I Found My Wife Who Had Unexpectedly Returned to Her Homeland in a Frozen Apartment, and at the Sight of My Mother the Lawyer Stopped Keeping Silent

On the day I returned home, I found my own wife, covered in blood, lying on the frozen floor with the body of our newborn child. For several seconds I did not realize that she was still breathing.

“Luka…” Wendy barely managed to say.

The suitcase fell from my hand. There was ice on the inside of the window, and such cold stood in the room that it seemed as if the apartment had turned into an abandoned warehouse. Wendy’s lips were cracked, her hair was stuck to her forehead, and she was holding our little boy tightly to her chest. The baby’s fingers hung motionless.

“Where is the heating?” I asked, barely keeping my voice steady.

“They turned it off.”

“Food?”

Wendy lowered her head.

“There isn’t any left.”

“The nurse?”

At this question she closed her eyes. That answer frightened me the most.

I fell to my knees and touched the baby’s hand. It was cold as ice. I took from my pocket the small copper thermometer that I had bought for Wendy before the baby’s birth. The red liquid had stopped at the lower mark. At that moment my inner world collapsed.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” I told her.

“Your mother said you had stopped sending money… She said the Singapore deal had fallen through and you no longer wanted to call.”

“What money?”

Wendy weakly gripped my wrist.

“The money that was in the family account. Jessie said everything would sort itself out. And Stephanie told me not to behave like a spoiled princess anymore just because I had given birth to a child.”

The blood rushed in my ears, but I did not feel anger. Not yet. I felt only cold. Exactly like the cold that was in that room.

Six weeks earlier, before I flew to Singapore, I transferred thirty-eight thousand dollars to the family account. The money was supposed to be used for a postpartum nurse, food, medicines, utility bills, and emergency expenses. My mother Jessie put her hand on my shoulder and reassured me.

“You think about your work, Luka. Family always helps family.”

Stephanie stood beside her and nodded enthusiastically.

Now I had Wendy weakened by hunger, while our child was on the verge of hypothermia.

At the hospital, doctors diagnosed Wendy with severe dehydration, an infection, and untreated postpartum bleeding. The baby was stable, but the doctor sternly told me that a few more hours in such cold and everything might have ended differently.

At two in the morning, while Wendy was asleep, I opened the banking application. The account showed zero. The money had been transferred to three unknown accounts.

Then I looked at my mother’s page. In the photograph, Jessie and Stephanie stood beside a rooftop pool in Miami. They held crystal glasses in their hands.

The caption read: “Sometimes women deserve real luxury.”

I looked at the photograph for a long time. Then, for the first time, I smiled.

Two years earlier, after a burglary at our house, I had installed security cameras in every room. The recordings were automatically stored in an encrypted vault. My mother and sister thought they had stolen thirty-eight thousand dollars. In reality, they had bought evidence.

I called lawyer Irakli in the hospital corridor.

“Luka, at this hour?” he asked me.

“I want you to retrieve all the recordings immediately.”

“What happened?”

I told him about Wendy and our child. Silence fell for several seconds.

“Come to me in the morning. I’ll notify the police too.”

“No,” I answered. “First we have to show them that I know.”

At six in the morning I returned home. I opened the door. The hallway light was flickering, and an uncovered baby bottle lay on the floor. I opened the recordings folder on the computer. Times appeared on the screen one after another.

Only one file remained to be opened. Just as I reached toward the mouse, the telephone rang. My mother’s name lit up on the screen, and her first words rang out in the room…

“Luka, are you still there?” my mother said in a voice as if nothing had happened.

“Where else should I be?”

“At home. With Wendy. I hope you didn’t shout. She always exaggerates everything.”

The recording window was still flickering on the screen. I held the telephone in one hand, and with the other I gripped the small copper thermometer.

“Why is my account empty, Jessie?”

Silence.

“We temporarily needed the money.”

“In Miami?”

Stephanie’s voice sounded in the background:

“Tell him we took it for the family.”

“For the family?” I asked.

My mother quickly began speaking.

“Your deal was in danger. We didn’t want you to lose everything because of the child.”

“So you left Wendy hungry?”

“Don’t dramatize.”

Those words killed my last hope. I recorded the conversation, but the camera recordings were stronger. I took the laptop to Irakli’s office and opened the file. There we saw how Stephanie turned off the heating, how Jessie took away the food boxes, and how she told Wendy that I was angry with her.

Irakli rubbed his face.

“This is no longer simple theft.”

“I know.”

“But there is one thing I don’t understand. Why did the cameras stop on Wednesday?”

I stopped the last frame on the screen. Jessie was looking directly into the lens and smiling. In the next frame, someone knocked on the door.

Irakli turned on the sound. The voice of an unknown man came from outside:

“Mrs. Jessie, I know the truth about your son…”

“Mrs. Jessie, I know the truth about your son…”

The recording continued.

On Wednesday, at nine in the evening, a tall man dressed in a black coat stood in our living room. Later I learned that he was Martin Cowley, a private investigator whom my mother herself had hired.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jessie told him.

“Then why did you pay fifty thousand dollars to a genetic laboratory?”

Stephanie stood in the doorway. The smile had fallen from her face.

“Mother, tell him to leave.”

Martin placed a document on the table.

“Luka is not your biological son. You have known this for thirty-two years.”

I stared at the screen. The room was so quiet that I could hear my own breathing.

Irakli looked at me carefully.

“Luka…”

I raised my hand. The recording had to continue.

Jessie grabbed the back of the armchair.

“You know nothing.”

“I know enough,” Martin replied. “Luka’s real father is Alexander Morel. Until his death, he owned an engineering company and left an inheritance fund. The fund was supposed to be transferred to Luka on his thirtieth birthday, but the mother’s consent was required in the documents.”

Stephanie chuckled.

“Why are you saying this now?”

“Because I traced the transfers from Luka’s family account. The money was going to your hotel. I wanted to see how much longer you would continue deceiving him.”

Jessie took the sheet of paper lying on the table and tore it in half.

“Luka is my son. I raised him.”

“You didn’t raise him, you controlled him,” Martin said. “You wanted his inheritance from the very beginning.”

I sat down on the chair. All my life I had thought I saw my own face in my mother’s eyes, but now, for the first time, I noticed that in my childhood photographs my eyes did not resemble hers at all.

Irakli stopped the video.

“The genetic result is in a separate document. It says here that Alexander Morel is your biological father.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“There is one more thing,” he replied.

At that same moment, a message arrived on my phone from an unknown number. It contained only one sentence: “If you want to find out why your mother hid your father, come to the old station tomorrow morning. Alone.”

Irakli read the message and immediately turned pale.

“Don’t go there.”

“Why?”

He looked at the photograph attached below the screen. In the photograph, Alexander Morel stood beside a young Jessie, and in his hand he held exactly the same kind of copper thermometer as the one I had bought before the baby’s birth.

“Because this man who sent it to you should be dead…”