Part 4 — At night, blood was flowing from my child in bed, and after my alarm call Dominik Costello suddenly turned pale

…Dominik read the message once more, as if he expected the words to change. I looked toward Arthur, while the boy held my copper compass with both hands and watched the needle.

“Fiona,” Dominik told me, “we must find my lawyer.”

“First we will take the child to the hospital.”

“If I stop the money, they may do something else.”

“If we leave him here, they already have everything they need.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then, instead of addressing the head of security, he addressed the police officers.

“Prepare a car. But no one must know where we are taking the child.”

At four in the morning, all the phones in the palace rang at the same time. The bank froze Dominik’s accounts. His lawyer, Alan Merry, came to the house and stayed for only five minutes.

“I cannot sign these documents,” he said.

Dominik pressed his palms against the table.

“You are my family’s lawyer.”

“I was, until I learned that my electronic signature had been used.”

“So you are involved too?”

“No. But whoever did this took out loans in my name. I must first manage to save my own family.”

Alan left. Dominik stopped in front of the door, and for the first time I saw his shoulders sink. The power with which he changed the air of the entire house had disappeared in one night.

At the hospital, Arthur was given an antitoxin. The monitor clicked calmly in the room. I was sitting beside his bed when Dominik played Harrison’s recorded conversation on the phone.

“Only to weaken him,” the recording repeated.

Harrison had said it. It was his own voice.

Dominik buried his head in his hands.

“I saved this man twice,” he said. “Once from a legal case, and once I paid for his son’s operation. I thought loyalty existed.”

“It did,” I said. “You were simply looking for it in the wrong person.”

That same morning, the police found encrypted correspondence in Harrison’s phone. On the other side of the messages was the name: Mira Costello, Dominik’s younger sister.

Mira had supposedly gone abroad three months earlier. In reality, she was hiding in the city. It was she who created the false bank documents, transferred the accounts, and paid Harrison the money.

Dominik whispered:

“My sister.”

Mira was arrested that same evening in the old lawyer’s office. In a safe hidden behind the wall, they found contracts, seals, and copies of Dominik’s signature. One folder contained my name.

“Why was I there?” I asked.

Mira answered me in the interrogation room. A white lamp stood on the table, and beneath it her fingers were trembling.

“You were supposed to be blamed,” she said.

“For what?”

“For poisoning the child. A new nurse whom no one knew was the perfect target. When Arthur died, you would be arrested, and Dominik, desperate because of the inheritance, would sign.”

“And if he did not die?”

Mira lowered her eyes.

“Harrison said death was not necessary. He only had to become weak enough that no one would believe him.”

The trial began several weeks later. I went there because I was afraid for Arthur, and also because I wanted him to hear, at least once, that that night no one had believed his voice except me.

Mira and Harrison pleaded guilty. The needles, the chemical report, the camera recording, the audio, and the bank documents existed against them. Victor initially denied everything, but when they let him hear his own conversation, his face fell apart.

“I did not say they should kill the child,” he said.

The prosecutor played the audio again.

“If Dominik signed, why do we need the boy?”

Victor could no longer utter a sound.

As we left the courthouse, Dominik stopped beside me.

“You ask nothing of me.”

“I already have a salary.”

“This is not about the salary.”

“Then be even more careful about what you offer me. Sometimes money brings a person back to the very house from which they barely escaped.”

He nodded.

“You are fair.”

“No. I am simply tired of saving people who do not want to see their own mistakes.”

At that moment Arthur took my hand.

“Fiona, when are we going home?”

Dominik smiled for the first time, but the smile was small and painful.

“To a new home,” he told his son.

He sold the palace. Every pillow, every piece of furniture, every object Harrison had touched was removed. Dominik bought a small house by the lake, away from the city’s noise. He kept only one security man and gave him a first-aid bag instead of a weapon.

In the room where Arthur slept, there was a small wooden shelf by the window. I put my compass on it, but Arthur immediately picked it up.

“This is yours.”

“Let it stay with you.”

“No. Let us both know which way we should go.”

Several weeks later, Arthur smiled for the first time at school. His teacher told me that in every drawing he drew a house whose windows no longer let in the rain.

I left my job at the hospital and began working at a children’s night clinic. Every evening my bag held new batteries, two thermometers, and the old copper compass.

On the first morning of winter, Arthur called me.

“Fiona, the snow has come.”

“Can you see it from the window?”

“Yes. Father says he will not go to work today.”

“That is good news.”

“I had a nightmare again yesterday, but I woke up and was not afraid.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew the door was not locked.”

His answer cut more deeply into my heart than any words of the court.

Three months later I received a letter from Dominik. Not a message, not an expensive gift, but one ordinary letter that said only this: “Arthur wants you to come back to us. And I want the choice to be yours alone this time.”

I looked at the paper for a long time.

Then I wrote a reply.

“I will certainly visit Arthur. But I will not live in that house again. I am not your family’s salvation. I am a person who has a life of her own.”

The reply came the next day.

“I understand.”

Only those two words.

And for the first time I believed that he really understood.

In spring, Arthur brought me a drawing for the wall of my clinic. It showed a little boy standing at a crossroads, holding a round compass in his hand. Beside him stood a woman who had no face, but had a small red bag hanging from her hand.

“Why didn’t you draw my face?” I asked.

“Because you always look forward,” he answered.

I hung the drawing on the wall.

That night, while closing the clinic, I took the compass out of my bag. Small scratches from time had appeared on its copper surface. It still showed the right direction.

I locked the door, saw the first warm rain in the window, and closed my hand around the compass.

That night, for the first time, I did not save anyone.

I simply went home.