Part 4 — After the accident, I dismissed every caregiver after three days, but this girl ignored my threat and acted strangely in front of Carmine

The sound of the tires was still trembling through the walls when the phone rang for the second time.

Faith looked at the call.

“It is Elias,” she said.

This time she turned on the speaker.

“Faith, I am by the stairs,” a hoarse man’s voice sounded. “Leon sent guards. Tell Dominic that I sent the second file to the police.”

Carmine sharply raised her head.

“You are a liar.”

“No,” Elias replied. “It is just that this time I acted before you.”

The sound of running was heard outside the door. Mrs. Gable ordered the guards to lock the door, but it was already too late. Two people entered through the back entrance, including an injured young man with blood running from his shoulder.

Faith ran toward him.

“Elias!”

“It is only a scratch,” he said, although his face tightened from pain.

I looked at Carmine.

“Now call my lawyer.”

“The lawyer is already with me,” she said.

She picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Daniel, everything has changed. Come immediately.”

Five minutes later Daniel Harper entered. He had served me for twenty-two years and had never once lost his calm. But that evening his face was tense from the very beginning.

Carmine held out the folder to him.

“All of this was obtained illegally. You must destroy it.”

Daniel looked at the papers, then shook his head.

“I am no longer your lawyer.”

A heavy silence fell over the room.

“What are you saying?” Carmine’s voice broke.

“For years I suspected that you were forging Dominic’s signatures. Today I understood why you asked me to work on every document without witnesses.”

Carmine moved toward him, but the guard stepped in front of her.

Daniel put the phone on the table and played a recording.

I heard my own voice.

It was two weeks earlier. In the recording I, or rather my voice, said: “If anything happens to me, trust Carmine. She will protect my property.”

Everyone in the room heard those words.

And only then did I realize how well they had bugged my room.

“That is my voice,” I said.

“But that was not your will,” Daniel said. “You were under the influence of medication then. The date in the recording has also been changed.”

Faith played the second recording. In it Carmine was telling Leon:

“We will give Dominic that medicine again in the morning. Until he signs, he will understand nothing.”

Carmine’s knees gave way.

“I was taking care of him,” she whispered.

“No,” I said. “You were controlling me.”

The police came that night. Carmine no longer resisted. Leon was found at the other end of the city, trying to escape by private plane. Elias handed the shop’s records to the police, and Daniel provided the complete history of the transfers from the bank.

I was not glad to go to court.

Nor was I glad about their arrest.

I simply was no longer going to protect others at the cost of my own life.

The hardest moment came before the trial began. The prosecutor played an audio recording in which Carmine said that I would become “a signer trapped in a wheelchair.”

Those words returned to the courtroom.

Carmine raised her head and listened to her own voice. Her eyes lit up.

“Turn it off,” she said.

But it was already too late.

For the first time she heard herself as others heard her.

Several months later, I left the upper floor of my mansion empty. There were no longer armed guards, Carmine’s heavy footsteps, or locked doors there. Only my wheelchair stood by the window, while the silver lighter remained on the table.

I no longer lit it.

I simply carried it with me, as a reminder that the most dangerous prison is not built with walls.

Faith no longer worked in my house. She became my partner. Together with Elias, she opened a small rehabilitation center in the neighborhood where she had lived as a child. I invested the money, but she chose the center’s name: “The First Step.”

Six months later, on a cold December morning, Faith’s little daughter, Lea, entered my room. She held a colorful sheet of paper in her hand.

“Dominic, I drew this for you.”

There was a large house on the paper. Yellow light came from the window. In front of the house stood a man whose one leg was still by the wheelchair, but whose other had already been placed forward.

“Is this me?” I asked.

“Yes. Mom said that you should start walking slowly.”

Faith smiled at the door.

“The doctor said that rehabilitation is producing results.”

“The doctor said that I am stubborn,” I replied.

“That is also true.”

That evening I took my first step beside the parallel rail. My foot trembled. My knee hurt. But no one looked at me with pity.

Faith only said:

“Again.”

I stood up again.

Weeks passed. I moved into a small apartment, where the smell of the neighbor’s bread came in the morning and the sound of the street tram reached me at night. Expensive marble no longer stood in the office. Only Elias’s old tools and Lea’s drawing lay on the table.

One evening I received a letter.

From Carmine.

“You can return everything. The money, the house, the influence. Just come and listen to me.”

I read the letter several times.

Then I looked at Faith.

“Will you write her an answer?”

“I already did.”

“What?”

“‘I am no longer protecting you.’”

That was the whole answer.

I folded the letter and put it in the drawer together with the silver lighter. Not because I wanted to return to the past, but because I no longer needed to hide it.

The next morning the first snow came.

Lea made a little snowman in the yard and placed a cardboard wheelchair beside it. Then she attached a paper leg to the snowman.

“Now it is learning to walk too,” she told me.

I smiled and opened the window.

Cold air entered the room. For the first time in many years, in that cold I felt not imprisonment, but freedom.

I took the silver lighter in my hand, placed it on the windowsill, and attached Lea’s drawing beside it.

Then I took hold of the rail.

And I took one step.

This time no one pushed me.