Chapter 7 Natasha Bells

Her mother, he had said, had been a model.

And not just a small-town beauty. Or a local pageant winner. She had been a high-fashion magazine cover model, signed to one of the biggest modeling agencies in the world. Her name was Natasha Bells, and she had come to their village with a whole team of photographers and stylists for a three-month shoot. Bright lights in a place that had none. Foreign accents in a place where everyone spoke the same tongue.

And somehow, somehow, Natasha Bells had looked past all of that glamour and seen her old man.

Her father had been in his forties then, very focused on only his work and had no time for women or drama. As at then he had even thought he would die a single man.

Even though he had been quite handsome. He was tall. Broad-shouldered. And had looked younger than his actual age.

Still, he had been the last man on earth who would have expected a woman like Natasha, barely into her thirties, glossy as a magazine cover, to look twice at him.

But Natasha Bells was not the woman the world thought she was.

Behind the flashbulbs and the campaigns, she was a woman trapped. She had been married seven years to a rich, controlling man who treated her less like a wife and more like an asset on his balance sheet. He demanded more money for his political ambitions from her career.

He called her beautiful and empty in the same breath. He timed her calls. He tracked her whereabouts. He beat her when he was angry and paraded her when he was proud. She had never known love inside her own home, only management.

And her greatest sin, in his eyes, was that in ten years she had never given him a child. He called her a pretty barrel with nothing inside. He said it to her face. He said it in front of guests.

He punished her in ways that left bruises no makeup could really hide. Emotional hurt. She had practically been living inside a golden cage and had almost forgotten what kindness really felt like.

So when Natasha arrived in that quiet little village and met Alisha's father, a man who fetched water for her without being asked, who cooked for her with his own two hands, who pampered her simply because he had never seen anyone so beautiful and wanted her to feel comfortable, she had totally mistook his kindness for something else.

She fell.

Head over heels.

He had meant only to care for her the way he would have cared for a daughter. He had been a strong farmer then, with fields of green and cattle and dairy, a rich man in his corner of the world, and he had given her the very best of everything he had. Fresh milk in the mornings. Warm bread. Little things he thought might make her smile.

By the second month she had drawn him into her orbit. The first time they were intimate she conceived almost immediately. Two weeks later the test confirmed it.

Natasha Bells was pregnant.

She had wept with joy, a joy so wild it frightened her, because after seven barren years she had finally been given the one thing her husband had beaten her for lacking. But joy has a short life when it is built on a secret. She began to panic when she remembered her devil of a husband.

But her mind was made up. She was definitely keeping this baby even if the entire world went against her, so she decided to cook up lies to her husband on the phone when he began asking why she was not back yet.

She, alongside her very close pals who had traveled down with her, began inventing excuses to stay longer in the village. At some point her husband’s calls turned impatient, and then soon graduated into threats.

Then she stopped answering the phone. And her husband sent messages and in everything he promised ruin.

But she did not care and had cut off every line that connected to him. She had even walked away from the woman she had been.

And through all of it, her old man kept loving her, kept caring for her, kept believing that this beautiful, complicated woman had chosen him.

So he gave her everything he had: the best of his dairy, the softest blankets, the certainty that she was safe with him.

And then the day came finally.

The day Alisha was finally born.

Alisha.

The baby was born healthy. Natasha had held her and laughed and kissed her father's cheek and joked and eaten dinner with them and gone to bed like any happy woman.

When her old man opened his eyes the next morning, Natasha Bells was gone.

No note. No warning. No sound of a door.

Just an empty side of the bed, and a baby who did not yet know that her mother had simply abandoned her.

Her old man was still stumbling around in shock, still calling her name into empty rooms, still wondering what on earth to do with the tiny thing that was suddenly, entirely, his, when the news reached him.

Natasha's husband had arrived in the village.

He had come based on information and had already found her father's farm. He had already burned it down. He had already slaughtered all the cattle her father had raised from calves. His crops. His livestock were all gone in one single day.

And that was not all. The man was already asking, door to door, for the man who had kept his wife.

On the realization that the husband was coming for him next. Terrified that the secret of the child would surface, the old man did the only thing a father could do. He wrapped the infant in a blanket against his chest, took what little money he had left, and ran.

He ran until the fields turned to forest, and the forest turned to a small village.

He had found a small, hidden settlement deep in the woods, the place Alisha had always called home.

Her old man had thought that no man with money and rage would ever bother to find a quiet place such as this.

They had in fact settled in.

But the shock of Natasha's leaving, the humiliation of loving a woman who had used him like a cure and thrown him away like a wrapper, the helplessness against a fragile little baby who had not asked for this kind of life yet now lived in it, settled into his chest and never left.

His poor heart began to fail him, and was never the same again. His strength wavered drastically. His body seemed to age ten years in one as strength drained from his body. The tall, capable broad-shouldered farmer who once carried sacks of grain on his back began to move like a man twice his age.

Still he kept going. Still he fed her, clothed her, told her stories under the stars, and never once let her feel that she was a burden.

He worked with the little strength he had left. He learned to braid her hair with clumsy, patient fingers. He walked her to school himself every morning until his knees refused. And when he could no longer walk far, he sent her off with his blessing and waited by the door until she came home.

By the time she turned eighteen he had given her everything he had left to give.

That was the story he had finally told her the night before the accident.

Because for eighteen years, that broken old man carried her.

Until yesterday.

Alisha pressed her forehead harder against her knees, her whole body shaking now, silent sobs punching through her chest.

Papa, she thought. Papa, please. Please do not leave me here. Do not leave me alone. Please take me with you.

She cried and wished with every fibre of her being that she had been the one that had died instead.

She cried and begged the old man to come back and take her along with him.

But the beautiful room did not answer her.

Instead she heard the door creak open.

She lifted her tear-streaked face and stared at the person standing in the doorway.