Part 4 — In My Estate, an Unknown Child Uttered My Twenty-Year Secret, and the Color Disappeared from Rebecca’s Face in One Second

The address belonged to a small hotel located near the old city station.

Davit called immediately.

“We must notify the police,” he told me.

“Not yet.”

“Ethan, the person who hid the child may still be dangerous.”

“This time I will not run away. But I will not let him decide everything in my place either.”

Rebecca stood by the window and rubbed her hands together. Sammy sat beside her, the wooden airplane resting on his knees.

“If he is alive,” Rebecca said, “he may no longer want to see you.”

“I know.”

“He may hate you.”

“He will have that right too.”

Davit looked at me for a long time.

“That is the first time you have said it without defending yourself.”

That same evening the former nurse, Mrs. Marina, came to our lawyer’s office. It was raining outside. Small puddles of water remained on the floor from her umbrella, and her hands were trembling so much that she could not open the clasp of her bag.

“I did not know what your father was doing,” she said.

“But you signed the documents.”

“I was afraid.”

“I was afraid too. I simply did not know what I should be afraid of.”

Marina placed an old cassette recorder on the table.

“I recorded this then. Your father was telling the doctor that the boy had to be taken away under another surname. He said that you were weak and could not cope with the truth.”

Davit turned on the recorder.

My father’s voice sounded in the room. Low, cold, calm.

“Ethan forgets everything if you give him enough money. The boy must not appear in his life.”

I squeezed my own hand.

That man was my father.

Hearing his words from outside was more painful than remembering them. For the first time I heard how the verdict of my life sounded from another person’s mouth.

Marina then gave us an address. The boy had not remained in the same city. A foreign family had adopted him, and years later he had changed his surname. He was now twenty-one years old and worked as a mechanic at the port.

His name turned out to be Luka.

I waited three days until Davit managed to contact him. During that time I left the room without help for the first time. Not on foot. In the armchair. But I still crossed the threshold of the door.

Luka refused to meet.

The next day too.

On the third day he sent a short letter: “I want to know why you did not look for me.”

I met him in a small station café. It was a winter morning. Steam stood on the windows, while a rough white cup trembled in front of him on the table.

Luka was taller than me. He had the shape of my jaw, but his eyes were Nora’s.

“Are you Ethan?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My father?”

I could not answer immediately.

“Biologically, yes. The rest is for you to decide.”

He smiled bitterly.

“That is an easy answer.”

“The truth is not easy.”

“Where were you when I was a child?”

“I thought you were dead.”

“And you simply believed it?”

At this question I lowered my head.

“Yes. That is my greatest guilt.”

Luka looked at me for a long time. Then he let go of the cup.

“I do not know whether I want to call you my father.”

“I will not ask you to.”

“Then why did you come?”

“To listen to you for the first time and not pay you to stay with me.”

His face changed. Very slightly, but I saw it.

We talked for almost two hours. He told me that his adoptive father was a good man, but that he had found the truth by accident. He had seen Nora’s name in his old documents. Then Rebecca found him and decided to come to me first.

“Why did Mother not take me back?” Luka asked.

“Because she could not find you. But she searched until she died.”

Rebecca brought Nora’s letters for him. Luka read the first letter and hid his face in his hands.

I sat beside him.

I did not touch him.

When he wanted to, he held out his hand to me.

After we returned to the estate, everything began moving quickly. My father’s old fund was frozen. The court admitted the documents and the recording into the case. Marina gave testimony, the doctor’s archive was opened, and the people who had kept silent for years began calling one after another.

Davit told me that part of the property held in my father’s name had been acquired through illegal transactions.

“You can get everything back,” he told me.

“I will return what was taken from Luka. But that money will no longer be mine.”

We created a foundation for children who disappear in the gaps of the medical and legal systems. Rebecca undertook its management. Luka came to the estate at least once a week, although at first he always stopped at the door, as if he were still a guest.

I began physical therapy.

In the first weeks each movement seemed like hell. My legs obeyed me slowly, but the doctor told me that part of my condition had been caused by nervous shock.

“The body can forget the way,” he said. “But sometimes it needs return, not an order.”

Months later I took three steps with a cane.

Rebecca was crying.

But Sammy became angry.

“It should be four,” he told me. “Three is not enough.”

“Tomorrow I will take four.”

“Everyone says that.”

“I am not saying it. I promise.”

Winter came soon. The first snow fell silently in the estate’s courtyard. Sammy drew a small airplane in the snow. It had a red wing exactly where the paint had been scraped off his old wooden toy.

Luka was standing with me that day.

He still did not call me Father.

But once he told me:

“I will come tomorrow too.”

That was enough.

Six months later I received the last letter sent in my father’s name. In exchange for money, the author asked me to change my testimony in court and say that all the decisions had been made only at my father’s wish.

I tore up the letter.

Then a call came from an unknown number. A man promised me that if I closed the case, no one would touch Luka’s past anymore.

“You do not understand me,” I told him. “I am fighting precisely so that no one can silently change another person’s life anymore.”

“You may lose everything.”

“I have already lost it. Now I am building only what is mine for the first time.”

I ended the call.

Later Luka asked me what that call meant.

“The past is trying to rule the present again.”

“And did it succeed?”

“No.”

That evening my study was no longer empty. Beside Nora’s photograph on the wall hung the only picture of Luka’s childhood. Rebecca had found it in the old archive. Sammy placed his wooden airplane on the desk.

The red paint on its wing was still scraped off.

I ran my hand over it.

For the first time I was no longer looking at this object as the strange sign of that morning. It had been there when I did not know that my family was still waiting for me. It had been there when I thought everything was over. And now, when three people had returned to my life, that small, damaged airplane seemed to me the most precious thing.

Sammy looked at the snow from the window.

“Ethan, will you walk again tomorrow?”

I gripped the cane.

“Yes.”

“How many steps?”

I went to the window. I took four steps. Then a fifth.

Snow shone white in the courtyard, while the wooden airplane stood quietly on the table.

This time no one was waiting for me to save them.

I went to them myself.