Part 4 — My Abandoned Ex-Boyfriend Burst into the Emergency Room with a Child, but When He Saw My Belly, the Color Drained from His Face

The call ended, but the man’s voice remained in my ear for a long time.

I stood in the corridor and looked at the phone as if an answer should appear on the screen.

Elias stood before me.

“Who was it?”

“A person who may know how this forged signature appeared.”

“You will not go alone.”

“You have not yet earned the right to go with me.”

Mariana stood beside the door. For the first time she no longer looked strong. Her fingers were gripping the edge of the leather folder so tightly that her fingernails had turned white.

“Do not listen to strangers,” she said.

“I trust a stranger more than a person who forged a document in my name.”

“You have no idea what you are destroying.”

“No, Mariana. You stirred everything up on the day you took my life away from me.”

Elias looked at his mother.

“Is this true?”

“I was acting to protect you.”

“In my name?”

“You were weak.”

“No,” I said. “She simply did not want you to make the choice yourself.”

That same night my superior, Doctor Harper, met us in the small conference room of the pediatric ward. Warm tea stood on the table, but no one touched it. Raindrops collided with one another on the window glass.

“Doctor Brooks, we must take the unknown call seriously,” he said. “The cameras in the old clinic still work, and the archive has also been preserved.”

“A security officer will come with me.”

“That is sensible.”

Elias rose from his chair.

“I am coming too.”

“No,” I said.

“This is my child too.”

“And therefore you will stay with Sophie. For the first time you must choose where your place is.”

Pain appeared in his eyes, but this time I did not step back.

In the morning, at six o’clock, I arrived at the old clinic building. The building stood on the back street behind the hospital and had been closed years ago. On the rusty gate, letters washed by the rain could barely be read.

The security officer stood behind me.

“If anyone frightens you, we leave immediately,” he told me.

“I have already endured more than they think.”

Inside there was the smell of dust and paper. An unknown man was waiting for us in the archive room. He was about fifty years old and held a small wooden box in his hand.

“Are you Adelaide?”

“Yes.”

“I am Nikoloz. I worked here as an administrator until the clinic closed.”

“Why did you call me?”

He put the box on the table.

“Because six months ago Mariana Hayle came here. She requested your medical record and forced an employee to change several pages.”

Cold spread through my body.

“Which record?”

Nikoloz took a small memory device from the box and connected it to an old computer.

A room I immediately recognized appeared on the screen. It was the clinic’s consultation office. In the video, Elias and I sat facing each other, one week before our last conversation.

In the video I said:

“If I am pregnant, this will not be only my decision. I want us to decide together.”

Then Elias’s voice was heard:

“If we have a child, I will start everything over. I just need time.”

I stared at the screen. I remembered these words, but not the recording.

Nikoloz stopped the video.

“This is not everything.”

He opened a second file. There Mariana could be seen handing an envelope to a clinic employee.

“Write in this document as if Adelaide requested a termination of the pregnancy,” she was saying. “Elias must think that the girl decided to use him.”

My hands froze.

“Why did you keep this?”

“Because I knew that one day you would need the truth. The file was automatically stored in the backup system.”

At that moment a message arrived on my phone. It was from Elias.

“Sophie has disappeared. My mother took her. I cannot contact the police. Please help me.”

A second message followed immediately.

“She said that she would never let the child go with you.”

I looked at the screen and for the first time realized that Mariana’s battle concerned not only my past.

She was also after my future child.

“We are going to the police,” I told the security officer.

Nikoloz nodded.

“And take these recordings with you. Today.”

Sophie was found two hours later in a private house on the other side of the city. Mariana was standing there and insistently repeating that she was trying to protect the child.

“You took her without authorization,” the police officer told her.

“I am the grandmother.”

“That does not give you the right not to notify the father and the hospital.”

Elias ran toward Sophie. The girl began to cry and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“Dad, I thought you would not come back.”

Elias closed his eyes.

“I will never leave you again.”

I stood several steps away. I listened to his promise, but I no longer tried to take responsibility for its fulfillment.

At the police station Mariana’s lawyer came. At first he spoke aggressively, arranged documents on the table, and repeated that everything was a misunderstanding.

Then Nikoloz played the recording.

Mariana’s own voice sounded in the room.

“Elias must think that the girl decided to use him.”

Mariana lowered her head.

Her lawyer could not say a word for several seconds.

“Mrs. Hayle,” he finally said, “from this moment I can no longer make any statement on your behalf.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you yourself must answer for what you said.”

Mariana heard her own voice through another person’s mouth for the first time. She covered her face with her hands.

Elias stood by the window. He had listened to the recording to the end.

“I believed you,” he said.

Mariana raised her head.

“You yourself wanted me to believe you.”

“Maybe. But you still lied.”

“I was protecting you.”

“No. You decided instead of me whom I should love.”

I no longer intervened in this conversation.

The following weeks consisted of court, lawyers, doctors, and endless phone calls. I gave statements about the forged document, the recordings were officially submitted, and a case was opened against Mariana.

Elias asked me for forgiveness.

“I am not asking you to come back to me,” he told me one evening, on the hospital roof. “I only want to be in my child’s life.”

“That will also be Sophie’s decision. And the child’s, when he grows up.”

“I will wait.”

“This time you really have to wait. Not with words, but with actions.”

He nodded.

Sophie was discharged from the hospital two days later. Her wrist was set in a small white cast, and three stars were drawn on it with a colored marker.

“Doctor Adelaide,” she told me, “will you draw one for my brother too?”

“If he lets me.”

“He is still in your belly. He cannot tell you.”

“Then you and I will decide together.”

For the first time I laughed with my whole heart.

Four months later my child was born. He was a boy. Small, noisy, and amazingly stubborn. Sophie named him Luka, because she said that this name “suits brave children.”

Elias came on time to every visit. He never entered without knocking. He never asked me why I did not return the ring he had once given me.

He was learning.

And for the first time I was no longer waiting for someone to make me lose myself.

Six months later I moved to a new city. I worked in a small clinic where the morning shift was always accompanied by the smell of cinnamon. Luka’s stroller stood by the window. Sophie came twice a week and read stories to her brother, stopping at the same place each time.

“Is the dragon still bad here?” she would ask me.

“He is still trying to improve.”

“Then he may become good.”

“Maybe. But every change takes time.”

One morning the first snow came. Luka was already trying to stand on his feet, while Sophie drew little houses on the window.

A message from Elias appeared on my phone.

“I will be in the city tomorrow. If you allow me, I want to see you. Not to bring back the past. I simply want to thank you.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote to him:

“There is no need to come for thanks. Meet the children at the agreed time. Let the rest remain where it ended.”

The reply came a few minutes later.

“I understand.”

This time I truly understood that the word could be true.

In the evening I opened the small jewelry box. The small copper stethoscope pendant my grandmother had given me was still lying there. Six months earlier it had trembled on me from fear. Now I hung it beside Luka’s crib, on a small hook on the wall.

Sophie saw it.

“What is that?”

“A reminder.”

“Of what?”

I looked at my son, who was sleeping peacefully, and followed the snow with my eyes beyond the window.

“That a heart can break and still continue beating.”

The pendant swayed slowly under the lamp.

This time my heart was calm.