I Saw My Former Wife on the Road with Two Infants, and My Fiancée Threw Money at Her Feet and Suddenly Turned Pale

That day my fiancée Maria was throwing money at my former wife, while I was sitting in a car stopped by the roadside and could not understand why I suddenly felt sorry for the woman in whose destruction I had taken part for an entire year.

It was six o’clock in the evening. On the road leading out of the city, the wind was raising dust, and fine sand was tapping against the car windows. Maria was the first to see Elena.

“Andria, slow down… Is that Elena?”

I pressed the brake. Elena was walking along the roadside, a worn canvas bag hanging from her shoulder, and in her hand she held a bag filled with plastic bottles. Dust had dried onto her old sneakers.

But I immediately forgot all of that when I saw a double baby carrier on her chest.

Both children were sleeping. Only light-colored hair and small hats could be seen from under the thin blankets. Every few steps Elena stopped and checked with her fingers whether they were breathing peacefully.

Maria lowered the window.

“How strange, life puts everything in its place, doesn’t it?”

“Maria, don’t stop…”

“Why? She is an old acquaintance.”

She took twenty dollars from her bag and threw them onto the dusty road, at Elena’s feet.

“Buy formula for the children. Or whatever you need now.”

Elena did not bend down. She did not even look at the money. She only adjusted the children, and then looked toward me.

There was no hatred in her eyes.

There was only exhaustion and such sadness, as if she felt more sorry for me than for herself.

“Elena…” I barely said.

“Don’t get out, Andria,” she said calmly. “The children do not like stopping on the road.”

“These children…”

She lowered her head slightly.

“One day you will understand yourself.”

Then she turned around and continued along the road. The twenty dollars remained in the dust.

When we returned home, Maria turned the radio on loudly, as if a song could cover the silence that had appeared between us. And I could see only two small faces before my eyes.

Our divorce seemed like a simple matter. Photographs taken near a hotel, transfers from the joint account, and family jewelry that was later found among her belongings. Everything was arranged so that no other explanation seemed possible.

I remembered our last argument.

“Someone is trying to separate us, Andria,” Elena cried. “Please believe me at least once.”

“Do you deny the photographs too? The money? The jewelry?”

“I did not do this!”

I did not believe her. I believed Maria when she held my hand and told me that I had the right to begin a new life.

That night, at nine o’clock, I went straight to the private investigator Gela. His office was on the second floor of an old warehouse. The smell of dampness stood in the corridor, and a broken green lamp flickered on the table.

“I want the materials from the old case,” I said.

Gela looked at me and immediately stopped twirling his pen.

“Why did you remember it now?”

“I saw Elena today. She has two children.”

His face changed color strangely.

“Children?”

“Yes. And I want to look at everything again.”

Gela opened the archive cabinet. He took out a familiar folder, but under it lay another, thin folder. My name was written on it, although it had been crossed out with blue ink.

“What is this?”

“Andria, some questions do not bring answers. They only bring misfortune.”

I opened the folder. Inside were payment statements. Amounts were regularly transferred from Maria’s account, exactly on the days when evidence against Elena was being collected.

My hands went cold.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Gela looked toward the door and answered me quietly:

“Because I was told that if I revealed the truth, the next case would already be against you.”

At that moment a message from an unknown number came to his phone. He read it, his face tightened, and he put the phone on the table.

“Go, Andria.”

“Who is threatening you?”

Instead of answering, Gela took a small memory card from the folder and slid it toward me.

“You were not supposed to see this today.”

The door handle slowly went down from outside. Gela switched off the lamp, while I grabbed the card and opened the folder. On the first page, in Elena’s handwriting, there was only one sentence: “If Andria ever sees this, tell him why I kept silent…”

The footsteps behind the door stopped. Gela put his finger to his lips and silently indicated that I should go toward the window. I had the old memory card clenched in my fist, and its sharp edge was digging into my palm.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

“The one who must not realize that this is with you.”

We slipped out by the back stairs. When I returned home at ten at night, Maria was standing in the kitchen. Two glasses of wine and an unfinished dinner were laid on the table.

Her gaze immediately stopped on the folder in my hand.

“Did you find this?” she asked.

Not “What is this?”

Not “Where were you?”

She said exactly: “Did you find this?”

“You knew it existed?”

Maria was silent for several seconds, then smiled.

“You are tired. Don’t drive yourself crazy with old papers.”

“The payments made against Elena came from you.”

“I was simply helping the investigator.”

“With what?”

“With our protection.”

That night, for the first time, I looked at her not as a savior, but as a person who had planned my past far too well.

The next morning Elena was waiting for me near my house. In her hand she held a small, aged envelope. A milk stain from the children could be seen on the edge of the paper.

“I was supposed to give you this when you were ready,” she told me.

“What is inside?”

“The answer to why I kept silent. And the reason Maria is most afraid of our meeting.”

Elena held out the envelope to me. Just then, across the street, a black car started moving and came toward us…

The black car drove directly toward the sidewalk. Elena pressed the envelope to her chest, and I grabbed her and pulled her aside. The car rushed past us so fast that its mirror touched my coat and tore off a button.

“This is no longer accidental,” I said.

Elena’s fingers were trembling.

“That is why I kept silent.”

We entered a small café nearby. It was eleven in the morning; raindrops were running down the windows, and paper sugar packets lay piled on the table. Elena put the envelope in front of me.

“Open it.”

Inside there was a clinic document, two printed messages, and a small voice recorder, on whose surface the children’s names were written: Luka and Niko.

The date on the document was two weeks before Elena and my divorce. Under the doctor’s signature it said that Elena was pregnant with twins and that a sample had already been taken to establish paternity.

“This is impossible,” I said.

Elena lowered her eyes.

“Then Maria told me that if I told you the truth, she would take the children away from me. She had false evidence, money, and a lawyer. And I was alone, pregnant, and frightened.”

“Why didn’t you tell me even now?”

“Because Maria called me after your divorce. She said that if I came to you, she would publish the address written in the children’s birth certificate, and social services would take them away from me. I believed that you would stand on her side.”

I turned on the recorder.

At first, for several seconds, only rustling could be heard. Then Maria’s voice sounded, clear and cold.

“First the photographs must appear, then the money. Andria will sign everything himself. Elena must look guilty, otherwise I will never get rid of her.”

The second voice belonged to Gela.

“What if he asks questions?”

“He only gets questions when it is already too late.”

The recorder fell from my hand. It rolled across the café floor like a small wooden cube and stopped at our feet.

“Did you do all this?” I asked Maria when I returned home that same evening.

She was standing in the living room. A valuable vase trembled by the window because her hand was hitting it.

“Elena lied to you.”

“I listened to your voice.”

Maria turned pale.

“The recording may have been edited.”

“Then why do you know what I found?”

She could not answer.

I put the clinic document on the table.

“Are Luka and Niko my children?”

Maria collapsed onto a chair.

“That changes nothing.”

“It changes everything for me.”

“Will you choose Elena again?”

“No. This time I choose my conscience.”

At that same moment my phone rang. It was the clinic doctor. He told me that the final paternity result was being prepared, but someone had recently tried to request a copy of the documents from the laboratory.

“Who?” I asked.

The doctor told me the name.

It was not Maria.

It was Gela.

And he still did not know that another recording was kept at the clinic, one that would confirm all his words…