Part 4 — Mother Humiliated My Eight-Month-Old Daughter in Front of Everyone at Christmas, but Her Face Suddenly Went Stiff When She Saw the Letter

“…and I want you not to fight alone anymore,” Davit’s message read.

For several seconds I could not take my eyes off the phone.

My mother immediately understood who had written to me.

“Do not call Davit,” she said.

“You hid the truth from him too?”

“He was not interested in you.”

“Then why was he sending you money?”

My mother could not find an answer.

Salome dialed Irakli’s number. My mother walked around the room, but every step became weaker. First she called the lawyer, then the doctor, then the person with whom she had planned to prepare the false statement.

No one answered.

At last she put the phone on the table and said to it with unusual calm:

“I am her mother. You cannot treat me like this.”

A man’s voice sounded through the phone:

“Precisely because you are her mother, your actions are even more serious. I advise you not to contact the child’s doctor anymore and not to try to change the statement.”

“Do you think Ana will endure this?”

“She has already endured it.”

The call ended.

For the first time my mother felt that the room was no longer closing in around her. For years, one word had been enough to make everyone fall silent. Now her words stood in other people’s hands—as a recording, as letters, as transfers.

The next day, at half past eight in the morning, we were at the police station. No one shouted there. No one spoke about revenge. I was only trying to hold Nino calmly while Irakli arranged the documents.

My mother was sitting beside me.

“You can take everything back,” she told me.

“Did you take your own words back?”

“I became nervous.”

“No. You planned it.”

She raised her head.

“Do you want them to arrest me?”

“I want no one to call Nino sick anymore in order to gain control over me.”

Then Irakli turned on the recording. The three of us seemed to hear our own mother’s voice for the first time.

“Ana’s child will be safer with me.”

That phrase hung in the room.

My mother lowered her eyes.

“I did not say it like that.”

Irakli turned the phone screen toward her.

“You did. It is your voice.”

My mother listened to the recording to the end. When she heard her own laughter in the conversation, her face changed. This was no longer the face of the woman who gave everyone advice. This was the face of a person who had heard her own words from the outside and could no longer escape them.

The legal process began. My mother’s demand for custody of the child was canceled. An investigation was appointed because of the false document. The money transferred by Nino’s father was returned to me in full, because the bank confirmed that my mother had received it without my permission.

My mother did not go to prison. She admitted her guilt, paid a fine, and signed an agreement according to which she would see Nino only in my presence. This was not a celebration of victory for me.

Simply, for the first time I no longer had to protect her from the consequences of her own actions.

A week later I went to my mother’s house only to collect my things. Nino’s room was almost empty. On the wall hung one dusty photograph in which I was a child and was holding my mother’s hand.

On the windowsill stood the small wooden box in which Marine had given me the recording.

My mother opened the door.

“You can take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Why?”

“Because now only the day when I defended my child for the first time remains in this box.”

My mother’s eyes lit up.

“I protected you too.”

“I know. That is why I believed you for so long.”

Three months later Nino and I moved to another neighborhood. The apartment was still small, but the morning sun painted a warm rectangle on the kitchen floor. I worked in a children’s library and read Nino books in the evenings.

Davit came often. At first Nino watched him cautiously, then she played with his watch strap. One evening Nino said her first clear word.

“Mama.”

The glass fell from my hand in the kitchen.

Davit smiled.

“I think she said that for you.”

Nino ran toward me. The same white rabbit clip was still in her hair, the one she had lost at that Christmas table and which Salome later found under the floor.

The first snow came at the beginning of December. Nino stood by the window and drew small circles on the glass with her finger.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Snow.”

“Beautiful.”

“Very.”

That same evening my mother sent me a message.

“I miss you. Come, let us spend Christmas together. I will do everything differently.”

I looked at the screen for a long time. The old Ana would probably have called her immediately, believed her words, and tried once again to preserve peace.

But I sent only one sentence:

“Meeting Nino will be possible only when you fully admit what you did to her and get help.”

The reply came a few minutes later.

“You are still my child.”

I put the phone down.

“Yes, but now I am Nino’s mother.”

I wrote nothing more.

That night Nino fell asleep in my bed. I went to the window and took the wooden box in my hands. It was already empty. The recording was kept with Irakli, the documents lay in a folder, but the box remained.

I put Nino’s white rabbit clip into that same little box.

Last Christmas I had searched for this object with my hands on the tense, cold floor. Now it was with me, calmly and safely.

I closed the lid of the box.

And for the first time in a long while, a locked door at home no longer meant fear.

It meant peace.