Part 4 — Before her husband died, he gave something to the doctor, but when I needed to open it, the doctor’s face suddenly turned pale

The number written down on Mark’s last night did not turn out to be unfamiliar.

It already existed in my phone.

Next to the name, only one word was written: “Ana.”

Ana was Mark’s childhood friend, who had moved to another city several years earlier. I had met her twice. She was always a quiet woman, with curly hair and a yellow scarf, with small wooden beads hanging from its ends.

Levan called the number.

The first time no one answered.

The second time neither.

On the third call, a hoarse woman’s voice was heard.

“Nino?”

“Yes.”

“Mark told me that if I contacted you, you should first read his last letter.”

“There is another letter?”

“There is. But before I send it to you, you should know that Mark was protecting you not only from Giorgi.”

A familiar heaviness awoke in my chest.

“From whom else?”

Ana was silent for several seconds.

“From your own fear.”

She sent me a voice recording that same day. In the recording, Mark was sitting in the hospital room. His breathing was heavy, but his voice sounded calm.

“Nino, if you contact Ana, it means that you already know the truth about Giorgi. Do not think that I was a hero. I simply realized far too late how easily a person can hide the truth in order to protect his own family. After my death, you may believe everyone who cries loudly. Please, do not do that.”

The recording ended.

I stood by the window and leaned my belly against its glass. It was raining outside. The streetlights spread across the wet asphalt, as if the whole city were floating in tears.

That same evening, the police officially opened Giorgi’s case materials. His lawyer came to my house, folded his dark umbrella at the door, and entered with such an expression as if it were I, not he, who was guilty.

“Mrs. Nino, my client says that Mark’s signatures were forged.”

“Was the voice recording forged too?”

“That requires an expert examination to establish.”

“The camera recording too?”

The lawyer pressed his lips together.

“Mark was ill. He may have had paranoia.”

Levan, who was standing near the kitchen, leaned forward.

“There is no such diagnosis in the doctor’s report.”

The lawyer closed his bag.

“If you refuse the agreement, the case will go to court.”

For the first time I felt that fear no longer controlled my voice.

“Then let us go to court.”

Giorgi continued trying to regain control. One day he called me ten times. The next day his mother came and cried at the door as if the whole neighborhood were unjustly persecuting her son.

“You made Mark doubt his own brother while he was alive,” she told me.

“No, Mrs. Marine. Your son’s words did that.”

“It is those who ask for money who break up families.”

“I did not ask for money. I only want the truth.”

She slammed the door so hard that the picture hanging in the corridor fell down.

Several weeks later, the investigation confirmed everything. Giorgi had been taking money for six months using Mark’s signature. The camera recording was genuine. His voice was genuine. Mark’s letter was genuine too.

The hardest day came in court, when the prosecutor turned on the recording.

Giorgi’s own voice sounded in the courtroom.

“If you talk, no one will protect Nino and the child.”

Giorgi sat with his head bowed.

The judge stopped the recording.

“Is that your voice?”

Giorgi said nothing for a long time.

“Yes,” he said at last.

That one word fell upon the courtroom more heavily than any shouting.

The court sentenced him to a long imprisonment, while the return of the company funds was determined by a separate decision. Giorgi’s lawyer tried to speak to me at the final hearing.

“If you soften your testimony, the sentence may also be reduced.”

“I do not decide his sentence.”

“But you can help him.”

“All my life I helped people who later used my kindness against me. Now I will no longer save anyone at the price of my own truth.”

Giorgi heard these words.

For the first time he looked at me the way a person looks at a result from which he can no longer escape.

When I left the courthouse, I was wearing Mark’s old coat. The wooden bead I had picked up at the hospital that morning was still in the pocket. The whole way I touched its round, smoothed surface with my fingers.

Then I returned home.

Mark’s study still contained his work desk. A pen lay on an open notebook. On the chair was the gray blanket with which he had covered his shoulders in recent months.

The room looked empty.

But what I missed most was one thing: beside our wedding photograph hanging on the wall, his small wooden box was no longer standing. I had taken it to the hospital because I thought Mark kept something important in it.

Now only one object remained in the box—the second wooden bead.

Mark always had two. He wore one on his wrist, and left the other in the box, saying that the second one would be enough if he lost one.

That night I cried for the first time not only because of his death, but also because he had managed everything except what he wanted most: to see our girl.

Three weeks later my child was born.

I named her Elene.

When I first laid her on my chest, the doctor told me that her fingers looked like her father’s. I smiled and answered:

“She has a name that Mark loved very much.”

Several months after Elene’s birth, I moved to another city. I rented a small apartment there, and a river could be seen from the window. In the morning I went down with the baby carriage to buy bread. At midday I worked in the hospital administration, because I wanted to remain in the place where Mark had made the last decision of his life.

In the first days, every corridor hurt me.

Then, little by little, I learned that it is possible to give pain a place in one’s own home without allowing it to occupy the whole house.

When Elene was nine months old, she walked for the first time. She held a colored pencil in her hand and drew three curved lines on the wall.

“This is Daddy,” she told me.

“Where is Daddy?”

She looked toward the window.

“Far away, but he is watching us.”

I did not correct her.

In winter, the first snow came. Elene stood by the window and drew circles on the glass with her finger. I stood behind her and shook Mark’s wooden bead in my hand.

That day I received a letter from Giorgi.

“Nino, I know I do not deserve forgiveness. But I want you to listen to me at least once. Mark loved you. I simply lost my way. Help me return to my family.”

I read the letter to the end.

Then I folded it.

Elene looked up at me.

“Who was it?”

“A person who realized too late what he had lost.”

“Will you answer?”

“No.”

“Why?”

I followed the trace of the first snow in the window with my eyes.

“Because sometimes not answering is also an answer.”

I put the letter in the trash bin. I felt neither anger nor victory. Only peace.

Mark’s death took many things from me: a husband, the old picture of the future, and that naive belief that every relative is family.

But it also left me something else.

The truth.

And a girl who looked at Mark’s photograph every morning and asked me why her father smiled like that.

One evening Elene took his photograph in her hand. The wooden bead lay behind the photograph.

“Is this Daddy’s?”

“Yes.”

“Then why is it with you?”

I placed the bead in her small palm.

“Because he left us a way to return home.”

Elene hugged the bead to her chest.

Outside the window, snow was still falling. And in the room, of Mark’s things, only this small, smoothed wooden bead remained.

But for the first time it no longer seemed to me that it reminded me of death.

It reminded me that we survived.

And that his last choice belonged to life.