Part 4 — After my father’s operation, my stepmother humiliated me in the corridor, but when an unknown doctor appeared, Victoria’s smile disappeared

Levan snatched the phone from my hand and ran into the corridor.

I followed him.

The police were escorting Victoria, but she was still trying to make a call.

“Call him,” I told her.

She looked at me.

“Who?”

“The one who is heading toward my father’s room now.”

For the first time I saw real fear in Victoria’s eyes.

A young man stood in front of my father’s ward. He wore a doctor’s white coat, but the badge hanging from his neck had no name on it. He held a small bag.

Levan shouted:

“Stop!”

The man turned and tried to run. A security officer pinned him against the wall. The bag fell to the floor. Inside were a new syringe, a fake medical badge, and a small memory device.

My father still lay unconscious in the room.

The machines beside him beeped evenly.

“Who sent you?” the policeman asked.

The man was silent.

But Victoria suddenly whispered:

“Daniel.”

I looked at her.

“Who is Daniel?”

Victoria bit her lip.

“My brother.”

It was the last door opening, behind which another darkness was hiding.

Levan connected the memory device to a computer. Several videos appeared on the screen. In the first, Victoria stood in my father’s office. In the second, she was speaking to some man. In the third, she was reading a plan concerning me.

“She must disappear before Giorgi changes the will,” Victoria was saying.

The second voice answered:

“What if the daughter resists us?”

“Then we will tell everyone that she is mentally unstable.”

At hearing my own name, my whole body froze.

I looked at Victoria, but now she no longer resembled the strong woman who ordered everyone in the corridor to be silent. She was only a frightened person hearing her own voice from the outside.

“Turn it off,” she said.

“No,” the policeman answered.

Then the last recording began. My father sat in front of the camera, wearing the same metal bracelet made from the mechanism of the old watch on his hand.

“Emma, if you are watching this, you probably already know that Victoria was not acting alone. I could not expose her for a long time because Daniel is in the hospital’s financial department and controls the accounts. The file created against you was prepared by him. But I arranged everything so that the truth would reach only you.”

In the video my father was silent for a while.

“My child, what frightened me most was that after my death you would again save everyone except yourself. Therefore I ask you: do not take my fight onto your shoulders. Take only your life.”

My father regained consciousness that same night.

The first thing he said to me was:

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I thought I had lost you.”

“And I thought I had lost you.”

I took his hand in mine. The cold metal of the bracelet touched my fingers.

“Victoria says you abandoned me,” I told him.

My father closed his eyes.

“Then she chose the most painful lie.”

The next day a case was officially opened. The police arrested Victoria, Daniel, and the fake doctor. The hospital board annulled all of Daniel’s signatures, froze the financial accounts, and sent the patients’ old records for independent examination.

Victoria’s lawyer refused to defend her at their very first meeting when he heard the audio recordings.

“I cannot represent a person who threatens witnesses and changes patients’ records,” he told her.

Victoria sat at the table and tapped the pen cap with her fingers.

“You took money.”

“Money is not a reason to turn a lie into truth.”

Several hours later the investigator made her listen to her own voice. The same phrase she had told me in the corridor:

“Your father will think you abandoned him.”

Her voice could be heard clearly in the recording.

Victoria listened, and her face slowly changed. When the voice stopped, she raised her head.

“I did not say that.”

The investigator answered calmly:

“That is your voice.”

“No.”

“You said it yourself.”

For the first time Victoria could not find a person to blame.

I stood outside the room and listened to her crying. Strangely, I did not feel joy. Only exhaustion.

Justice was not loud.

Three weeks later my father left the hospital. His room was almost empty. Beside the bed stood only one glass, by the window a small bag, and on the dresser a photograph remained—my father and me on the seashore, when I was still a child.

Victoria’s things were gone.

Her perfume had disappeared too.

Only a bright square remained on the wall, where a picture had hung for years.

I took the photograph and put it in my bag.

My father looked out through the doorway.

“Are you ready?”

“For the first time in a long while, yes.”

Months later I began working at a small clinic in the city. I transferred control of the hospital temporarily to a supervisory board until all the accounts and records were completely cleared. I no longer wanted power that stood on fear.

I wanted a place where a nurse would not be afraid to help a patient.

Every morning I opened the window, brewed coffee, and checked the patients’ names myself.

In the corner of my desk lay the metal bracelet made by my father.

I no longer wore it.

But I saw it every day.

One evening my father brought me a little girl. My niece, Nina, was five years old. She held a sheet of paper in her hand.

“I drew this for you,” she told me.

Three people stood beside the sun on the paper. I was in the middle. In my hand I held something resembling a small house.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It is a hospital.”

“Why is the roof red?”

“Because warm people should live inside.”

My father lowered his eyes to hide his tears.

I hugged Nina.

“That is how it will be.”

Several days passed peacefully.

Then I received a letter from Victoria.

The address was from the prison’s legal department. The letter said that Daniel had planned everything, while she had only been trying to preserve the family. At the end she asked me to allow her to meet me.

“You are my child, regardless of what you think,” the last line said.

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

Then I wrote a reply.

“I was never your child. But I no longer carry your imprisonment in my heart either. I wish you to look calmly at your own choice. I am not going to meet you.”

I sent the letter and for the first time did not wait for her reply.

That night the first snow came.

Nina stood by the window and counted the snowflakes. My father was pouring tea in the kitchen. And I sat at the desk and touched the metal bracelet with my finger.

The same object that had never been anything proving power for Victoria, but for me had preserved the voice of my entire childhood.

My father once told me that he used the mechanism of an old watch because time never stops.

At the time I thought it was simply a beautiful phrase.

Now I knew that truth works exactly this way.

You may hide it.

You may delay it.

But you cannot stop it.

I placed the bracelet on the windowsill. In the white light of the snow its small metal rings glimmered.

This time time was on my side.