Part 4 — At the altar, the groom let go of my hand and ran to another woman, but the laughter that broke out in the hall suddenly stopped

“…after the third knock, Arthur raised his hand to me.

“Do not move.”

Cole drew his weapon, while the general pressed a button attached beside the armchair. The light in the room went out.

My first desire was to scream, but Arthur gripped my wrist.

“Quiet. You must reach the back exit with your mother.”

“The folder?”

“You will take it.”

“Me?”

“You are the reason they will come.”

Glass fragments crunched beneath our feet. In the darkness I heard my mother’s breathing. Cole opened the door slightly and then immediately closed it.

“There are three men outside,” he said quietly. “No, four.”

The general clicked his teeth.

“Hayes acted quickly.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“I knew his conscience before he sold it.”

Arthur opened a small wall panel. Behind it there was a narrow passage.

“This house was built during the war. It leads to the forest.”

He sent my mother ahead of me. I hugged the folder to my chest. The copper lock touched my fingers like a cold spot.

A gunshot sounded behind us.

My mother screamed.

“Do not stop!” Arthur shouted.

We ran through the passage. Instead of the dress, I was now wearing a simple dark coat that my mother had given me in the car. Still, it seemed to me that the heavy fabric of the wedding dress was wrapped around my legs again.

At the edge of the forest, a prepared car was waiting for us. Cole opened the door.

“Get in.”

Arthur stayed behind.

“Are you coming too?” I asked.

“In a little while.”

“I do not like that answer.”

He smiled for the first time, although the smile was tired.

“I do not like many answers either. Still, we must live with them.”

He closed the door. The car started moving.

We drove in silence for ten minutes along a country road. Then Cole’s phone rang.

“The police are already on the way,” he said. “The general recorded everything. The attack cameras were also working.”

“The general?”

“He is alive. Arthur arrested two men before we left.”

My mother exhaled.

But the heaviest blow was still waiting for us in the morning.

At the military investigative building, Daniel Hayes was brought in between two security officers. Kyle was there too. He had put on a white shirt, but its collar was open and his hair was disheveled.

As soon as he saw me, he came toward me.

“Elene, listen to me. Everything is my father’s fault.”

“And you simply happened to abandon at the altar the woman to whom you had promised faithfulness for four years?”

“I wanted to protect you.”

“By running into Liza’s arms?”

Kyle lowered his eyes.

“I had no other way.”

Then the investigator turned on the screen.

A recording filmed in the hall appeared. Kyle was telling Liza: “If she gets angry, she will leave the house. Then we will find the folder too.”

His own voice.

His own words.

Kyle looked at the screen and his face changed. For the first time I heard what a person’s fear sounds like when he listens to himself from outside.

“This was cut,” he whispered.

The investigator shook his head.

“Twenty-eight of the twenty-nine cameras show the same thing.”

Kyle’s lawyer did not even listen to the recording to the end.

“My client will not testify.”

“And you, it seems, no longer want the case at all,” he said calmly to Daniel Hayes.

“What do you mean?”

“Against you there is falsification of the military archive, organization of murder, threats, and pressure on witnesses. I was paid for defense, not suicide.”

The lawyer closed the folder and left the room.

Daniel Hayes looked toward me.

“If your father had remained silent, we would all have been happy.”

“My father is dead. And now he is speaking for the first time.”

That day Hayes and his two accomplices were arrested. Liza made a deal and testified. Her testimony revealed that Kyle had planned leaving the wedding in advance. He thought that publicly humiliating me would destroy me and I would leave everything myself.

Kyle continued calling me even several weeks later.

At first he apologized.

Then he blamed his father.

Then he went to my mother.

“Tell her that I love her,” he asked.

My mother did not open the door.

By that time I had moved into a small apartment beside the river. In the mornings I taught history lessons at school. I taught the children that the past is not only dates. Sometimes it knocks on the door when you think it has already ended.

Arthur called me once a week.

“The general is asking about you,” he would tell me.

“How is he?”

“He is still giving everyone orders.”

“Then he must be well.”

The general did not make it to the trial. His heart failed him, but in his last days he sat beside me and told me about my father’s photographs.

“Your father always said that truth is the heaviest weapon,” he told me.

“And why did you help me?”

The old man looked at the small compass attached to his wrist.

“Because your father promised Peter before his death that he would never abandon his family. I fulfilled that promise very late.”

Several months later the first snow fell on the city. When I returned from school, I saw a child’s drawing on the kitchen table. It had been given to me by my student, Nino. In the drawing a woman stood at a crossroads, holding a small compass in her hand.

Below it was written: “Mrs. Elene, you are choosing the right road.”

I attached the drawing to the wall.

That evening I received Kyle’s last message.

“I became a different person after the trial. Please meet me at least once. I will explain everything to you.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Earlier, each of his messages had received a reply. Now only silence remained for me, which needed no protection.

I wrote: “I no longer need your explanation. I have already heard your choice.”

Then I blocked the number.

I went to the window. Outside, snow was falling silently. My father’s photograph hung on the wall, and beside it was Nino’s drawing. On the table lay the small copper compass given to me by the general — the one I had first noticed on his wrist in that hall where everyone thought I had been defeated.

The compass needle slowly stopped.

This time I chose the road myself.