Part 4 — I Overheard My Husband’s Secret Conversation at the Airport, but When He Mentioned Losing My House, His Companion Suddenly Turned Pale

Elene hung up the phone and looked at everyone in the room for a moment.

“We can no longer return to the house,” she said.

Adrian raised his head.

“What did they take?”

Elene did not answer him.

The police officer tightened the handcuffs on Adrian. Gabriel stopped halfway through a step toward the door.

“Who is the third person?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Elene told me. “But they took the original folder and my father’s old photo album from the study.”

The photo album.

It contained not only pictures of our family, but also a small dark-red notebook in which my father had written down all the expenses of the house, the names of the craftsmen, and the old history of the property. That notebook was not merely a memory. It said that the previous owner had transferred the property directly to me and that Adrian had never had any right to it.

Adrian knew that.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “If that notebook is gone, the bank will see only the documents that have already been submitted.”

“Are you frightened now, at least?” I asked.

“I was trying to protect you.”

“By preparing forged documents in my name?”

He opened his mouth, but could not find a word.

The police took Adrian and Gabriel away. As Gabriel left, he stopped beside me.

“This was not only Adrian’s plan,” he told me quietly. “You don’t know whom you are helping.”

“Then tell me.”

He looked at Elene.

“It is not too late yet,” he said, and left.

That same evening an investigator called me. They had recovered a recording from the cameras at my house. The third person entered at seven in the evening. Her face was covered by a hat, but her way of walking and a slight limp in her left leg were visible.

“Does this woman know your family?” the investigator asked me.

I looked at the screen. The woman stopped by the stairs, touched the railing with her hand, and walked exactly where there was the small crack in the wood repaired by my father.

I recognized her immediately.

“This is Adrian’s sister, Melanie.”

Elene closed her eyes.

“Adrian has a sister?”

“He never mentioned her. I saw an old photograph only once. He told me Melanie lived abroad.”

The next day the police found Melanie at the train station. In her bag were my photo album and the notebook. She thought she had destroyed the main evidence, but I had already kept a copy of the notebook with Elene.

Melanie told them everything during questioning.

Adrian had called her and told her that if she took the notebook, the bank case would collapse. Gabriel had given the woman who went to the bank in my place a false copy of my identity document. That woman was an acquaintance of Melanie’s.

Melanie also admitted that years earlier Adrian had taken samples of my signature from the documents for the household payments.

When the lawyer told me all this, instead of victory I felt exhaustion in my body.

I no longer wanted them punished.

I only wanted no one to have the right to enter my life and rewrite everything in their own name.

I spent the following weeks in phone calls, meetings at the bank, and testimonies. Adrian’s lawyer refused to defend him on the very first day when he saw the audio recording and the signature examination.

“He deceived us too,” the lawyer told me. “He said that you were voluntarily transferring the property.”

In court Adrian heard his own voice for the first time.

The recording was played in the large courtroom.

“Rebecca will have nothing left.”

His voice returned from the walls.

Adrian sat on the chair and listened to his own words. When Gabriel asked in the recording how he should hide the forged signature, Adrian buried his head in his hands.

The judge looked at him.

“Is this your voice?”

Adrian said nothing for a long time.

Then he answered quietly:

“Yes.”

It was the first honest word I had heard from him in months.

The court returned ownership of my house to me, canceled the forged transfers, and opened a criminal case against them. Melanie chose to cooperate. Gabriel partially confessed to the crime. Adrian could no longer escape responsibility.

Several days later I entered the house alone.

In the study I found his desk empty. The bottom drawer was open. Neither his pen, nor his leather wallet, nor that small metal box was there anymore.

Only one thing had remained.

Under my father’s notebook they found my old photograph. I was eighteen in the photograph and stood on the veranda of the house. On the back, my father had written in pencil: “This house is waiting for your strength.”

I took the photograph in my hand and cried for the first time.

Not for Adrian.

For the woman who for years had tried to turn someone else’s lie into the truth of her own life.

Three months passed.

I left the job I had with Adrian and began working at a small architectural studio. I helped people restore houses who wanted to save old walls.

In the mornings I walked around the new city. I drank coffee without sugar. In the evenings I sat on the veranda and added new pages to my father’s notebook.

One day Nora’s daughter, little Lily, brought a drawing to my house. There was a house in the drawing, with large yellow windows and a red door.

“It’s yours,” Lily told me. “No one will be able to drive you out of here anymore.”

I attached the drawing to the refrigerator.

That same week I received a letter from Adrian.

“Rebecca, I know you cannot fix everything, but I want to talk to you calmly at least once. I never wanted you to be lost to me.”

I held the letter in my hand for a long time.

Then I called Elene.

“Should I answer?”

“Only if it is necessary for you,” she told me.

I wrote a reply.

“Adrian, you did not lose me. I simply left the place where you had planned my loss in advance. Please do not contact me again.”

I sent the letter and turned off the phone.

That evening the first snow came.

I went out onto the veranda. I ran my hand over the wooden railing where my father had once repaired a crack with his own hands. The cold wood touched my palm, but this time the cold no longer frightened me.

I returned to the house, attached Lily’s drawing beneath my father’s photograph on the wall, and placed the small red notebook on the table.

On the first blank page I wrote only one sentence:

“From here, everything begins in my name.”

Then I closed the pen.

And for the first time in many years, the silence in the house no longer resembled danger.