Three days before the partnership meeting at Suyasa Café.
Andini Suyama—a woman with a CEO title in an online dating company—stared at an Instagram profile on her phone. One of her employees. More precisely, her Head of Marketing, Melvin.
Melvin's public carousel showed fragments of his daily life—mostly arcades, late-night hangs, always with the same guy. The one who kept picking him up.
Angga Mahendra. The man who'd made his interest in Andini painfully obvious from the moment they met. Tonight felt like the peak of it. Andini was set to discuss a collaboration between NusaMatch and a board game café owned by Melvin's friend. Even though she'd mocked Melvin for suggesting a hotel meeting, the challenge of messing with Mahendra's nerves had its own appeal.
As noon slid toward afternoon, Andini thought about wandering around the house while replying to the flood of messages from Mahendra lighting up her phone. She clicked her tongue and turned back into her bedroom instead. Office notifications—admin, creative, finance, management, web dev—had been blowing up her iPad nonstop.
She'd just passed the mini home theater by the stairs and reached the living room when her eyes caught a door that was almost never opened. Her late mother's room. Rina Maharani Suyama. Since the woman she called Mama died along with the baby she was carrying—Andini's unborn brother—grief had settled deep in both father and daughter. Neither of them had dared to open that door.
What's the point of missing someone who didn't even want to be loved by her own family? Andini thought. She pushed the ache away, clinging to the version of truth reflected in her father Andre Suyama's face every weekend: Rina always dressed up, always picked up by a man—Andre's adopted older brother, Jason Suyama. The son her grandparents took in before Andre was even born.
"Non Dini?"
Andini turned. The image of her mother walking away with Uncle Jason still burned somewhere in her head, but she pulled herself back into a polite smile for the woman who had raised her.
"You're cleaning Mama's room now, Bi…?"
Aunt Margie lifted a plastic container about twenty centimeters tall, cradled in her arms. "It's your father's room we're tidying, Non. I'm just putting things here."
"I get that, but… why Mama's room?"
"Because it's the only room with nothing in it except the bed?" Aunt Margie wasn't wrong. Andini nodded and stepped aside so she could enter. Without looking back at her mother's room, Andini walked briskly toward the west wing—where the gym, the small library, and her father's room were.
She was about to knock on Andre's half-open door when his baritone voice froze her fist mid-air.
"I've always wondered if Angga will look like me when I was young, Yas—" Andre exhaled deeply before continuing, "—the same way Rina always saw herself in Andini. Is it really wrong if I just want to see my own child, even for a moment?"