Part 4 — My husband’s family held a family council in my home, but one question from me will wipe the smile from Pavel’s face

Pavel stood by the door and could not decide whether to open it.

From outside, the man knocked once more.

“Pasha, I know you are inside. The account has been frozen.”

Pavel slowly looked at me.

“Olga, please do not open the door.”

“Why?”

“First we need to find out what happened.”

“You have already found out. You simply hoped I would not understand.”

Elena jumped up.

“Pasha, tell her that this is a misunderstanding!”

“Mother, be quiet.”

This was the first time he had spoken to his mother like that. But it was already too late. The problem was not his voice, but his words. I had recorded every word.

I opened the door.

A man about fifty years old stood in the hallway, holding a black briefcase. Anger and fear were written on his face together.

“My name is Rezo,” he said. “I am Pavel’s friend. More precisely, I was.”

Pavel ran toward him.

“Rezo, listen to me, I will explain.”

“Do not explain anything anymore. The bank stopped all operations. The tax service sent a letter. You used my company’s account to hide your wife’s money.”

Elena opened her eyes wide.

“Your wife’s money?”

Rezo looked at me.

“You did not know?”

I shook my head.

Pavel raised his hands.

“It was not like that. I only borrowed it temporarily.”

“Four hundred and eighty thousand lari temporarily?” Rezo chuckled. “And with a forged signature?”

No one moved in the room.

At that moment I realized that truth can have a voice. Sometimes it knocks at the door. Sometimes it enters through the mouth of a friend. And sometimes you hear it from your own husband, and it finally ends everything you still wanted to save.

Pavel took a step toward me.

“Olga, I will return this money to you.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“With what?”

He had no answer.

Nino was saying from the phone:

“Olga, the police officers are on their way. Also, the bank confirmed that all the transfers were made from Pavel’s phone.”

Pavel flinched.

“It was not my phone.”

I looked at his phone lying on the table. My birth date was displayed as the password. The date I had remembered for three whole years only because he loved me.

And now I realized that perhaps I had simply been an easy password in his life.

The police came in the evening.

Elena cried loudly.

Aliona leaned against the wall and repeated:

“I did not know.”

And Pavel sat on a chair and was silent.

Nino told me that he could refuse a lawyer if Pavel signed the documents returning the property to me. But Pavel’s lawyer immediately called and declared that he was distancing himself from his client.

“I cannot become involved in such a case,” he said on the phone. “You concealed essential information.”

Pavel heard his own words from others for the first time.

I turned on the recording.

His voice sounded in the room:

“Sign it and let all this end. We are still staying together.”

Pavel buried his head in his hands.

Then Elena’s voice was recorded:

“You are informing her. If you approach her softly, she will have her way again.”

And Aliona’s voice came last:

“No one needs permission in a family.”

No one spoke.

Pavel listened to his own words, and such pain was written on his face as if he had understood for the first time what kind of man he was.

“Turn it off,” he asked quietly.

“Why?”

“I cannot take it anymore.”

“I managed for three years.”

That night they left.

The police took Elena away for questioning. Aliona stayed with a neighbor because she did not dare return to her mother’s apartment. Pavel stood in the hallway and looked toward me.

“When the baby is born, will you call me?”

I put my hand on my stomach.

“If the court allows you, you will see him.”

He lowered his head.

When I returned to the bedroom, I found the bottom drawer of the wardrobe open. I had a small item there — a baby shoe sewn from white fabric, with a small wooden button at the neck. My mother had sewn it before my parents died. Pavel often took one shoe in his hands and said that our child would surely look like me.

Now only one shoe lay in the drawer.

The other was nowhere to be seen.

That small emptiness hurt me more strongly than the police, the money, and the forged signature together. Not because the shoe was valuable. Because Pavel had taken it.

As if he considered even the last small sign of our future to be his.

Three months passed.

My child was born on a cold November morning. It was a boy. I named him Sandro — after my father.

Pavel did not come to the hospital.

His case reached court. The right to the apartment remained with me, he was ordered to return the money in stages, and the forged documents were entered into the case as the main evidence. Elena and Aliona lived separately. I had no further contact with them.

I did not want revenge.

I wanted to wake up in the morning without having to listen to the walls anymore.

In spring I sold the apartment.

The new house was small, but the river could be seen from the window. I placed a wooden shelf in the living room and hung yellow curtains in the kitchen. I began remote work in the field of translation, and for the first time in my life my income came only under my own name.

Sandro drew with pencils every evening.

One day he drew a house on a sheet of paper, with three figures standing beside it.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Me, you, and Grandma,” he told me.

My mother was no longer alive, but for Sandro she existed through what I told him.

“Where is Dad?”

The child put down the pencil.

“He does not live in the house.”

“Why?”

Sandro shrugged.

“Because peace lives with you.”

That night I could not sleep for a long time.

Several weeks later I received a message from Pavel. It said that he had changed, that he was undergoing treatment, that he wanted to see his son and begin our relationship again.

At the end he had added one sentence:

“You always believed me, didn’t you?”

I held the phone in my hand and watched the rain beyond the window.

Then I wrote to him:

“I believed you. Now I believe in myself.”

I wrote nothing else.

I did not wait for his reply.

I entered Sandro’s room. A small wooden shelf stood beside the bed. I placed the baby shoes sewn by my mother on it. Both of them.

Pavel sent the second shoe to us later, through a lawyer. No apology or letter accompanied it. Only a small box.

I did not throw it away.

Some things do not remain in order to return you to the past. They remain so that you remember where you came from.

Sandro touched the small wooden button with his finger.

“Mom, is this the key to the house?”

I smiled at him.

“No, Sandro. It is a reminder that only the one who can protect you remains in the house.”

The first snow began to fall outside.

I opened the window. Cold air entered the room, but this time I was not afraid of it.

The little shoes stood on the shelf.

And for the first time in my home, no one’s quiet voice could be heard anymore.