what happened in a small town

part eleven

Question: Do we know everything?

I mean, do we look at the mistake we swore we wouldn’t make, the decision we promised ourselves we wouldn’t take, the step we shouldn’t have taken, the phone call we shouldn’t have made as if they were wrong in the first place, but we force ourselves to believe that we are right or that this is the only choice we have, or do we just not realize it until it happens and we suffer the consequences?

I think the mistake is very clear but we do it because there is something we want to achieve, and we convince ourselves that it is the only way to achieve it because giving up something you want and need is not something that all humans can do.

She doesn’t know how wrong she is at this moment but she can’t stop or doesn’t want to, she feels at this moment that this is her right, that she is not doing anything wrong that she is just enjoying eating some fruits that were picked in front of her eyes and had a friendly conversation with an ex-boyfriend whom she now calls her friend.

“I didn’t know Ethan’s agency was this bad.”

After he let her go, stopped cuddling her, and was assured that she was safe and sound and that the matter did not concern her, he asked her if he could sit with her on his property.

She smiled and was clever with the answer that clearly screamed that he could; otherwise, why would he think that she came here? In the hope that she would meet him and relieve her of the events of the day.

She avoided talking about why Joan was at the suspicious clinic, their bad encounter today, and what Anne had told her, asking her about work, neutral ground for conversation, or escaping from another conversation.

“I can understand that, he himself didn’t realize how bad his agency was.”

He pressed his head on her feet, preferring the laughter coming from him. His head ended up on her feet while he was eating an appetizing green apple, listening to her talk in an intimacy that he had not missed with all the previous events as if they were in a time capsule where this was their time together six years ago from now before his mother fabricated problems and the continuous work in which he was drowned, before the separation and escape, before everything.

“He always can’t get anything done.”
She swallowed the rest of her banana and looked down, shaking her head in disbelief. “I don’t think so. He just doesn’t know anything about advertising, marketing, and journalism, and he hires people who don’t have experience either.”

He hummed and the words rolled off his tongue without thinking. “Anne told me the agency is important, good, and big.”

She lost her appetite for a moment before finishing her banana, rolling her eyes in mockery. “Well, if you’re talking about the complex where the agency is, the high-rise building, the décor, and the furniture, it’s big and classy and good.” She sighed, revealing the true state of affairs that he was surely half aware of. “But inside, it’s drowning in the mud; no one in their right mind would go and give it their business, and every business that Mr. Segal forced his owner to give his authority to his son’s agency, he knew he would fail for and do it in return for a huge favor.”

“Did you find out this too?”
She tilted her head, her eyebrows quirking in amusement. “It doesn’t take a superhuman intelligence to figure that out.”

She moved her gaze to the garden that was drowning in the darkness night, its paths lit only by the lampposts that illuminated the entrance to the road and kept the rest in the dark, they were in the dark and this struck her to follow her speech with an explanation that they had been avoiding for the past hour. “But Anne did this to give me a message and I got it.”