Too Little, Too Late

28

Ayra was seated at the dining table in the kitchen when the clock struck midnight and the calendar date moved from Thursday, August 12th to Friday, August 13th. It had only been a full day since Bella and Ibrahim left but with the discoveries Ayra had made and with the emotional numbness she felt, it felt as though it had been years.

Her eyes were still a little swollen and the dark circles underneath were even more prominent. She'd only bathed because of the blood she was losing and her hair had never been so messy; curls tangled slightly as she'd been so unmotivated to even run a wide toothed comb through them. The nightdress she wore was long, reaching her ankles with sleeves that stopped at her elbows. For the first time in so long, her lips were dry and were on their way to being chapped.

In front of her, on the top of the table, was her laptop. Displayed on the screen were minimised browser windows, all of them displaying every single social media page – from Instagram all the way to LinkedIn – of Serkan Yilmaz; the man Bella had introduced as her lover.

The longer she stared at the displayed pages, the more Ayra wondered if things would have gotten this far had she not trusted Bella and the others so blindly. If she'd gone ahead back then to try to find him out online, it would have told her that there were things that didn't quite add up.

Serkan Yilmaz was a real person and he was the same man Ayra had seen on the day of her and Ibrahim's Nikkah; the same man who winked at Bella before disappearing. Unlike all she thought and all she was told, Serkan Yilmaz was a married man with two daughters he clearly loved more than anything.

Like Bella had said, he was Turkish but he wasn't based there and neither was his family – both nuclear and extended. They were all based in Europe and unlike what Bella said the first time Ayra went down to the apartment on the eighth floor, Serkan Yilmaz was not a software developer neither did he like tech as much as the squad did. He'd tweeted about it so many times because his wife – Aliana – was into coding.

Serkan Yilmaz was into banking and finance and he was very accomplished in that area. He dabbled in acting too, getting little roles as a way to unwind. It told Ayra all she needed to know as to how he'd been able to step into the shoes of the real Serkan and play it out really well based on the very little she knew.

Taking in all that was opened, Ayra closed most of the windows and maximised Serkan Yilmaz's Instagram page. She scrolled down, to a photo that had been taken in May 2019; mere months before the first time Ibrahim claimed to have stumbled upon her picture on the same social media platform.

In that particular post, Serkan, his wife – Aliana, and the entire Hexad squad stood with their arms around each other's shoulders and wide smiles on their faces. Bella stood between her two Serkans: the real Serkan who was Ibrahim and the Serkan that played the role of her lover perfectly well, fooling both Ayra and Ibtihaj.

Ayra snipped the photo with her laptop's snipping tool and then uploaded the saved photo to her Google drive, placing it in the same folder that now held the footage from the foyer and pictures of every other discovery she'd made. Going through all the posts once again, she closed Serkan Yilmaz's page and pulled up Bella's and Ibrahim's; putting them side by side and scrolling through both simultaneously. In the mental puzzle sheet that was spread out in her head, more pieces fell into place.

Side by side, Ibrahim and Bella's posts told a story of people who'd been together for a very long time; pictures complimenting each other in a way that wouldn't be noticeable if the person scrolling through didn't have both pages open side by side the way Ayra did. She couldn't help but smile bitterly as she saw how she'd liked each and every post on both pages, oblivious like most people in the world to both Ibrahim and Bella telling everyone codedly that they were together.