Part 4 — After My Son’s Fight at School, I Saw the Other Boy, and His Guardian Looked at Me, Stopped at the Door

The call came in a second time.

Miriani could not move her hand.

When it rang for the third time, I picked up the phone.

“Who are you?”

For several seconds, only breathing could be heard on the other end of the line.

Then a woman’s voice sounded:

“I am Salome Kereselidze. I was working at the clinic that night. Mark handed the child over to me.”

Mark raised his head as if a window had suddenly opened in the room.

“Don’t listen to her,” he said. “This woman wants money.”

“No,” Salome answered. “I have already received the money. Now I only want the truth to be recorded.”

The lawyer turned the phone toward me and recorded the conversation.

Salome said that Mark had a large debt that night. His business was threatened with bankruptcy, while Miriani’s family was paying money to adopt a child. Mark had forged the doctor’s signature, threatened the nurse, and used my condition.

“I thought the child would be officially adopted,” Salome was saying. “Then I learned that they had told the mother the child had died. I told Mark then that I would go to the police. He made a recording so that he could blackmail me.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“Because Mark called me again. He told me he would take Stepan to court and blame everything on me. Then I realized that if I remained silent again, the child would lose his family for a second time.”

Mark was standing by the wall.

“You don’t know what you are doing,” he told me.

“For eight years you have been telling me exactly this,” I answered. “But now, for the first time, I know what you were doing.”

The lawyer handed the folder to the police officers. Inside were the false medical certificate, bank statements, the contract concluded with Miriani’s family, and a recording from the clinic entrance from that time. The camera showed Mark taking a small child wrapped in a white blanket out through the back door.

While watching the video, Mark closed his eyes.

“That is another child,” he muttered.

Doctor Irakli shook his head.

“No. That is your son.”

The word “your” was heard in the room against Mark for the first time.

That same evening Mark’s lawyer called me.

“Mrs. Nino, my client is ready to explain everything to you if you do not file a complaint.”

“Your client spent eight years explaining to me that my child was dead.”

“He does not want the family to be destroyed.”

“He has already destroyed my family.”

“You can make a peaceful agreement for both children.”

“Children are not subjects of an agreement.”

The lawyer remained silent for several seconds.

“Then I will no longer be involved in this case.”

“That is your choice.”

The next day Mark was taken to the police station. I did not go there. I stayed beside Koli and Stepan, because for the first time both of them were afraid not of a fight, but of separation.

Stepan sat several steps away from me.

“If Dad goes to prison, will I have to go somewhere else again?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“This time I will be beside you.”

Koli took his hand.

“You can sleep in my room. But don’t take my pillow.”

Stepan smiled for the first time.

“Your pillow smells bad.”

“That is not my smell. It comes from the old cupboard.”

They quietly began arguing, while I went into the kitchen and leaned against the door. At that moment I allowed myself to cry for the first time, not because of the loss, but because my son had turned out to be alive.

Three days later they played Mark his own voice.

It happened in the investigator’s room, where there was only a recorder on the table and a neon lamp flickering on the wall. Mark sat on a chair, his hands placed on the table.

The recording sounded:

“Nino will not find out. One child will stay with her, and the other will grow up in Miriani’s family.”

Mark lowered his head.

The recording continued:

“I will tell her he is dead. She depends on me.”

“Can you stop it?” Mark asked.

The investigator did not press the button.

“Is that your voice?”

Mark remained silent for a long time.

“Yes.”

“You denied this.”

“I lied.”

“Why?”

For the first time Mark looked at his own hands.

“Because I thought that if I earned money, everything would be fixed.”

“And when it was not fixed?”

“Then I invented another lie.”

He heard his own words and his face changed. As if for all these years he had been watching someone else’s crime, and now realized that the voice was coming from his own mouth.

I did not enter that room.

For me it was enough that for the first time someone did not ask me to protect him.

One week later I sold our old house.

Everything there belonged to Mark: his cup in the kitchen, his shirts in the closet, our wedding photograph on the wall. The most painful thing turned out to be the small box standing in Koli’s room.

Inside there was only one item—a small wooden train, beside which the yellow paint had peeled.

It was the toy that Mark had told me to leave for my dead child.

For eight years it had simply lain in my house.

Mark had never taken it away.

I took the train in my hand and for the first time thought that this object was not a memory of death, but a witness to a life deceived.

In the new apartment I made Koli’s and Stepan’s rooms next to each other. I painted honey-colored stripes on Koli’s wall, and hung dark-green curtains in Stepan’s room. Both demanded one large shelf, because dividing the toys made no sense.

Miriani came often. At first Stepan stopped at the door every time, as if he were afraid that one day Miriani and I would quarrel and he would have to go somewhere again.

“You are not my mother?” he asked once beside Miriani.

Miriani’s eyes filled with tears.

“I helped raise you. No one can take that away from you.”

I placed my hand on hers.

“You protected his childhood when I thought I no longer had a child. I am grateful for that.”

Miriani nodded.

“And I must apologize to you for not finding you for eight years.”

“We were both deceived.”

It was the only truth we both had.

Two months later the court imposed a temporary separation of Mark from the children. Later fraud, use of false documents, and an illegal transaction were confirmed. I did not shout at the hearings, and I did not celebrate Mark’s downfall.

When the judge announced the decision, I only held Stepan’s hand.

As Mark left there, he looked at me.

“Nino, one day you must understand me.”

“I understood you,” I told him. “That is exactly why I will not return to you.”

Four months later the first snow passed over the city.

I began working in a new library. In the mornings I handed out books to children, and in the evenings I returned home, where two boys shouted at the same time that the other was stealing his pencils.

Life became chaotic again.

But this chaos was ours.

Koli chose Stepan as his best friend at school. They often argued, and then sat on one bed and quietly drew. One evening Stepan drew four people on a sheet of paper: me, Koli, himself, and Miriani.

Mark was not in the drawing.

I said nothing.

Stepan himself added a small house in the corner and said:

“Everyone I love must be here.”

That same week I received the last message from Mark.

“I don’t want you to remember me as a stranger. Let me meet the boys at least once. Please.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

I did not want to write a reply, but silence was just as heavy as when I woke up in the hospital and saw only one crib.

I wrote:

“The children have their own wishes. When they ask you themselves, the meeting will be their choice. I can no longer create that choice for you.”

Mark did not write to me again.

That night I placed the small wooden train on the windowsill. Snow was falling outside, while the street lamps left yellow spots on its surface.

Koli and Stepan were quietly arguing in the room about who should draw the first track.

I poured tea in the kitchen and stopped to listen to their voices.

I ran my hand over the train.

After eight years, it was moving forward for the first time.

And I was no longer waiting for anyone.