Jade's eyes were fixed on him, amazed, but what could she possibly tell him that he did not already know? What part of her life was truly worth sharing when it had been laced with layers of sadness and pain up until this moment?
"What?" he asked, his spoon frozen midair. "Have you forgotten about yourself so quickly?"
Jade shook her head. "Not exactly," she replied. "I just don't know where to start."
"Start anywhere," he said, returning to his food. "Or start with the sad stories. I enjoy those."
At his words, Jade's expression immediately shifted to irritation. Now he was trying too hard to be intimidating by claiming he liked sad tales. Who even did that?
Anyway, Jade accepted the idea by telling him one of the saddest tales of her life, one that always haunted her so much that each time she remembered it, it was as though she were right there all over again. It was the first time their house was broken into. She was fourteen years old.
It was a night similar to the one she was kidnapped, raindrops clinging to the windows and thunder clapping in the distance. She hid in the bedroom with her mother, whose arms were wrapped around her, warm and comforting.
"It's okay," her mother said. "Don't worry."
Jade knew her mother meant every word, but she also knew that everything was not okay. Jade knew the house was not randomly broken into. She knew the men had something against Jade's father, though she could not explain what. While they hid upstairs, her father had gone down to confront them. There were no sounds of a fight, only a loud and violent conversation, voices raised against one another and unfortunately, none of it made sense to Jade.
Then, all of a sudden, a loud bang echoed through the house. It was a gunshot, immediately followed by the shattering of glass and then her father's scream. Her mother panicked and pulled away from her.
"Stay here," she ordered. "Do not come out of there, do you hear me?"
Her mother's words were final. She did not even wait for a response before dashing out the door leaving Jade behind, her chest rising and falling rapidly. She hated whatever was going on downstairs and feared that her parents might lose their lives trying to fight.
Soon, she stood from where she sat and approached the door, too scared to step outside yet too inquisitive to remain inside. With a gentle push, Jade stepped out of the room, she could hear her mother screaming while the men yelled at her to be quiet and all the while, her father was eerily silent, but she did not want to assume he was dead, not yet.
Soon she heard one of the men ask about her, so she ran back into the room before her mother could tell them she was not in the building, claiming the rain had prevented her from coming home yet. Sweat dripped from Jade's body as she silently prayed for everything to be okay. Unfortunately, the sound of a second gunshot was enough to tell her that nothing was okay.
This time there had been no screams, only silence, and in less than two minutes, she had heard the door open and then shut. It appeared the men had gone.
She had mustered the courage to step out again. This time she reached the stairs and descended slowly, one step at a time. With every step, she heard the faint sound of someone sobbing. She had wanted to hurry, but what if the men were still downstairs?
As soon as she had gotten low enough to catch a glimpse of who it was, Jade froze in place. For a moment she tried to process the sight, hoping it was not her mother lying in a pool of blood while her father sobbed beside her.
"Mom!" Her voice echoed, and her father turned immediately, locking eyes with her.
She downstairs, but her father did not let her touch her mother. He had caught her before she could stain herself with blood and carried her over his shoulder. She kicked and struggled, but he simply ignored her, not making a single attempt to calm her down. Without another word, her father rushed to the dining table, picked up the car keys he had left there, and dashed out of the house, tossed her into the car and drove straight to his parents' house, where Jade had spent three months without seeing him.
Years passed. She had come to understand a little more, but not enough. She learned that the men had known her father, at least from the conversations she had eavesdropped on, but never knew the details. Her father had stopped smiling after that incident, he locked doors obsessively and changed his phone a little too frequently. He had installed cameras at random, which only made Jade more suspicious of him rather than reassured.
The older she got, the more questions she had asked, but he never said anything other than, "It's business, dear," or, "Let us let the past be." So instinctively, she learned to stop asking.
She grew, went to university, and earned a degree in economics. When the job market had not favored her, she applied for cooking classes and was given the opportunity to meet Ann Becker, a renowned chef who had taken a liking to her and offered her a job at her café. That was where she had worked until she was kidnapped by the man who had no name.
Time moved quickly, and Jade believed the worst had already happened, but she was wrong.
A year ago, she witnessed everything. It was not a stormy night, there had been no rain, only a simple knock on the door. She had just returned from work and had prepared a quick dinner because her father could not, so her gaze fell on the door from the dining table, and so did her father's.
"Go to your room," he ordered, forgetting that he was no longer speaking to a fourteen-year-old but to a twenty-three-year-old. She stayed and just before he could speak again, the door opened. She could have sworn it had been locked.
Four men rushed in. They spotted her father first, then her, guns pointed in both directions while a man with a green beard ordered them to remain still.
"Leave her out of this," her father yelled.
The man with the green beard scoffed, looked in Jade's direction, and said, "She is grown, old enough to live on her own." The statement had been final and Jade had not fully understood what it meant until he had pulled the trigger, not once but three times, aiming directly at her father's chest.
Her father fell backward, his blood painting the couch as his body collapsed into it. Just as quickly as they had come, the men left, even politely closing the door behind them.
"There." Jade tried to smile beneath her tears as she narrated the tale to the man sitting before her. "That is my life, sir. The only good thing that has happened to me is that I went to school and became a cook, I suppose."
"Hmm." He nodded. There was no ounce of sympathy in his expression, and Jade did not expected any from a man who had bought a woman at an auction where women were sold, or from a man who ate breakfast beside a corpse.
"Tell me," he said, "Do you consider me buying you a good story or a bad one?"
Jade hesitated. It was bad, of course, but she could not say that, so she remained silent, looking at him until he broke the silence.
"You can go. Goodnight." Jade did not wasted another second. After all, she had been meaning to leave.