Chapter 68

                                    

                                          
*
"Don't lie to me, Afrah," he said the moment she began to shake her head. "No more lies."
                          
Trembling all over, Adnan leapt of the rock. He couldn't sit still anymore. Not for a single second. His thoughts were all over the place, and his mind was numb from moving so quickly. 
                          
Afrah meanwhile was trying to stem her tears. Of all the ways she'd imagined the truth finally coming out, she had never thought that Adnan might guess it for himself. He'd caught her off-guard with the question, and even before she could arrange a comprehensible answer, the mere shock in her eyes had given it away. 
                          
She couldn't look him in the eye now. Not when he knew what she'd been hiding her entire life. The truth would surely break him. No man could live with the knowledge that his father was the vilest of creatures. 
                          
"How old were you?" Adnan asked, his voice on the edge of breaking. Afrah shook her head, shaking violently as the tears kept flowing. 
                          
"How old were you, Afrah?" he asked, gritting his teeth. 
                          
"Nine," she replied.
                          
Adnan swore loudly, turning to face the sea as his anger bubbled underneath. He was silent for several minutes, and when he spoke, he sounded nothing like himself. 
                          
"I'm going to kill him," he said. "I've hated him ever since I knew what it meant to hate someone. But now, for what he did to you, I'm going to rid this earth of his presence once and for all."
                          
"Adnan," Afrah tried to speak, but her throat tightened and the words refused to come out. Instead she gagged, hurling the contents of her stomach onto the sand. Adnan was beside her in an instant, pulling the straw hat off her head and rubbing her back in slow, circular motions. 
                          
"I'm sorry," he kept saying over and over again. "I'm so sorry."
                          
When Afrah calmed down a bit, he hurried to the shop and returned with two bottled waters, a mat, two cokes and some cookies. 
                          
They left the rocks, walking further and further into the beach until they reached a small cliff where the tide was low and they could skirt across to the other side. There were no tourists here, and the sound of the ones they'd left behind was drowned out by the noise of the water beating against the bedrock. Adnan set the mat down here, sitting beside Afrah and resting his head on her shoulder while she drank copious amounts of water. The cliff behind was their shield from the sun, and he'd set the mat so they could lean back on a small rock behind them. 
                          
"I'm sorry you had to go through that," he said. "And I'm sorry it was him. I'm sorry it has to be anyone in fact."
                          
"It's not your fault," she said, happy that the tears were finally slowing down. She felt lighter, for some reason she couldn't understand. Maybe it was because she'd carried this secret for eleven years without telling a soul. The burden had weighed heavily on her shoulders, and now that Adnan knew it felt like her problems had been halved. It didn't matter that he felt slightly awkward being close to her. That would come to pass. She'd been awkward around him at first too, until she came to understand that he was a far cry from his vile father. 
                          
And that was just one of the reasons why she loved him. 
                          
"I think I suspected it a long time ago," he said, grabbing a fistful of the sand and letting it go slowly. "I should have figured it out sooner."
                          
"How so?" Afrah asked, surprised that she had the voice to speak even now. 
                          
"I noticed how you've never said my surname before," he said. "You don't even call junior by his name. And all those times you'd flinch when you looked at me. I thought maybe there was just something about me that reminded you of him. But I couldn't bring myself to ask you what it was. I came close to figuring out it was him though. Once."