I Found My Little Daughter Bald When I Returned from Work, and When I Asked for the Truth, Nikolai Lowered His Eyes

As soon as I entered the house, I saw my three-year-old daughter on the balcony, in the frost, turned toward the wall and completely shaved, while my mother-in-law stood calmly behind her.

The January wind fluttered the thin pajama fabric. Dasha was trembling in the shoulders, while her small hands were clasped over her chest. When she heard the sound of my steps and turned around, I saw such fear in her eyes, as if I had been away from her not for a whole week, but for her whole life.

“Mommy… I didn’t take anything,” she whispered.

I bent down on my heels and held her to my heart. I pressed my cheek to her shaved head. Her skin was cold. Small red scratches were visible on the surface, as if someone had been in a hurry and had not heard the child crying.

“Who did this to you?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

Galina came out of the kitchen. She was drying her hands on her apron, and her face had such an expression as if we were talking about juice spilled on the dinner table.

“Little thieves must be punished like this, so that they remember the shame,” she said.

My back suddenly became cold.

“You will never again call my child a thief.”

Behind her, Irina sat on the sofa and looked at her phone. Her fingers moved quickly across the screen, but she could not hide the smile at the corner of her lips. Nikolai stood at the table and stirred his cup with a teaspoon.

“Galina’s gold bracelet has disappeared,” he said. “Dasha was the only one who entered her room.”

“She went into the kitchen to play,” I answered. “She cannot reach the drawer where you keep the jewelry.”

“Children suddenly become clever when their mother is not home,” Irina raised her head from the phone. “She saw something shiny, put it in her bag, and forgot.”

Dasha buried herself in my neck. Her tears flowed into the collar of my blouse. All the way from the business trip to here, I had thought about how she would greet me, how I would bring her the chocolate teddy bears she asked me about every day. Now I was counting her breaths, only so that I would not go crazy.

“Where is her bag?” I asked.

Galina shrugged.

“In the room. Do you still not understand whom you are defending?”

“I understand very well. I am defending a child.”

Nikolai suddenly came closer to me.

“You are in our house. Lower your tone.”

“This house cannot become a place where a three-year-old child is punished and placed in the cold air with her head uncovered.”

“Do not teach us how to raise children,” Irina intervened. “You yourself abandoned her for a week.”

“I was at work, not on the street.”

Then everything happened in a second. Nikolai’s hand struck my face. My lip split against my tooth and I staggered backward, toward the balcony door. Dasha screamed so loudly that I could no longer feel my own pain.

Galina did not move. Irina put down her phone only when she was sure that I was not going to fall.

At that moment, the fear disappeared.

I took Dasha into the room and packed our documents, a bank card, several clothes, and her worn plush rabbit into a small suitcase. A piece of fabric sewn with red thread was attached to one of the rabbit’s ears. It was the only thing that no one could take from Dasha’s hands.

Galina blocked my way in the doorway.

“If you leave now, do not come back.”

“That is exactly what I am going to do.”

Before getting into the car, I wrote to Andrei: “Your father hit me. Your mother shaved Dasha for something she did not take.”

The answer came immediately: “Mother is very angry. Come back, apologize, and do not exaggerate. We are family.”

I read it once. I blocked the number.

At one in the morning, Dasha fell asleep in a small hotel. I sat beside her and carefully stroked the cold skin of her head. Just then I remembered the small camera installed in the living room, which I had set up for the nanny years ago and then completely forgotten.

I opened the old program on my phone. I barely remembered the password. In the archive, I found the date of that day. A recording bar appeared on the screen and slowly began to fill. My hands were trembling, but I did not take my finger away from the screen. After a few seconds, the image became clear, the room door opened, and someone’s hand appeared in front of the camera…

The camera recording continued exactly from the moment where my finger had stopped on the screen.

Only the monotonous sound of the refrigerator could be heard in the hotel room. Trucks passed outside the window, and their headlights moved across the ceiling in white stripes. Dasha slept beside me, holding one of my fingers in one hand and the rabbit with the red-stitched ear in the other.

The living room appeared on the screen. The clock in the corner showed four twenty-nine. For several seconds nothing happened. Then Irina entered.

She was holding her mother’s black velvet bag.

My breath caught.

Irina first looked toward the hallway, then went toward Galina’s room. The camera angle could not see the bedroom completely, but her shadow was visible in the open doorway. After a while she returned, holding a gold bracelet between her fingers.

I gripped the phone so tightly that my nails dug into my skin.

Irina put the bracelet on the table, but immediately picked it up, as if she sensed the camera. She took a small plastic box from the bag and put the jewelry inside it. Then she entered the bedroom again.

I could not believe it.

I rewound the recording. One minute earlier, Irina had been standing alone in the living room and talking to someone on the phone. Her voice was low, but it could be heard clearly enough in the room.

“We have to sell it today,” she said. “I have no other way.”

She did not hear the voice from the other side, but Irina’s answer froze my blood.

“No, Andrei, I cannot tell Mother. You told me this was the last debt.”

Andrei.

My husband. He, far from the city, supposedly on business, was continuing the game arranged against me together with the same family.

I stopped the recording again. For several minutes I simply stared at the screen. I wanted to hear the voice differently. Maybe the word had been another one. Maybe Irina meant another Andrei. But then my husband’s face appeared on the screen.

He entered the house in the evening. He was still wearing his jacket. He said something to Irina that I could not make out, then both of them went away from the camera. About ten minutes later Galina entered, holding Dasha’s small backpack.

I looked at Dasha, and something burned inside my heart.

“Mommy, I really didn’t take anything,” she murmured in her sleep.

“I know, my little one,” I whispered.

But the hardest part was still ahead. I continued the recording. Galina brought Dasha out of the room. The child was crying and covering her hair with both hands. Galina opened her backpack, looked inside, and then looked at Irina.

“It isn’t here,” she said.

“Then check the room completely,” Irina answered.

Nikolai also appeared.

“You must find the bracelet before Natasha returns.”

“What if we do not find it?” Galina asked.

Irina shrugged.

“Then we will blame the child. She is three years old. Who will believe her words?”

The recording stopped here because the camera’s sound disappeared for several seconds. I looked at the screen and felt my body become completely exhausted.

Then the sound returned.

“Shave her hair,” Nikolai said. “It will be more convincing this way.”

“She is a child,” Galina’s voice trembled for the first time.

“You have to teach a child not to touch other people’s things.”

I splashed cold water on Dasha’s face and returned to the screen. Now I already knew that this was not only about the missing bracelet. They had prepared the lie in advance. They wanted to humiliate my daughter and make me believe that this was family upbringing.

The phone rang.

It was Andrei, from a new number.

I did not answer the call. A few seconds later a message arrived: “If you do not return home, I will take Dasha away from you. I already know where you are.”

At that same moment I heard footsteps in the hotel corridor. Someone stopped at our door. The handle moved slowly. I held Dasha to my heart and looked toward the door when a man’s voice sounded from outside…

“Mrs. Natasha, open the door. We are from the police.”

I did not want to wake Dasha. I got up from the bed silently, took the phone in my hand, and went to the door. Indeed, two uniformed policemen stood outside, and behind them the hotel manager looked on with a pale face.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Your husband reported that you took the child illegally and that she may be in danger,” one policeman said. “Please open the door.”

“The child is asleep. First you must see the recording.”

I turned the phone toward their eyes. I played the recording from the beginning. After a few seconds Irina appeared on the screen, holding the gold bracelet. The policemen looked at each other.

“You can enter the room,” I told them. “But first watch this to the end.”

At six o’clock in the morning we were sitting in the hotel’s small administrative room. A broken plastic cup lay on the table, while a clock on the wall counted the minutes noisily. We played the recording again.

Irina’s voice was heard clearly:

“We will blame the child. She is three years old. Who will believe her words?”

Silence descended in the room.

Then Nikolai’s voice sounded:

“Shave her hair. It will be more convincing this way.”

The policeman clenched his jaw.

“Is this recording original?”

“The camera was installed in my house. The file was automatically saved to the account. You can verify it in the technical department.”

Dasha sat on my lap. I had covered her head with a hat. Her fingers were still clutching my blouse.

“Mommy, are we not going home now?” she asked.

“No, if you do not want to.”

That same morning, my lawyer, Elena, watched the video. She took off her glasses and put them on the table.

“Natasha, this is not only proof of innocence. Here we can see premeditated humiliation of a child, physical and psychological violence, your beating too, and your husband’s participation.”

“Andrei said that he knew nothing.”

“Now we know that he did know.”

Elena opened the list of files on the computer. In one recording Irina was talking to Andrei, and in another Andrei was telling Nikolai that everything had to be finished before I returned.

“But where is the bracelet?” I asked.

Elena opened the last part of the video. At nine in the evening Irina left the house. She was holding the same black bag. In another camera angle, which showed the entrance hall, her face appeared clearly. At the end of the recording, a small receipt appeared, having fallen from the bag onto the floor.

It had the address of a pawnshop and a description of a gold item written on it.

“They sold the bracelet,” Elena said. “Then they blamed the child in order to hide the loss.”

Nikolai, Galina, and Irina told different stories from one another during the very first interrogation. Andrei continued writing to me that I had exaggerated the “family problem” too much.

Around noon, a call came to my phone from an unknown number.

“Natasha, it is Andrei. Come, let us talk.”

“Everything has already been said in the recording.”

“If you take this all the way, you will lose Dasha anyway. My father said that in court we would prove that you are unstable.”

“Do you really think that after this I will be afraid of you?”

A long silence fell on the other side.

Then Andrei said very quietly:

“You do not yet know whom you are opposing.”

I ended the call. A few minutes later Elena called me. Her voice was tense.

“Natasha, the police found the bracelet at the pawnshop, but they discovered one more thing there. In the documents for debts taken in Galina’s name, there is your signature, although you never signed them.”

I looked at the recording. Andrei stood on the screen and told Irina: “When Natasha leaves, everything will remain with us.”

At that moment I realized that this family was not only trying to accuse a child. They were planning my home, my money, and my future as well. But they still did not know that their own recordings would become the evidence before which no one could hide their words…