AFTER

AFTER

I woke the following morning wondering how I had gotten into my bed. Memories of the day before assailed me and despair hit me all over again like a flower in full bloom.

I closed my eyes as tears filled them. I was too damn emotional for a man. I squeezed my eyelids, feeling the pain flare up behind them. I sighed and opened them again. All around me, traces of Aretha had all but vanished. The matching golden filigree bedside lamps she bought, the two gilt high backed chairs in front of the bed, the pure cotton bedsheets she favored over the silk one's I preferred. Even her clothes, shoes and all of her ornaments, every single item, I had given to charity.

They were a painful reminder of what was meant to be, but wasn't.

My eyes widened when they fell on the curtains.

Who in their right mind would agree to have sunshiny yellow curtains?

Aretha, that's who.

She had always loved the colour yellow. Not just any shade of yellow. It had to be the exact shade of the sun - yellow with strains of burnt orange mixed into it.

I groaned and shut my eyes, once more willing the memories to stop. The strain of squeezing my eyes shut caused a headache to flare up. I opened them once again and they settled on the backdrop behind the curtains. Leaves, green and vibrant with dewy drops on each one, gaped at me. The quintessential evergreen forest.

Aretha's choice, yet again.

That had to go.

I clapped my hands and I heard the whir of the gears as it flipped, changing to another backdrop. I smiled as I saw the replacement. Snow-capped mountains topped with high peaks and sleek mounds.

That's better.

But the feeling only lasted for a few minutes, and it was back to the clawing despair in my chest.

"Wake up, Aretha."

"Good morning, Alex, what can I get you?" She came into view. A humanoid robot with a weight of eighty pounds of steel, Aluminium and Kevlar, equipped to carry on a conversation of human intelligence in three different languages. It was also equipped to carry and fetch things.

Believe me when I say it didn't come cheap.

"Go get my morning tea from the cook, and don't spill it."

"I will try not to, Alex." She replied before walking away.

I lay on my bed and tried not to think of Aretha. When I first got the robot, it was actually a gift for her. She would spend hours talking to it about anything and everything. When she asked me what name we should call it, I told her it was entirely in her hands.

I came back from work one day to see her referring to herself in the third person. I was shocked to know she had given the robot her own name. In order not to confuse them, she named it Aretha 2.

"I am sorry for your loss, Alex." The robot appeared by my bedside, a few minutes later, startling me.

When had it become this silent?

I realized I must have been too deep in thought to notice her arrival. It held a tea cup in it's hand and a newspaper in the other.

I collected the cup filed with tea and put it on the bedside table, then I snatched the newspaper from it's hand and threw it to the other side of the bed. I didn't need to see my face splashed all over the front page. I had already seen it all over the news on four different channels. That was enough for me.

"Does it hurt?"

I looked up to see the robot still standing by my bedside and looking at me. "Does what hurt?"

It blinked, those human look-alike eyes that seemed to see straight into my soul. "The death of Aretha1, my best friend."

I sighed, resisting the urge to tell it to go to hell. "I don't want to talk about it, please let me be."

"But you need to talk about it, Alex, bottling up your feelings will only make things worse for you."

Anger surged through me as I raised my forefinger in the air, but then it dropped limply to the bed. It was only a robot made to converse. It was just doing what it was meant to do. After all, it had watched me tending to Aretha all the while she was sick.

But I couldn't deal with any more talk of Aretha and her passing. What I needed was peace. I also needed to be left alone. I got up and opened up a section of its head where all the information lay in a microchip, and switched it off.

"Goodbye, Alex." It said before shutting down.

"Goodbye." I replied, already exhausted from talking too much.

I stared balefully at the tea cup I had placed on the bedside table. I didn't feel like drinking its contents anymore.

I took a shower and got dressed. Then I called Eric and told him to bring the car to the front. I had a business that needed me now more than ever.

*

As I walked into the employee's work area, slack jaws and open mouths assailed me. Most of them stood halfway and followed me with their eyes.

I walked to the middle and turned, anger surging through me. "Is there no one here who has manners? Did you all forget them at home?"

"I. . . I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore." A man standing close to me started. "We weren't expecting to see you at the office."

"And why is that?" I knew exactly why he had said it but I still wanted him to say it out loud.

That was if he dared to.

I think common sense took over them all, because choruses of good morning filled the air. I nodded and walked off towards my office. Hardly had I gotten inside when the door opened and a gasp echoed.

"So it's true?"

I walked to my chair, removed my jacket and draped it on it before addressing the person. "Good morning to you, Kelly,."

"What are you doing here? You should be at home mourning your wife who was buried just two days ago."

"I thought you quit? What are you still doing hanging around and giving me motivational speeches?" I fired back.

"People are talking, you know, they say it's not right for you to be here so soon after your wife's death."

The number of times I had gotten angry this morning, sailed through my mind, but I couldn't help the emotion when it came once again. "Exceva is literally the only thing that can save thousands of people from an untimely death, so I need to make sure it's perfected and up to standard. Aretha is already dead and buried, I don't need to moon around for the dead." I opened a file on my desk and began flipping through it. "Now go make yourself useful and get some work done. Oh, and em. . . tell Eric to get ready to take me to the lab."

I knew my words sounded cold and indifferent, but no one except me knew how much I suffered from Aretha's death.

A steely gaze took over her soft features. "This is not you. You've become a cold, unfeeling bastard, Mr. Moore."

She turned on her heels and walked out of my office, banging the door in the process.

Some time later, I found myself at my lab and the same shocked looks from my employees there. I was already over it. I walked through security, nodding curtly as they stammered out greetings. Luckily, no paparazzi had assailed me at the gate. That's probably because I gave Hugo some of my clothes to wear in order for him to paint the town red by visiting different bars.

So the tabloids were going crazy, painting me as a reckless, heartless bastard with no morals whatsoever.

That suited me just fine.

I placed my key card against the door and it beeped me in.

All around, employees, hard at work in various postures, stopped what they were doing and gaped at me, shock lining every corner of their faces. No doubt, the news must have gotten to them as well.

Simon broke away from his post and approached me. "Good morning, Mr. Moore, please accept my condo-"

"What's the progress with Exceva?" I cut him shut with a wave of my hand as I kept walking towards the section of the lab where I knew the solution that would eventually become Exceva was.

He jogged to catch up with me. From the corner of my eyes, I noticed a splash of red had risen on his checks but it quickly faded. "As you know, we changed the other compound which was unstable to thymoquinone because we found out it had hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory, and -"

"Antioxidant properties. Yes, I know. Tell me something I don't know." I stopped directly in front of the shelves where the final solution was bottled.

If this thymoquinone remained stable with the other compounds in the solution, then I had on my hands a miracle working drug that would beat cancer in the early stages without causing any long or short term effect to the human body.

The solution had first been injected into rabbits with early stage cancer and it had stopped the growth. Next, we tried it out on monkeys who had been injected with cancers cells, and the solution had also stopped the growth.

We had yet to try it out on any human being, but I was informed by the team yesterday that we already had ten men willing to be injected with the solution. They had been diagnosed with cancer and it was still in its early stage. I already knew without a doubt, it would work.

As Simon reeled off the other reasons, I looked round at the lab.

This is it, Aretha, it's coming to life. You did this, baby, but you're not even here to see it coming to life.

"- Mr. Moore, Mr. Moore, can you hear me?"

As if from far away, I heard Simon call my name. I blinked and his face came into view. "Yeah. . . yes, I heard you, I just. . .good work, Simon. So when do you think we can send it to the manufacturing section?"

He squinted his eyes in thought. "All things being equal, if Thymoquinone keeps behaving itself, two weeks, tops, and in a month's time, we would have Exceva ready for the world."

He beamed proudly and I managed a smile. I was happy I had hired him. His expertise as head molecular biologist was invaluable. Infact, my whole team was highly invaluable.

My joy was however tainted when I remembered how I had messed up last week with the Department of justice's drug enforcement administration.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, startling me out of my thoughts. "Yes, Kelly, what is it?"

"I just got off the phone with Mr. Hendricks. He said the DEA will give you a second chance. In his exact words - Don't fuck it up this time around."

"Good job, Kelly, you'll get a raise at the end of the month." But she had already cut the call.

Bitch!