Part 4 — I accidentally entered the mafia boss’s meeting in wet clothes — but instead of getting angry, he came straight toward me, and everyone’s faces changed

At that very moment Adrian’s phone rang again.

This time his lawyer’s name appeared on the screen.

“Answer it,” I told him.

He accepted the call.

“Mr. Moretti, the police are already on their way,” the lawyer said. “Transfers from Victor’s accounts have appeared. But there is another problem.”

“Say it.”

“All the transfers are confirmed with your signature.”

Adrian closed his eyes.

Victor laughed from the floor.

“I told you that everything was mine.”

“You forged the documents,” Adrian said.

“No. You signed them yourself. You simply did not know what you were signing.”

The guards led Victor out of the room. He was still smiling, although now there was no victory in his smile. There was only a desperate attempt not to lose control.

The lawyer, Daniel Ross, reached the mansion in half an hour. It was nine o’clock at night. Cold rain was falling outside, and drops of water struck the windows as if the house were knocking with thousands of little fingers.

Daniel spread the folders across the table.

“Victor created shell companies for years,” he said. “Money left your family’s accounts and then returned in your name.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Adrian.

“Because after my father’s death I could no longer trust everyone.”

“You didn’t trust me either?”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“Do you know me now?”

Adrian looked toward me.

“Now I know that even with water-filled shoes, you entered the room where other people do not dare even knock on the door.”

Daniel cleared his throat.

“There is another recording.”

He turned on a small device.

Victor’s voice sounded on the screen; he had been speaking on the phone several hours earlier, before entering the room.

“We must frighten Maia. If she learns about the bird, she will tell Adrian everything. First let us take her brother away, then she too will fall silent.”

Cold spread through my body.

This was the moment when I heard Victor’s words from outside. His voice was cold and calm. As if a human life were only one line in an account.

Adrian listened to the recording to the end.

“This is enough,” Daniel said.

“Leo is still with him,” I said.

“The police are searching for his trail.”

“I cannot wait for the police.”

Adrian stood in front of me.

“You will not go alone.”

“I am not coming with you either unless you tell me what is in the safe.”

He was silent for several seconds.

Then he went to the safe.

A door hidden in the wall opened. Inside were money, weapons, and documents. But at the very top lay a small wooden box with my name written on it in my mother’s handwriting.

“For Maia, when the truth can no longer protect her.”

The box trembled in my hands.

Inside I found three things: my father’s old photograph, a copy of my birth certificate, and a letter.

“My child, if you are reading this, know that your family did not run away. We were trying to protect you. Adrian’s father saved your life when Victor wanted to kill him. That is why we could not ask Adrian for help. He was also in danger. In the safe are the final accounts. They will prove that Victor did not act alone.”

Daniel looked through the documents.

“There is another name here,” he said.

Adrian took the sheet from him.

His face slowly changed.

“Who?” I asked.

He could not answer me.

Under his father’s signature on the document was the name of Adrian’s uncle, Luca Moretti. Luca was officially considered to have died ten years earlier.

“He is alive,” Adrian said.

“And is he with Leo?”

The phone rang at that very moment.

The call was from Leo’s number.

Adrian turned on speakerphone.

“Maia,” my brother’s voice sounded, “I am safe. The woman let me go.”

“Where are you?”

“At the old station. But come quickly. I saw a man here. He had a photograph of your mother.”

My heart stopped.

“What does he look like?”

Leo said quietly:

“He looks like Adrian.”

Adrian’s face turned to stone.

The next morning we found Leo at the old station. He was frightened, but unharmed. An old woman stood with him, who had previously been my mother’s neighbor.

“She took your brother away when Victor’s people left the house,” she told us. “Your mother asked me, if something happened, to help the children.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?” I asked.

“Because fear sometimes turns a person into a slave of the truth.”

That day the police arrested Victor. Three weeks later they also arrested Luca Moretti, who was living under another name and trying to flee abroad. Victor’s accounts were frozen. Adrian completely handed over his company’s finances to independent investigators and publicly apologized to all the employees.

An investigation against him also began, because his signatures stood on the documents. He did not try to flee.

“You can hand everything over to someone else,” I told him before the court, when I had my last meeting with him.

“No,” he replied. “If I failed to notice for years how Victor was controlling me, I cannot run away from responsibility.”

That was the first answer from him that I truly liked.

Four months later Leo and I left the city and moved to a small seaside town. We rented an old house, from whose kitchen window fishermen’s boats could be seen in the morning.

I began working at a new hotel. Every morning I knocked on room doors, cleaned the floors, and warned guests not to put excessive pressure on the bathroom pipes.

Leo returned to school. During the first week the teacher asked him to draw something about the family. He drew four people: me, Mother, Father, and himself. Above them he drew a little copper bird.

“Is it no longer afraid now?” I asked.

“No,” Leo told me. “Now it shows us the way.”

Adrian’s case ended in six months. The court determined that he had not directly participated in Victor’s crimes, although he was sentenced to a large fine and the transfer of part of his property for neglecting financial control. He sold the house, and the remaining money was transferred to a fund helping employees who had suffered violence.

One evening I received a letter from him.

“Maia, I know that you do not owe me an answer. I simply wanted you to know that I no longer live in that house. If you ever want to talk, I will wait for you. If not, I will understand that too.”

I held the letter in my hands for a long time.

Earlier, even one word from him could change my day. Now I only went to the window and put the envelope in a drawer.

Leo asked me:

“You won’t answer?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Outside the window the first snow was beginning. White flakes disappeared on the black surface of the sea.

“Because sometimes you can forgive a person, but you no longer want to return to your old life.”

I hung the little copper bird on the window latch in the bedroom. Now it no longer hung from the mop handle. At sunrise its shadow moved on the wall and truly looked like a bird.

Leo closed the door.

And I looked at the bird.

This time I was choosing the way myself.

And for the first time it no longer pointed me backward.