Part 4 — Six weeks before chemotherapy began, my family replaced my death with wedding plans, and then my mother smiled strangely

Tako read the message aloud, and such silence fell in the room that we could hear every strike of the wall clock.

Father dropped the phone from his hand.

“This is impossible,” he said.

“Grandfather’s notary died ten years ago,” Salome added.

Tako looked at the screen.

“The message did not come from his old number. This is an automatic notification from the archive of his law office. The document was opened today because an attempt to change the fund was recorded.”

Investigators were standing at the door.

Father immediately picked up the phone.

“Call the lawyer,” Salome told him.

“I am already calling.”

Father dialed the number. A few seconds later the call ended.

“He is not answering,” he said.

Tako looked at him calmly.

“Probably because he already knows what happened.”

“Did you speak to him?” Father asked me.

“No. The bank and the investigators got there first.”

Salome grabbed the chair.

“Nino, all this can be settled. We will return the money.”

“Money is only one part.”

“Then what are you asking for?”

“Nothing.”

Father looked at me in astonishment.

“You are going to court and asking for nothing?”

“I am asking that no one ever again be able to lie in my name.”

The investigators entered the room. One of them handed Father an official document.

“Giorgi Beridze, you must come with us for questioning. Salome Beridze, you too.”

Salome then looked at me as she had in childhood, when she broke something and hoped that I would hide it.

“Tell them that this is a misunderstanding.”

I shook my head.

“I have already been living in your misunderstanding for four years.”

Father walked toward the door, but suddenly stopped.

“We were not doing this for you. We were doing it for the family.”

Tako turned on an audio recording on the computer.

Father’s voice sounded in the room.

“If Nino cannot endure the treatment, the fund issue will also be resolved.”

Then Salome’s laughter.

“We will forget soon enough anyway.”

Father froze in place.

For the first time I saw his face from the outside. This was no longer the face of a strong man who told everyone that my mother was tense. It was the face of a person who heard his own words through someone else’s mouth and could no longer invent a new meaning for them.

“Turn it off,” he whispered.

“You said it yourself,” I answered.

“Nino, please.”

“I was begging you then, Father. In the hospital restroom. I told you that I might die.”

He had no answer.

The investigators took both of them away. Salome’s diamond necklace caught on the door and lightly jingled on the floor.

I did not go with them.

That same night the notary’s office called me. The main document turned out to be a letter from my grandfather. It stated that if anyone used my medical expenses or inheritance against me, the entire fund would pass under the control of an independent trustee and every attempt would be handed over for investigation.

My grandfather knew everything about me. He knew that Father was financially careless. He knew that Salome had always thought that the loss of others was a gain for her.

The fund remained protected. The bank froze part of the stolen money, and part was returned to me by court decision. Father and Salome were convicted of fraud and document forgery. The apartment bought with their wedding expenses was sold, the debts were paid, and the remaining money was returned to the fund.

I went to court only once.

The judge asked me whether I wanted to say anything.

“I want it to remain in the record that I did not want to destroy them,” I said. “I simply was no longer going to transfer the consequences of their decisions onto myself.”

As we left the court, Tako took my hand.

“Are you all right?”

“For the first time, truly.”

The next day I went to my parents’ house to collect my things. My old room was almost empty. The photographs had been removed from the wall, and only one thing remained on the bed—the small leather notebook in which I had written down every transfer with a blue pen.

The pages were no longer there. Father probably thought that by taking away the evidence he could erase the history too.

I took the notebook anyway.

His greasy fingerprints were visible on the cover. This was his last touch on my past.

When I returned home, I did not put the notebook away in a drawer. I placed it on my desk, but I did not open it again.

Three months later my consulting company moved into a new office. I chose a small, bright room in the city center. In the mornings I opened the window, listened to the sound of the street, and told the employees to recheck any suspicious number from the beginning.

My life was not a noisy victory.

There were mornings when my hair was still short and I remembered the old sick woman in the mirror.

There were evenings when the smell of the clinic suddenly returned to my memory.

But now I turned on the light at home myself. I paid my own bills myself. I made my own decisions.

Mother sent me a message once a month. The first was short: “I miss you.”

The second was longer: “We suffered too.”

And the third almost sounded like a plea: “If you help us get the fund back, we will explain everything.”

I did not answer any of them.

One Sunday, at the beginning of winter, my nephew, little Luka, came to me. He was still too young to understand the meaning of his parents’ crime. He was drawing with colored pencils on the kitchen floor.

“Aunt Nino, are you a doctor?” he asked.

“No. I check money.”

“And do you stop bad people?”

His question sounded so sincere that I smiled.

“Sometimes. But the most important thing is that a person does not lose themselves.”

Luka drew a house on the paper. One door led outside from the house, and a little woman stood by the window.

“This is you,” he told me. “The door is open.”

That evening I thought for the first time that perhaps my family’s story did not end in the room where they were taken away, but began in the house where I no longer expected anyone.

Four months later the first snow came. The city quietly turned white. Before going to work, I put coffee on the windowsill and attached Luka’s drawing to the refrigerator.

That day Mother called me.

In her voice, the old crying and new weariness could be heard together.

“Nino, I am asking you only once. Come and talk to us.”

“What do you want to tell me?”

“That we are still your family.”

I went to the window. The street trees were barely visible beneath the snow.

“Being family is no longer a word, Mother.”

“Then what is it?”

“It is what a person does when another person cannot defend themselves.”

Mother was silent for a long time.

“We made a mistake.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t you forgive us?”

“I have already tried forgiveness.”

“Then why don’t you come back?”

I closed my eyes.

“Because forgiveness does not mean returning.”

The call ended.

A few minutes later a message arrived on my phone. It was Father. It contained only one sentence: “We may still need your help.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I deleted it.

I felt neither anger nor victory.

I simply no longer wanted to return to a house built from someone else’s fear.

I sat down at my desk and opened the old leather notebook. On the first page stood the date written with my blue pen—the day when Mother told me that my death had come at an inconvenient time for them.

On the last page I made a new note: “Today I chose my life.”

Outside, snow was still falling.

I closed the notebook and placed the key on top of it.

This time I locked the door myself.