Part 4 — My Wife Told Me at the Festive Dinner That She Had Never Loved Me — and in the Morning She Noticed My Disappearance and Froze

At that very moment the call was disconnected.

I sat silently for several seconds.

“Who was it?” Niko asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“Then you will not go alone.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it.”

Dato went toward the door, but two investigators were waiting for him in the corridor. One of them showed him a document.

“Mr. Dato, we have several questions for you.”

Dato lost for the first time the self-confident expression with which he had been looking at me all morning.

“Elena, tell them that this is nonsense.”

Elena sat on the chair, tightly intertwining her fingers.

“I no longer know what I should tell them.”

“You promised me that he would find out nothing!”

At these words Elena raised her head.

“You yourself told me that everything was already finished.”

“Don’t try to shift it onto me.”

Niko played the audio recording again.

Dato’s own voice returned to the room.

“I already have his signature. The company will soon be ours.”

He froze.

For the first time he heard his own words from someone else’s mouth.

His face changed, as if he had suddenly seen an unfamiliar person in the mirror.

“That was a private conversation,” he said.

“No,” Niko answered. “This is a confession of a crime.”

I followed the investigators. Dato remained behind, while Elena looked at me for a long time.

“Philippe,” she called to me.

I stopped.

“Are you really going to take everything away?”

“I am not taking anything from you. I am simply stopping the protection of the things that you stole.”

In the evening we went to the warehouse. The building stood on the outskirts of the city, and the wind carried the rusty doors. Marika, the company accountant who had disappeared three weeks earlier, was waiting for us there.

“I saw how they changed the accounts,” she said. “Dato forced me to keep silent. And Elena told me that you would believe everything anyway, because you were in love with her.”

Marika opened her bag and took out the documents. There were all the transfers, all the forged signatures, and a camera recording in which Dato entered my office.

That night everything ended.

Not because they were punished immediately. This process lasted for months. The company survived, a case was opened against Dato, and Elena signed the divorce papers. Her lawyer contacted me the following week.

“Mrs. Elena is ready to discuss an agreement.”

“I have already discussed it.”

“She regrets it.”

“Does she regret what she did, or that I discovered it?”

The lawyer fell silent.

“I have no answer,” he said at last.

I was no longer angry. Anger ties you to the person from whom you want to escape. And I learned to be free.

Three months later I heard Dato’s testimony in the courthouse. He denied everything until they showed Marika’s documents and the recording. Then his own voice sounded in the courtroom.

“I already have his signature. The company will soon be ours.”

Dato hid his head in his hands.

I did not watch his humiliation. I looked at the empty autumn trees through the window and thought about how long I had lived with the belief that if I worked hard enough, every person would become grateful.

When I returned home, Elena’s things had already been taken away. In the bedroom only empty hangers remained, and I found a small copper bell under the bed.

She had taken it and left it behind.

I picked up the bell. Dust remained on my fingers.

For the first time, seeing it did not hurt.

Six months later I moved to another city. I opened a small branch of my company near the sea and finished work at six in the evening, even if work remained. On Sundays I went to the market, cooked food for friends, and no longer checked my phone during dinner.

One morning my niece, Nata, came to me. She put a drawing on the table. In the drawing there was a small house, the sea, and a man holding a golden bell.

“This is you,” she told me.

“Why am I holding a bell?”

“So that when you come home, everyone can hear.”

I smiled.

“Now I already want them to hear.”

That same evening I received a message from Elena.

“I want to talk to you. This time I will really be honest.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote to her:

“I have already heard your truth. Now I prefer my peace.”

And I blocked the number.

I went to the window. The sea wind moved the curtain. On the table stood the small copper bell that I had bought years ago as a sign of love.

Now it meant something else.

Coming home.

I rang the bell once.

This time I did not need anyone to convince me that I was here.