Part 4 — Two days earlier they forcibly took me to marry, but on the wedding night Niko’s face lost its color

…I placed the envelope on the table and could not bring myself to touch it.

My father was alive.

Or someone was playing his voice very well.

Niko ordered security to lock every entrance. Stella stood by the window and watched the street through a small gap in the curtain.

“The black car has already passed for the third time,” she said.

Niko picked up the phone.

“Call the lawyer.”

A few seconds later, the ringing sound was repeated in the room.

“Mr. Santoro, I will no longer take part in this matter,” the lawyer said. “Hale’s people broke into my office. I am going to the police.”

“If you go to the police, they will kill you at the very first step.”

“No. For the first time in this matter, someone will tell the truth.”

The call ended.

Niko stood silently.

I looked at the envelope.

“Open it,” he told me.

“Are you afraid now too?”

“Yes.”

His sincerity frightened me more than his threat.

Inside the envelope lay a small disc and one sheet of paper. On the disc, in my mother’s hand, was written: “For Sophia, when the truth begins to protect her.”

Niko put the device into the computer. My mother’s face appeared on the screen. She was young, her hair falling over her shoulders, and she wore the same silver hairpin that she left to me years later.

“Sophia, if you are seeing this, it means Arthur finally understood whom he was fighting. William Hale is only an assistant. The main person is the one who sells the law in the city.”

In the video, my mother said one name.

Deputy Prosecutor Mark Belmont.

The man who, on that same day, was making the first official statement about my father’s death.

The video continued.

“Belmont closed my case, protected Arthur’s money, and brought all the witnesses to Hale. I hid the recording in the object I would pass on to my child. I asked Arthur to keep Sophia far away, but he could not. If he is dead, trust neither the police nor the man who appears first in the name of truth.”

The video stopped.

Stella wiped away her tears.

“Your mother kept this all these years?”

“No,” I said. “She knew that one day I would certainly need it.”

Niko picked up the disc.

“Your father is alive, but where is he?”

The answer to that question came at that very moment.

A new message appeared on the phone.

“The old courthouse archive. Before midnight. Come alone, Sophia.”

Below it was a photograph.

My father was sitting on a chair, blood on his face, but his eyes were open.

Niko snatched the phone from me.

“You are not going there.”

“My father is there.”

“It is a trap.”

“Then let us go together.”

“That is exactly what they fear.”

“No. They fear that now my voice is not alone.”

We had two hours until midnight.

At the old courthouse archive, we found the basement doors half open. The smells of dampness, paper, and rust mixed together. A lamp flickered at the end of the corridor.

“Father?” I called.

The man sitting on the chair slowly stood up.

It was Arthur Shaw.

Alive.

There was a stitch on his cheek, and his right hand was pressed to his chest.

“Sophia, you must leave.”

“You died.”

“The man they found was my security employee. Hale staged your death scene in order to extract the recording from us.”

Niko stepped forward.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Arthur looked at him.

“Because I could not understand whether you were also one of them or not.”

“And yet you entrusted your daughter to me.”

“Because I had no other way.”

I stepped between them.

“I am not a deal. Nor a shield. Nor an inheritance that you passed to each other.”

My father lowered his head.

“I know.”

It was the first time he said that word and truly believed it.

At that moment, the sound of applause came from the end of the corridor.

Mark Belmont came out of the shadows. William Hale stood behind him.

“A family reunion,” Belmont said. “How sad that it will not continue.”

Hale drew a pistol.

Niko reached for his waist, but I immediately shouted:

“Do not draw your weapon!”

Everyone stopped.

I took my phone out of my pocket.

“Your conversation is being broadcast live.”

Hale laughed.

“To whom?”

“To the people who are already on their way.”

It was a lie. But only half of one. Before we went down into the basement, Stella had sent all the files to journalists, federal investigators, and my father’s lawyer.

The smile disappeared from Belmont’s face.

“Put the phone down.”

“No.”

“You have no idea whom you are opposing.”

“Now I know. And for the first time you do not know whom you are opposing.”

Sirens sounded in the corridor.

Hale stepped back. Belmont tried to escape, but federal investigators were already standing in the archive doorway.

Niko slowly placed the gun on the floor.

“All of this was recorded,” I told Belmont.

He heard his own voice when I played the recording from the phone. His words from a few minutes earlier could be heard: “A family reunion… how sad that it will not continue.”

Belmont turned pale.

Hale lowered his eyes.

For the first time they saw their own words through someone else’s ears.

My father held out his hand to me.

I looked at it for several seconds.

Then I went to him and embraced him.

His shirt smelled of hospital medicines.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“I do not yet know whether I can.”

“I know.”

Niko stood farther away from us. His face was still tense, but this time there was no lost place for me in that tension.

That night we went to the police.

The next day it was officially confirmed that the corpse found was Arthur’s security employee. Belmont and Hale were arrested. There was sufficient evidence against them—recordings, transfers, cameras, and the film my mother had hidden from me for fifteen years.

Niko handed over his family’s financial network to the investigation.

And I froze my father’s money accounts.

The wedding was canceled, although the marriage legally still existed for several weeks. Niko signed the divorce papers first.

“You are free,” he told me.

“For the first time?”

“No. For the first time you decided that you were free.”

He was right.

From my father’s office I took only one thing—the photograph from my childhood that had remained on the empty wall. The room looked strangely small. There were no longer red-wax-sealed envelopes on the desk. His heavy breathing was no longer heard.

Several weeks later I moved to Boston and continued my law course at the university. In the mornings I worked in the library, and in the evenings Stella called me and asked whether I had eaten.

My father slowly recovered. He visited me once a week. At first we spoke only about the weather. Then about Mother. Finally about the day when he sacrificed my life to save others from fear.

“At your wedding I thought I controlled everything,” he told me one evening.

“You only took away my choice.”

“I know.”

This time I did not ask him for forgiveness.

Time did its work.

Three months later the first snow came to Boston. Stella’s little nephew stood with me by the window and drew a house on paper. He drew a small silver column on the roof of the house.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A door,” he answered. “So bad people cannot come in.”

I laughed.

That evening I received a message from Niko.

“I want to talk to you. This time I will ask nothing of you.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote back:

“You may say whatever you want. I no longer have an obligation to answer.”

His reply came immediately.

“That is enough too.”

The next day he sent me a letter. It was short. He wrote that for the first time he understood how easily a person can be turned into a mistake when you look at them only through rumors. He apologized for the words he had said to me on the wedding night. He asked for nothing.

I folded the letter and put it in a book.

I did not burn it.

Nor did I return it.

Some things simply have to remain where the truth was last spoken.

I was slowly building my own life. In the mornings I went to lectures. In the evenings I wrote in a small café. I no longer checked the cars from the window. I no longer flinched at every sound of the door.

I placed the silver hairpin on my desk. I kept its back open, so that I would not forget what was hidden beneath the surface.

One morning snow completely covered the city. I opened the window and let cold air into the room. The hairpin flashed in the sunlight—like a small courthouse column that had finally truly turned out to be a support.

At that moment I understood that my mother had not said that truth would always set us free.

She said that truth always had a support.

And for the first time I stood on my own feet.

The silver column glittered in the sun.

And this time I locked the door myself.