Part 4 — Ten Years Later, My Former Husband Asked Me If I Regretted Losing Him — But His Face Fell When He Saw the Photo

The man who had come to the school in Victor’s name was sitting in the security room when we arrived there.

A sharp smell of disinfectant stood in the corridor. Nino was beside me and had seized my coat so tightly, as if the moment she released her fingers we would return to ten years earlier.

The principal closed the door.

“He said that he was the child’s father,” he explained to us. “He also had a copy of your daughter’s birth certificate.”

“Name?” I asked.

“Levan. He said he was an assistant to a lawyer.”

Victor put both hands on the table.

“I did not send him.”

“But your representative had the document,” I said.

His lawyer, Gela, immediately took out his phone.

“Victor, no one in our office gave such an instruction.”

“Then who gave it?”

Gela did not answer.

The police took Levan away within a few minutes. In his bag they found copies of our old divorce file, Nino’s school address, and a document in which Victor requested custody of the child.

Nino stood silently.

“Mom, I don’t want to go with this man.”

“You are not going anywhere.”

For the first time Victor looked at me not as his former wife, but as the only person who might be able to save him.

“Elene, please, I didn’t do this.”

“I would believe you if you had ever done anything to deserve trust.”

That same evening he called me twenty-two times.

I answered on the twenty-third.

“What do you want?”

“I found out who Levan was. He is Karina’s brother.”

I fell silent.

“Karina thought that Nino was my daughter,” he continued. “She had always envied your life. When she found out that I might receive a million-dollar contract, she decided to take everything from me by using the child.”

“Using Nino is not Karina’s fault alone.”

“I just wanted to get to know my daughter.”

“No. You wanted to get back the lost role without taking responsibility.”

The next day Victor’s lawyer withdrew from the case.

“Were you hiding the truth, madam?” he asked after the clinic.

“I was protecting the child.”

“And your former husband is now trying to bring everything under control. This is already a legal risk.”

Victor stood in the corner of the room. Just then Gela turned on a recording.

It was a conversation from ten years earlier. I had managed to save it by chance: I had left the voice recording on in an old phone when Victor was packing his suitcase.

His young voice sounded in the room.

“If there is a child, that is not my problem.”

Ice immediately touched my breathing.

My voice could be heard in the recording:

“I may be pregnant.”

Then Victor’s laughter.

“Elene, don’t try to hold me with this. I have already decided.”

Victor closed his eyes.

For him, it was the first time he had heard his own words through someone else’s mouth.

“I don’t remember it that way,” he said quietly.

“Because you remember only what does not damage your image.”

The case reached court, but Nino’s custody did not become a matter of dispute. The psychologist’s report and the school camera recordings showed that Levan, acting in Victor’s name, had tried to take the child away. He was charged with fraud and unlawful entry.

Victor would not escape responsibility.

The judge granted him the right to meet Nino only with the child’s consent and in the presence of a specialist. Nino refused the first meeting.

Victor was not imprisoned, but his company was almost destroyed by lost contracts and court expenses. Karina left the country. Levan confessed to the crime. Everything that gave Victor the feeling of control over other people’s lives fell apart piece by piece.

I no longer tried to defend him.

Nor to justify him.

Nor to explain to others why he was not as bad as he seemed.

Three weeks later, on Friday evening, Nino asked me for the first time:

“Is he really my father?”

We were sitting in the kitchen of our new apartment. Outside the window the first snow was falling, and on the stove milk was slowly boiling.

“By blood — yes.”

“And in his heart?”

The answer to this question turned out to be the most difficult.

“In his heart, a person becomes a father when he stays. He did not stay.”

Nino thought for a long time.

“Could I speak to him someday?”

“When you want to. Not when he wants to.”

She nodded and put her drawing on the table. In the drawing there was a house with two windows, and Nino and I were standing beside each other. In the corner she had drawn a small yellow raincoat.

“This is our house,” she told me.

“I know.”

At that moment my phone lit up.

It was a message from Victor.

“Elene, now I know everything. Ten years have passed. We must not lose another ten. Come, let us start again.”

I looked at the screen for several seconds.

Earlier I would have cried all night at such words.

Now I simply wrote a reply.

“It is impossible to start again where childhood has already passed. Respect Nino’s choice. And I will not return to the life from which I barely escaped.”

I deleted his message.

Then I put the phone on the table.

Nino attached her drawing to the refrigerator. The yellow raincoat looked exactly like the one in the photograph that I showed Victor ten years later — the photograph in which Nino was sleeping beside his mother, while behind her on the old wall could be seen the small copper ship-shaped clasp that Victor had closed on the suitcase that morning.

For a long time I thought that clasp had locked my life.

In reality, it had closed a door for me only where I was no longer supposed to remain.

This time the key was in my hand.

And I did not open it.