The price of wealth

As Eden was walking in the hospital's hallway, passing through numerous hospital wards, his mind was only fixed on one thing - The key.

He kept on tossing the key from one hand to another, with different thoughts running through his mind.

Thinking about everything that had happened to him in the last thirty minutes was enough to give him a migraine, but at the same time, he couldn't stop thinking about them. The more he thought about it, the louder the bang in his head sounded.

Everything was weird, so weird to him, and he'd have loved a full bottle of the strongest alcohol at that moment.

Eden could swear that he had been walking for so many minutes, but he was still in the hospital, his eyes taking in every detail of the hospital, the walls, the wards, and nurses - nurses that took pleasure in looking at him in a funny way, or was he the one overthinking it? He didn't know, and he didn't care either.

Eden just wanted to get home, and bury his face into a bucket of water.

That sounded suicidal, but that was really what he wanted - what he needed, at that moment.

A few seconds later, Eden did it! He succeeded in walking through the never ending hallway, and he was finally outside the hospital, trying to balance his breathing.

Ever since Arnold gave him the key, his heart had been beating in a way that it had never done. It was weird, very weird to Eden, but what was even weirder, was the way he was breathing.

If he continued breathing that way for a few more seconds, then he would have definitely been admitted into the hospital that he just walked out from.

"What just happened?" He asked himself.

With the look a pregnant woman, who was trying to climb the little step at the entrance of the hospital, gave him, Eden was sure that she thought he was talking to her.

"Have a safe delivery!" Eden said, trying to lighten the struggling woman's mood. The middle-aged pregnant woman stopped trying to push through the pain to climb the step, and she just stopped to stare properly at Eden.

"I still have three weeks to go, you weird man. You should quit talking to yourself and help me!" The woman said, and Eden was taken aback. He had thought that she was a sweet, pregnant woman that needed his help. Now that she straightforwardly asked for his help, he decided that he wasn't going to help her.

As Eden walked past her, his right shoulder almost clashing with hers, the woman continued calling after him.

Nobody would have known that she was calling Eden though, because she kept on chanting "weird man, help me!"

Does anybody bear the name, weird man? No.

After leaving a safe distance between him and the rude, pregnant lady, he stopped in his tracks, to stare at the key again. The whole thing was still looking like a big dream. Even though the dream was so overwhelming for him, it was one that he never actually wants to wake up from.

The man had told him that he deserved it, so maybe, just maybe, the dying man giving him the key was a way the universe wanted to compensate him for...everything? Eden wasn't sure, but if that was the way the universe wanted it, then he was all up for it!

Eden got home fifty-five minutes later, and just like he expected, he was welcomed by his mother-in-law's screams. The moment she set her eyes on him, she started screaming at him, like she was bitten by a dog and he was the cause of it.

He didn't have an issue with that, because his mind was focused on only one thing.

The key. The key to his happiness.

Before doing anything at all, he made sure he kept the key safely, because he couldn't risk losing the key at all. If he did, then he was so sure that he was going to lose himself too.

"Eden!" "Eden!" "Eden!" His mother-in-law screamed his name from outside his room, and after making sure that the key was out of sight and properly kept, he rushed outside, thinking that she was hurt or something even worse.

When he got out, he wasn't surprised to find her laying on a chair, while preparing to call him again. She had wanted him to help with a remote that was not up to a foot away from her.

Staring at the maid, who was standing beside his mother-in-law with a huge fan, blowing air into his 'mother-in-law's skull', as she liked to call it, he picked the remote and handed it to her, with his lips left in a thin, straight line.

*********************

For the second time in thirty minutes, Eden's stomach growled again, but this time, it was louder.

"Are you sure we can't get any more food to eat tonight, El?" He asked Elaine, whose head was casually resting on his weak shoulder.

Elaine gave a small shrug, not knowing what to say to his question. Well, it was more like her mouth was too tired to even speak.

Seeing that Elaine didn't know what to do either, he let out a small sigh, his mind immediately drifting towards the key that was safely kept in the cellophane bag, at the bottom of his clothes.

That was the only place that he knew nobody cared about, so he was sure that his key was okay there.

That night, Eden already planned to sneak into the kitchen and steal some food for him and El, because he was sure that if he didn't do that, they would probably die of hunger before dawn breaks.

*****************

Eden let out a loud yawn, as he opened his eyes. However, he had to close them back immediately, because of the bright rays of sunlight that quietly poured through the slightly dusty windows.

He tapped Elaine's side of the bed, but he saw nothing but a rumpled sheet there. That woke him up completely, and he slowly rubbed his eyes, hoping that would wake him up properly.

Checking the bed again, he didn't see her. He was about to stand up and start searching for her, when he heard the tap running from the bathroom, and he just knew where she was.

Eden sighed...again, and closed his eyes.

Time to stand up and be unhappy for the rest of the day. He thought, and hissed.

He would have said that he hated his life, but since he got the key, he was only alive because of two things - one person. His wife, Elaine and the key.

The key!

Eden screamed in his head, and immediately jolted from the bed. His eyes darted around the room, before he got on his knees and outed his clothes on the ground. He picked the key up, and turned it around in between his fingers, surprised that it didn't actually disappear.

When he heard the bathroom door creaking, he instantly dropped it back into the bag and started packing his rumpled clothes back.

***************

Eden spent days poring over the key, studying its intricate design and trying to make sense of its origins.

"It's so beautiful," he muttered to himself one day, and turned the key around again. It was too beautiful to be true, and if he hadn't spent the last three days of his life studying the key intently, making it the second most important thing in his life - Elaine is the first, then he would have said that the key wasn't real.

He knew that there must be a reason why the dying man entrusted it to him, he couldn't have been given like that without a reason. That started tugging at his heart, and he was determined to uncover the truth.

After pondering over everything, and trying to think of what to do, he decided to take a step at a time. So, he made a call to the manager, hoping to find some information.

The manager should have an answer. He thought to himself, as he tightly pressed the phone against his right ear, waiting for the manager to pick after the third ring.

The manager picked after the fourth ring.

Eden was happy, as he knew that he would definitely get an answer to his question.

However, the manager informed him that he didn't have any information about the key and that only Eden could find out what it meant. Shocked by the manager's words, Eden realised that he was on his own in this quest.

"That should be your case to solve, Mr Eden. Have a nice day." Eden repeated the words that the manager said to him again. He tried to make sense of the man's final words, but nothing was making sense to him.

Chanting the man's words at the back of his mind, he knew that he had to follow his words and find things out himself, so he decided to investigate the key's origins.

At the same time, he was also ecstatic at the prospect of finally being free from his past, and the constraints that have been holding him back. But, little did he know that his newfound wealth actually comes with a price.