink could send you swaying into the sidewalks. He ignored her question.

"Can he kill a child?"

He only turned slightly and showed her a smirked face then got back on the wheel. She couldn't help but think of all the things that were going on in his head. Maybe he would be killed if he said a thing.

Maybe he had signed a confidentiality contract. Maybe he just knew that the only thing that could save her and her baby was to do exactly as William had said.

"What does he want to do with the blood samples at the hospital?"

He got irritated, stopped the car and turned to her.

"You are going to do exactly as I say. We have 15km to drive. I'll be going at 120km/h and you will go at zero questions per second! When we get home, you'll be a normal girl from a party that went all night long and you don't know anything about what happened.

Remember, you tell anyone, she dies, and then you die. And that parcel contains the samples you'll swap for the ones at the lab. Do as I say and you will be safe. No Questions."

She got scared of his temper and sorry for enraging him at the same time. He looked like a nice man who had been pushed to the limit.

The car pulled over an hour later next to a series of rumbling flats off Mombasa road. She still couldn't connect where that hidden place was and why it didn't take them long to arrive home. She wondered how the driver knew exactly where her home was.

She was terrified but remembered she had to look as natural as possible. He got out of the car and opened the doors for her like a gentleman would. He looked her in the eyes and held her hand to the gate. She rang the bell and realized her fingers were shaky.

"Don't give yourself away. And remember you don't know where Sofi is."

Liana's mother opened the gate. She was terrified. She didn't know how to hide it from her, but she needed to know that her only daughter was kidnapped following a last night raid by people she didn't know. However, she couldn't hide her delight in what she was seeing.

Finally, her 35 years old daughter brought home a man. It was a sign that a wedding would be up next and she will soon be out of the house. That was all that mattered to her. But she brought him on a bad day.

A day that something wasn't in its place. He shook hands with Liana's mother with the courtesy of a gentleman then handed Liana what he called her gift.

"Here is my first gift to you princess."

He looked at the mother and daughter and smiled, like he was staring at the cluelessness of what amount of trouble she was in. Like he was trying to gauge how well they would fit in body bag if Liana dared to blurt anything out.

As soon as he drove away, she locked the gate and hugged her daughter while stroking her hair. Everyone knew something the other didn't and nobody had the guts to break their guard first. Then she looked at her in tears and told her the bad news wondering how her daughter would take it.

"They took Sofi"

She said and broke out sobbing. Liana didn't want to be dramatic. Normally she would faint thrice and cry herself to bed upon learning about that. She didn't want to go like "Who?" "Why?" "How?" when she knew the rest of the story. Liana knew it was time to collect her pieces together and come up with a solution. She took the parcel with her to her room, locked herself in and started brooding.

Liana rushed to the parking lot with her car keys in her hand. It was a strange way of going to work. Sofi would be here. She would be dressed in her new school uniform and she would drop her at the New Bloomfield academy.

She would whine about how her shoe pinches and ask when her dad was coming to school like other children's. She hated the denudating questions she would ask about her father, and she would play her the baby shark instrumentals in her car stereo all the way to school just to distract her, but she would again see a motorist and ask Liana if daddy was that good with motorbikes.

Sofi was her every reason for living. She was the only thing she got from the steamy affair she had with Mr. Lee; a married lawyer who had tried as much as possible to avoid legal proceedings regarding child support.

Sofi was the only reason she smiles when she thinks of the heartbreak that followed her discovery that Lee wasn't the Ultimate Bachelor he masqueraded as and that he had a wife and three children somewhere in Nauru. She was only a young girl out of medical school then and Lee had poised as the soul mate, father figure and Mr. Right every girl looked for.