Part 4 — Six Years Later, the Man Who Humiliated Me Was Brought Bloody into My Operating Room, and My Father’s Face Suddenly Went Pale

My father’s voice could be heard behind the door, but now he no longer resembled the man I had believed in during childhood.

Simon lowered his weapon.

“Do not shoot,” I told him.

“If he enters, he may hurt you.”

“This time you will not kill to save my life.”

He looked at me.

“Then what will you do?”

I picked up the phone and signaled to the head of security to call the police quietly. Then I walked toward the door.

“Father, the door is open.”

The lock opened. Alexander Sterling entered alone. He wore an expensive coat, but his face was extinguished. Two men stood behind him.

Simon’s security blocked their way.

“Irene, leave here,” my father told me. “This man is trying to use you.”

“You have been telling me that for six years.”

“Because Simon killed your mother.”

It seemed as if the air disappeared from the room.

Simon raised his head.

“That is a lie.”

“Then why did she meet his brother that night?”

“Because your people kidnapped both of them.”

My father laughed.

“Prove it.”

I picked up the recorder and turned it on. My own father’s voice sounded in the basement.

“If you do not break up with her, I will destroy Irene’s career and stop her mother’s treatment.”

My father’s face changed.

Then Valentina’s voice sounded.

“If you tell Irene, you will both die.”

My father took a step back.

“This recorded conversation means nothing. The voice could have been edited.”

“That is why I have the original,” I said.

I opened the archive folder. There were clinic payment certificates, my mother’s medical records, and accounts bearing my father’s signature. On the last page it said that the medicines necessary for my mother had arrived at the hospital, but were taken back the next day.

“This was not a natural death,” I said.

My father lowered his eyes.

“The doctors said that her condition was hopeless.”

“The doctors whom you bribed.”

“I was protecting you.”

At these words I felt sorry for him for the first time. Not because he was right, but because for so many years he had hidden his own guilt under the name of protection.

Simon said to him calmly:

“Tell her who paid for the cancellation of her mother’s medicines.”

My father was silent.

“Valentina,” he said at last. “She needed Simon’s property. And I thought that if Irene stayed away from you, you would both survive.”

“And my mother?”

My father closed his eyes.

“That night Valentina called the director of the clinic.”

Simon covered his face with his hands. And I realized that for years both men had been deciding my life in their own ways: one with lies, the other with silence.

The sound of footsteps came from the stairs. The police entered the basement. The officer put handcuffs on my father.

“Alexander Sterling, you are under arrest on charges of extortion, threats, and falsification of medical records.”

My father looked toward me.

“Irene, you are my daughter.”

“I know. That is exactly why it hurts so much.”

Valentina was arrested at her own home that same morning. Her lawyer no longer appeared in court when he saw the bank transfers and recordings. Later it became clear that she had poured the poison into the mushroom soup, but Simon knew in advance that she was trying something. He deliberately took a harmless sedative so that Valentina would expose herself with her own words.

That same evening I received a call from Simon.

“Irene,” he said, “the lawyer told me that an investigation may also be started against me.”

“Let it start.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Not of the truth anymore.”

“What if I lose you?”

I was silent for a long time.

“You lost me six years ago, when you decided that you knew the truth better than I did.”

“I know.”

“If you are ever beside me again, hide nothing from me.”

“I will hide nothing from you.”

“Then first tell me your own crimes too.”

He exhaled.

“I will begin with the day when I had to leave you.”

Several weeks later I heard my own voice in the courthouse. Valentina’s lawyer requested one of the recordings from the case, and the judge ordered it to be played publicly.

Simon’s young voice came from the speakers.

“Irene, I can no longer be with you.”

Then came my crying from that time.

“Please, look me in the eyes and tell me once again.”

I realized that this was the conversation that had ruined six years of my life. Simon had recorded everything to prove to my father that he was separating us. But in the recording only my despair had remained.

Simon was sitting beside me.

He heard his own words and covered his face with his hands.

“I told you this,” he whispered. “I did it myself.”

“Yes.”

“I hurt you, even if I had a reason.”

“A reason does not erase pain.”

“I know.”

For the first time I did not try to comfort him. It was no longer my job to ease his own guilt for him.

The court found my father and Valentina guilty. My father received years of punishment, while Valentina lost her property and went to prison for fraud and attempted poisoning. The case against Simon was minor because he handed over the entire network to the investigation and testified about the illegal businesses.

I did not ask for mercy for him.

Nor did he ask for it.

Six months later I emptied my mother’s room for the first time. Her white armchair stood by the window, and in the closet there was one unfinished knitted scarf. Under the bed I found my father’s old bag. Inside there was nothing except the small bronze bell he had given me on the day I enrolled in medical university.

I held the bell in my hand and shook it lightly.

Its sound no longer meant my father’s love.

It belonged to the part of my life that I was reclaiming myself.

Eight months later I moved to a seaside city. I began working as a surgeon in a small clinic. In the mornings I opened the windows, brewed coffee, and wrote the patients’ names myself, because no one needed to decide whom I would save and whom I would lose.

Simon closed his illegal businesses. He founded a legal security company and brought the children to me every Saturday.

Milena once drew our house on a sheet of paper. In the picture four people stood, and there was a large yellow sun in the sky.

“Where is your place here?” I asked.

She drew a small figure on the paper.

“Here. Because Dad should no longer be alone.”

I looked at Simon.

“Children sometimes understand more than we do.”

“I understood late,” he said.

The first snow came in December. White flakes fell in the clinic yard, while Milena was drawing by the window. Then I received a message on my phone.

It was my father.

“Come at least once. I will explain everything to you. Now I have nothing left to lose.”

I looked at the message for a long time. Then I wrote a reply.

“I have everything to protect. I will not come.”

I deleted his number.

That same evening Simon knocked on the door. He was holding an old wooden box.

“This remained with me,” he told me.

I opened the box. Inside was my old photograph, the one he had kept hidden for six years.

“I do not want it to be hidden anymore,” he said.

I hung the photograph on the wall, but not in the bedroom. In the corridor, where everyone who entered would see it.

“Simon.”

“Yes?”

“I do not know what tomorrow will bring us.”

“I do not know either.”

“And that is good.”

He nodded.

I put the small bronze bell on the windowsill. The wind moved the curtain, and the bell rang once.

This time the sound no longer resembled a warning.

It was the door of my life, which I was opening myself.

And for the first time, I was waiting for no one.