Part 4 — My husband left me for his former lover and stabbed me twice, but his strange visitor at the hospital lost color

I read the message to the end and the phone fell from my hand.

Lika picked it up from the floor.

“Call your mother,” she told me.

“My mother died two years ago.”

That heavy silence fell over the room again, broken only by the sound of the monitor.

Lika checked the number in the message. The number did not exist. But the contract mentioned in the text really did exist.

The next morning the police returned to the hospital. Alejandro and Valeria had already been detained, but a third name appeared in the case—Ricardo Salgado, my uncle, who had managed the family’s legal affairs after my mother’s death.

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“Alive,” the investigator answered me. “And last night he tried to flee the city.”

Lika immediately made a call.

“Mr. Salgado, I know that you drew up the second version of the contract.”

A hoarse man’s voice sounded from the other side of the phone.

“Mariana, I wanted to protect you.”

“The man who stabbed me asked for my protection?”

“I did not know they would go so far.”

“But you knew they intended to.”

Silence.

That was a sufficient answer.

Later the investigator showed me a camera recording that had been hidden behind a kitchen shelf in Alejandro’s house. For the first time I heard my own voice from outside.

“If I sign this document, you will take away my future completely,” I was saying.

Alejandro was laughing in the recording.

“No one will believe you anyway. You sat at home for three years and told everyone that you were happy.”

“I did not say that.”

“You would have, if I had told you to.”

Then Valeria’s voice sounded.

“Mariana, sign and everything will end easily.”

I listened to the recording and had the feeling that I was looking at another woman. At the woman whose fear was still mixed with love.

“Enough,” I whispered.

Lika turned off the recording.

That same day the doctor told me that the pregnancy was progressing steadily. He called the twins little girls because on the screen the two spots were held so close to each other, like two little stars.

“You must rest,” he told me. “That is the most important thing now.”

“What if I have to go to court?”

“Then you will go there not as a victim, but as a mother who chose survival.”

Several days later the police sealed the door of my house. I still could not return inside. However, one evening Lika brought me things from there.

Among my things was a half-burned wedding photograph. The fire had almost completely destroyed Alejandro’s face, while mine was still visible. Beside it lay the silver bracelet. The two little bells no longer rang because one of them had been bent by one of the blows.

When I took the object in my hand, for the first time I was not afraid of its sound.

Ricardo was arrested the next day. He confessed that he had given Alejandro the family’s secret property documents and helped forge my mother’s signature. Years earlier my mother had left a letter stating that my inheritance should be opened only if someone attempted to take away my right to choose.

This was the real contract.

It said that my property and the company share belonged only to me, and that no one could use my marriage to take possession of them.

Three months later the court found Alejandro and Valeria guilty. Alejandro’s sentence was set as years of imprisonment, while Valeria faced the same fate for conspiracy and assault. Ricardo could not avoid a prison sentence.

I did not stay until the end to witness their punishment.

When the judge asked me whether I had anything to say, I said only this:

“I ask nothing more from them. I am taking back my life.”

The words were short, but as I pronounced them, my chest opened freely for the first time.

Five months later the twins were born.

Elena and Sofia.

I spent the first night with them in a small rented apartment, in a part of the city where the sound of trams could be heard from the windows in the morning. Two white cradles stood beside the bed. In one, Elena’s little fingers clutched the blanket; in the other, Sofia breathed quietly.

I was still working.

Lika hired me as a consultant at a financial company. In the morning I fed the children, then went to the office, and in the evening I put their drawings on the refrigerator. My new life did not look like beautiful photographs. Sometimes the dishes remained in the sink all night. Sometimes I woke up asleep on my feet from exhaustion.

But this life was mine.

In the first week of winter the girls saw snow by the window.

“Mom, the sky is falling apart,” Elena said.

Sofia drew two round figures on a sheet of paper. Above them stood a small house, with two bells hanging from its roof.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Your bracelet,” she answered me. “So that you do not get lost.”

Several days later Alejandro’s lawyer called me.

“He wants to request visitation rights with the children,” he told me.

“He can petition the court.”

“He says that he has changed.”

I stood by the window. Outside, snow was silently falling on the yard.

“Counsel, the man who exchanged my life for a document cannot prove with words that he will protect his children.”

“Then your answer is no?”

“My answer is peace. Let him prove whatever he has to in court. I will no longer help him escape from his own consequences.”

Several weeks later I received a letter from Alejandro. I recognized his handwriting on the envelope. The letter said that Valeria had been a mistake, that he wanted to return to me, and that our children needed a family.

I did not answer.

I folded the letter and put it in the box where my old things were kept. The burned wedding photograph and the silver bracelet were there too.

I touched one of the bronze-colored bells.

This time it sounded lightly.

I put the bracelet back on my wrist, while the girls laughed in the room. Their voices filled the walls and no longer resembled the house where the smell of blood had once stood.

I went to the window. Two small tracks were visible in the snow.

The bracelet rang once more.

And this time I chose the path myself.