Part 4 — Three Days After the Funeral, My Son Threw Me Out of the House, but When His Wife Heard My Calm Reply, the Smile Disappeared from Her Face

I called Tekla that same night.

She named a small café in the city center. Salgadze and I went there, because I no longer wanted to go alone. The streets were wet, and the headlights of the cars spread into long strips across the asphalt.

Tekla was sitting by the window in the café. She was about thirty years old. In her hand she held a white folder whose edges had become wet from the rain.

“Are you Marina?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She pulled out a chair for me.

“I waited a long time for you to find me yourself.”

Salgadze looked at the folder.

“What do you have?”

Tekla first looked toward me.

“I worked at the clinic where your husband was treated. I was on duty that night.”

I felt dryness in my throat.

“On the night of Ernesto’s death?”

She nodded.

“The doctor recorded the cause of death as cardiac arrest. But that night I met your son in the doctor’s room. He was very nervous and held several sheets of paper in his hand.”

“What papers?”

Tekla opened the folder.

There was a copy of the clinic camera recording, registered calls, and a handwritten statement. Daniel had requested the right to manage Ernesto’s property in Ernesto’s name, even though his father was still alive.

“Did he request this document from you?” Salgadze asked.

“No. He was asking the doctor on duty to sign that the patient could no longer make decisions. But the doctor refused.”

I was looking at the sheet. The marks resembling Ernesto’s signature looked like a living wound.

“Why didn’t you publish this immediately?”

Tekla pressed her lips together.

“Daniel threatened me. He told me that I would lose my job. Then he mentioned my brother’s debt, which legally no one was supposed to know about.”

Salgadze slowly exhaled.

“This is enough for a complaint.”

“I do not want him put in prison,” I said.

Salgadze looked directly at me.

“You do not want to punish him. You simply need to stop saving him from his own crimes.”

The next morning Daniel called me ten times. I did not answer the first time. On the eleventh I picked up.

“Mother, let us explain everything,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“What should you explain to me? The house? The forged signature? The clinic?”

A long silence fell.

“I was desperate.”

“A desperate person asks for help. He does not throw his mother into black bags.”

“You have everything! The house, money, the business! And I am drowning!”

“So I had to wait for my death?”

He hung up the phone.

Two hours later a police car stopped in front of our house. Daniel had gone there together with a real estate agent and was trying to say that I was mentally incapable.

Salgadze brought out the notary documents for me. I was standing on the stairs when Daniel saw me.

“Mother, please, don’t do this!”

“I am doing nothing, Daniel. I am simply no longer hiding the truth.”

The policeman placed a hand on his shoulder.

“We must continue our conversation at the station.”

Daniel rushed toward me, but the second policeman blocked his way.

“Mother, I am your son!”

It was the only weapon he had left.

I answered calmly:

“That is exactly why I expected more from you.”

At the station, Daniel’s lawyer refused to defend him on the very first day when he saw the camera recording and listened to the audio in which Daniel told the agent: “Mother will no longer be able to resist in two weeks. We must formalize everything before then.”

Daniel heard these words from someone else’s speaker for the first time.

He hid his head in his hands.

“I did not say that,” he whispered.

The lawyer answered coldly:

“It is your voice. They are your own words.”

The case reached court. Daniel was proven guilty of attempted forgery, financial fraud, and the use of coercion. The house and all the property remained in my name. The court also temporarily prohibited him from approaching me.

I did not go to see him punished.

I took only the truth.

After the court I returned home. For the first time in four days I opened the door of my bedroom. Everything in the room stood as Ernesto had left it: the book at the head of the bed, his glasses on the window, and the small copper key on top of the cabinet.

His room, however, was empty. Daniel had taken his things from there. Only one photograph remained on the wall—a small Daniel, six years old, sitting on his father’s shoulders.

I took the photograph in my hand and looked at it for a long time.

I missed that child.

Not the man who expected a house from me.

Three months later I left the nursing home and did not return to our house. I rented out the house, and handed the management of the shops over to my nephew. I bought a small apartment in a quiet district of the city, on the third floor, where in the mornings a ray of sunlight fell on the kitchen floor.

Twice a week I worked at a children’s center. I taught them drawing and returned home in the evening tired, but peaceful.

One day my grandson, Niko, visited me. He was Daniel’s son and remained innocent in all that.

“Grandmother, will Father come back again?” he asked while sitting by the box of pencils.

The first snow was falling outside the window.

“He may want to,” I said.

“Will you let him in?”

I looked at his drawing. He had drawn a small house, and two people stood in front of it. There was no high fence between them.

“If he ever returns, he must come only with the truth.”

Several weeks later I received a letter from Daniel. He wrote that he had changed, that he regretted everything, and wanted me to listen to him at least once.

I read the letter to the end.

Then I wrote an answer.

“I can listen to you, but I no longer promise you a return to my life. Trust does not return through a request. It is built over years, and you destroyed it in one day.”

I sent the letter by post and did not wait for an answer.

That evening Niko stayed with me. In the kitchen we baked hot bread, the radio played quietly, and I placed a new violet in a small pot on the windowsill.

I put Ernesto’s small copper key on top of the cabinet. Before, I thought it was only the key to an old drawer. Now I knew that sometimes an object opens not a door, but your own life.

Niko asked me:

“Grandmother, why aren’t you crying?”

I smiled at him.

“Because now I am home.”

Outside, snow fell silently.

The copper key flashed in the last ray of sunlight.

And this time I locked the door myself.