Year: 2044
Two decades earlier, I had walked away from investment banking — not out of burnout, but something closer to survival.
I gave up the drinking, the gambling, the women, the cigars.
I started lecturing instead, believing that knowledge was cleaner than risk.
I taught others how to grow their portfolios, how to manage wealth.
But I never taught anyone what happens when your moral debts come due.
Kuala Lumpur hadn’t changed.
The city still clung to the ghost of the 1997 Tom Yam Crisis, like a man clinging to a suit that no longer fit.
The skyline evolved, but the alleys hadn’t.
They stayed exactly the same.
It wasn’t the city that haunted me.
It was what I had left behind inside it.
A call came.
“Daddy, how was the farewell? When will you join us in the UK?”
My daughters’ voices were warm, excited, distant.
Two AI specialists with brilliant minds and compassionate hearts.
Proof that something in me had gone right.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Soon,” I said. “Just tying up loose ends.”
But that wasn’t true.
I wasn’t delaying for logistics.
I was delaying because something in me was still looking for a door I had once closed too quickly.
A part of me feared that if I looked too closely into the past, I’d see what I had broken — and that it might be looking back.
My wife was long gone — not dead, just emotionally extinct.
The house we once shared was now a quiet, air-conditioned museum.
I walked the streets instead.
And then I saw it.
A street I hadn’t been on in nearly two decades.
Neon signage buzzed overhead, casting a sickly pink hue on pavement wet with humidity.
It shouldn’t have drawn me in.
But some part of me moved before my conscience caught up.
The building hadn’t changed.
The door creaked in the same tone.
Inside, the walls wore the same perfume of cheap air freshener and cologne.
And the girls — they were young, eager, and already hiding behind the smiles they would wear out.
Then I saw her.
Short. Shy. Chinese.
Not like the others.
She wasn’t advertising herself.
She looked like she had just arrived.
And something about her eyes — the way they flicked up, then down, like she was afraid to look too long — unlocked a part of me I thought I had buried.
She looked like someone I once knew.
Not exactly. But enough to make the air thicken.
The agent caught my hesitation.
“You sure, old man?”
“Just want to talk,” I said. Then, trying to mask the weight in my voice, I added with a crooked grin,
“I can still do it five times a day, you know.”
He barked a laugh.
“Right. Talk. Just don’t keel over on me, old cock. I don’t want a body in my shop. Slow down.”
He laughed again.
“They all say that.”
We sat.
She said her name was YinYan, from Chongqing.
Her voice was soft, deliberate, untouched by the jaded tone of the others.
It felt like talking to someone before the fall. Before the trade.
“You’re kind,” she said after a pause. “Most men don’t talk much. They just want.”
That line stayed with me.
Not because it was rare — but because I remembered someone else saying it once, long ago.
And I had ignored it.
I don’t know what I was looking for that night.
Closure?
A memory?
Maybe a mirror.
Or maybe forgiveness I hadn’t earned, and couldn’t ask for.
What I didn’t know — what I couldn’t know — was that this night would be the start of something far darker.
That this innocent conversation, this attempt at nostalgia, would set in motion a slow spiral.
Twenty years from now, I would meet her daughter.
Or maybe… my own.
And realize what I had truly done.
Author’s Notes
?? Can I ask you something?
What percentage of men do you think…
have had an affair or paid for sex at least once?
Most say 10%.
Some say 30%.
?? But the truth?
It’s closer to 70%.
Shocking?
But this story isn’t about judgement.
It’s about confession.
- Rowan Sun 2025
