Part 4 — I Was Asking My Aunt for Fifteen Euros, but the Reply from an Unknown Number Stopped My Life in One Second

Victor still had his hand placed on the phone when his guard locked the door from inside.

“Daniel’s car was seen at the end of the street,” he said.

Mother sat down on the chair. Her knees were trembling.

“Will he come here?”

“No,” Victor answered. “We are going to the police first.”

His guard looked at him in surprise.

“To the police?”

“This time we will not play by my rules anymore.”

I held Lucas against my chest. For the first time I saw that Victor was afraid too. Not for himself. For the child.

He called me, but the phone was in his hand. So he knelt before me.

“Sophia, you should know that if you come with me, returning will be difficult.”

“Staying here is more difficult.”

At this answer he lowered his eyes.

Mother took my hand.

“Forgive me, my girl.”

“Do not ask me for forgiveness yet. First let us save Lucas.”

The sound of car brakes came from below. We all became silent.

Victor signaled to the guards, but I touched him on the arm.

“Let no one be killed.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“I promise you that he will answer to us alive.”

It was not a heroic promise. It was the promise of a man who had ruined many things in the past and was now trying for the first time to do at least one thing correctly.

We went down by the back stairs. The stair railing had rust on it, and my finger was stained red. Cold air struck my face in the street. I covered Lucas with his blanket, while I hugged Mother.

Before we got into the car, Victor’s phone rang.

“I need to talk,” Daniel’s voice said. “If you want to see your son alive, come alone.”

Victor looked at the mirror, where Lucas and I could be seen.

“I already see him.”

“Then you know that he cannot escape from my hands.”

“He is no longer in your hands.”

Victor ended the call.

We entered the police building at nine o’clock at night. At first no one understood who was standing before them. Victor placed the memory card, the birth certificate, and the genetic report on the table.

“Register all of this officially,” he said. “I also want to record my confession about organized crime.”

The lawyer who was standing behind him quickly leaned toward him.

“Victor, do not do this.”

“There are many things I should not have done today. But I will do this.”

“We can protect the family in another way.”

Victor looked at him.

“Leave.”

The lawyer picked up his bag and left. It was the first time someone had turned his back on Victor Salazar and the door had simply closed before him.

Daniel was arrested an hour later. His voice was heard clearly in the recording, while the messages recovered from his phone proved that he had been surveilling me and Lucas.

But the hardest moment came the next day.

The investigator played the recording again in a small room.

“The child must disappear before Victor learns the truth,” Daniel’s voice sounded.

Victor was sitting on a chair. He heard the voices of his own past—orders, threats, people who had been frightened in his name.

Daniel raised his head.

“You did this too.”

Nothing changed on Victor’s face, but he gripped the edge of the table so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

“I know.”

“Then why should this child survive?”

“Because he did not choose my sins.”

Daniel smiled bitterly.

“Do you think one confession will make you clean?”

“No. I just will not hide the dirt anymore.”

After Daniel’s arrest, Victor’s organization fell apart. Some fled, some cooperated with the court. Victor opened every account, handed over every record to the investigators, and gave testimony against himself as well.

And I went to the hospital.

Lucas was receiving an infusion of milk. His little hand clung to my finger. The white curtain in the room moved slowly, while the bottle placed beside the bed moved lightly every few minutes.

Victor stood at the door.

“You can come in,” I told him.

“I am afraid.”

“You tell everyone that you are afraid of nothing, don’t you?”

“I was lying to everyone.”

He went to Lucas’s bed. The child was still asleep, but when Victor touched his little finger, Lucas squeezed his hand.

Victor began to cry immediately.

Not loudly. He simply lowered his head, and a tear fell onto the child’s blanket.

Several weeks later we left the old apartment. Nothing remained there anymore—not threats, not an empty refrigerator, not the door handle that someone had forcibly pulled at night.

I left only one thing in that apartment—the old cracked phone with the small red star sticker.

I did not want to take it.

It was no longer a request for help. It became proof that one incorrectly dialed digit had changed our lives.

Four months later Mother no longer worked at the hotel. She opened a small laundry in a new district of the city. I returned to school and helped children with reading in the evenings.

Lucas was already running. His laughter filled the walls of the house.

One evening he drew three people on a sheet of paper. One was small, one was a woman, and one had very large hands.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Father,” he answered.

Victor was visiting us that day and was making tea in the kitchen. The court proceedings had not yet ended, but he no longer ruled the city’s shadows. Every week he came, giving Lucas not toys but books.

Once he told me:

“If you ever no longer want to see me, just tell me.”

“You are not planning to run away anymore?”

“No. But you have the right to choose.”

It was the first gift I received from him that could not be bought with money.

Eleven months later, on the first day of winter, I received a letter from Victor. He wrote that an agreement had been offered to him in court and that his lawyers were trying to reduce the sentence.

At the end there was only one sentence: “If you want, before I go to prison, let me come at least once.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote: “Come. But for my son, not as a king. Come as a father.”

That evening I stood by the window. The first snow was falling outside. Lucas sat on the floor and colored his drawing. Mother was stirring soup in the kitchen.

And on the shelf lay the old phone. The screen no longer lit up, dust had settled in the cracks, but the small red star was still in its place.

I ran my hand over it.

Then Lucas raised his head and asked me:

“Mother, do we have milk today?”

I laughed.

“As much as you need.”

Outside the window, snow was descending silently.

And for the first time in my life, the future no longer looked like an empty refrigerator.