Sir, do you need a maid? I can do anything – my daughter is starving.” I froze when the woman looked up. It was my wife, missing for two years, our one-year-old child sleeping soundly in her arms.

Sir, do you need a maid? I can do anything—my daughter is starving.” The woman stood beneath the awning outside my hotel, soaked by November rain, clutching a sleeping child against her chest.
I almost walked past her.

Then she lifted her face.

The world stopped.

“Lena?”
Her lips trembled. A bruise yellowed one cheek. Her hair had been hacked short, and the elegant woman who had vanished two years earlier looked twenty years older.