I Left the Hospital Where I Had Stayed to Say Goodbye to My Husband, but at the Sight of the Doctor, His Brother Suddenly Turned Pale

Several hours before Mark’s funeral, his brother demanded to enter our house and told me that there was no longer a place there for a pregnant widow.

It all began when Mark’s doctor, Levan Beridze, rushed toward me in the hospital’s cold corridor. With his right hand he was gripping his coat pocket tightly, as if he were protecting inside it not something, but my entire future.

“Ana, please do not leave yet,” he told me. “Mark left something for you.”

“Now?” I barely uttered. “He is no longer here.”

Levan looked toward both sides of the corridor. At the end of the lobby, Mark’s brother, Davit, seemed to be talking on the phone, but his gaze was frozen on us.

“That is precisely why I must give it to you,” the doctor lowered his voice. “Mark made me swear, while he was alive, not to show it to you.”

I was still holding documents filled with his signature in my hands. On every page, ink stains were mixed with tears. After three years of marriage, I no longer had Mark, but our little girl was moving inside my belly, and that movement was the only thing that still connected me to life.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I do not know how to explain it to you. It is not only a letter.”

He took a small wooden box from his pocket. Scratched onto the box was the address of our first home, the house that Davit had demanded be sold that morning.

Mark loved that address. In our kitchen hung an old copper key, which I touched with my fingers every morning before making coffee. He used to say that a house was not only walls if you had no reason to return to it.

Six months earlier, when we learned about the pregnancy, Mark picked me up on the balcony and spun me around for so long that we both began laughing for breath. Three weeks later, the doctors told him that he had only a few months left to live.

“If my organs are healthy, I want to give them to someone else,” he told me that evening, when our girl first moved strongly.

“Do not talk about death when she can hear you.”

“That is precisely why I must talk. If I cannot watch her grow, perhaps my heart or liver can give another parent a few more years.”

Mark was weakening quickly. By the eighth month, I was already helping him fasten his shirt buttons. He even had difficulty reaching the bathroom. Despite this, in the last weeks he asked to meet Levan alone.

“What are you arranging?” I asked once.

He squeezed my hand.

“Something that will protect your life afterward. Just trust me.”

On the night of his death, I did not let go of his hand. In the morning, when I was signing the consent for organ donation, I thought that every signature was tearing something from my heart.

Now Levan was opening the wooden box.

“Mark told me that if Davit were here, I should not open the door. But I no longer know whom to trust,” he said.

Davit put the phone into his pocket and walked toward us.

“My brother needs peace now, Ana,” he said. “I must take over this house and his affairs.”

“My husband has not even been buried yet.”

“And you are pregnant; you will no longer be able to manage anything.”

Levan took a thin folder from the box. His fingers trembled. On the outside there was only one word: “Ana.”

He began opening the first clasp, while Davit suddenly came toward me as if he intended to snatch the folder…

I reached toward the folder, but Davit seized me by the wrist.

“You will not see this,” he whispered.

Levan immediately struck his hand away.

“Touch her one more time and I will call security.”

“You know nothing, doctor.”

“I know that Mark trusted his own brother less than he trusted you.”

Davit’s face tightened. I looked at the red mark left on my wrist, and for the first time I thought that my fear did not come only from grief.

Levan pressed the folder to his chest.

“Mark told me to activate this recording only when you signed the final consent for organ donation.”

“A recording?” I asked.

“And one more thing. If his brother came here, I was to call the police.”

Davit laughed mockingly.

“A dead man cannot accuse anyone.”

At these words, Levan turned pale.

He switched on a small device. Mark’s tired but clear voice sounded in the corridor.

“Ana, if you are listening to this, it means you have already endured the hardest part. Now remember only one thing: someone whom I have called my brother since childhood was involved in my death.”

Davit stepped backward.

The recording suddenly stopped. Levan took out a second sheet and read it, then looked toward me with frightened eyes.

“Ana… it says here that Mark learned one more thing the day before his death…”

“What did he learn?” I asked, gripping Levan by the wrist.

We moved into the hospital’s small waiting room. Rain struck the window as if someone outside were asking us to escape. Security officers were stopping Davit at the door, but he was still shouting that everything was a lie.

Levan put the folder on the table and finally opened it.

Inside were three sheets of paper, a small memory device, and a glass vial with a stopper, on which a date written in Mark’s hand was visible.

“Mark had a serious heart disease,” Levan began. “At first we thought it was a natural complication. But before his death he told me that his medicines had been changed several times in the last months.”

“Who changed them?”

The doctor looked at Davit.

“The laboratory records show that the changes were made from your husband’s company warehouse. On the same day that Mark refused to transfer half of the company to Davit.”

“That is impossible,” Davit shouted at the door. “Mark was ill, and I was helping him!”

Levan switched on the device.

Mark’s voice sounded in the room. It had been recorded in our house, on the same balcony where I had first placed his hand on my belly.

“Ana, the doctor told me that the substance found in my body does not resemble a natural reaction to the medicines. I told Davit that I would conduct an audit. The next day he visited me and told me to sign, otherwise he would leave you and the child on the street.”

The air stopped in my chest.

Davit struck the door with his fist.

“That is not my voice!”

But his voice was heard in the recording as well.

“You will die anyway, Mark. Sign, and nothing will happen to Ana.”

I sat down on the chair. Levan picked up the vial.

“I secretly kept this blood sample. The examination confirmed a toxic substance. Mark knew everything, but in the last days of his life he thought about only one thing: that you and the child would be safe.”

“Why did he not tell me?”

“Because he was afraid Davit would reach you first.”

On the last page of the folder stood a notary’s stamp. Mark had left the house and his share of the company to me, while his charitable foundation financed the treatment of the child who had received his liver.

Davit fell silent. For the first time I saw fear on his face.

But just then Levan’s phone rang. He listened, lowered his eyes, and turned toward me.

“The police told me that money has already been transferred abroad from Davit’s accounts. And one more thing… this morning he took one recording from the hospital archive…”