Part 4 — My Mother Hit Me in the Stomach at My Twin’s Party When I Refused to Give Her Money — But Suddenly My Father’s Face Changed

Nika slowly lowered the phone.

“Who was it?” I asked.

First he looked at me, then at Marina.

“The bank’s lawyer. He says a request for seizure has been filed against our apartment.”

The same heavy silence fell over the room again, the silence I had felt at the party beside the pool.

But this time I was no longer drowning in the water.

Marina immediately took out her phone.

“No one is going anywhere,” she said. “I have already sent the documents to the investigator.”

Nika called my mother.

She did not answer.

She did not answer the second time either.

But the third time Olivia picked up the phone.

“Mother is unwell,” she said.

“No,” I replied. “Mother is in a situation for the first time that I cannot fix.”

Olivia lowered her voice.

“Elene, please, don’t do all this. We are family.”

“We are family when we protect one another. Not when one person pays everyone’s debts.”

“They want to arrest Mother.”

“I did not decide that.”

“You can withdraw the statement.”

“I can, but I will not do it anymore.”

I said these words calmly. So calmly that I could not even recognize my own voice.

At two o’clock at night, an investigator came to the hospital corridor. He held a small recorder in his hand.

“Mrs. Elene, you can still refuse to testify,” he told me.

“No. I want everything recorded.”

“Are you sure?”

“I spent my whole life hiding other people’s truths. Now my truth must remain.”

Daniel was there too. He played the video from the beginning.

White balloons appeared on the screen first. Then my mother’s voice was heard.

“Now give me the money.”

“This is for the baby.”

“You always managed to solve problems.”

I knew that these words had been said, but hearing them from the outside turned out to be much more painful. It was as if some other woman were watching my life, and I was seeing for the first time how alone that woman stood.

Then my mother’s hand appeared on the screen.

The blow.

My fall.

Father’s voice:

“Leave her, maybe she will learn.”

Olivia’s laughter.

Nika covered his face with his hands.

Father could not endure the video to the end. He went out into the corridor, but the investigator stopped him.

“You must listen too, Mr. Irakli.”

“I did not do anything.”

“That is exactly what the recording says. That you did everything and did nothing.”

Father sat down on a chair. The heel of his shoe struck the floor nervously.

After the video ended, only the intermittent sound of the machine could be heard in the room.

Father said for the first time:

“I did not think it would go this far.”

“How far?” I asked.

He lowered his eyes.

“To humiliating you.”

“No, Father. For you this was not humiliation. It was using me.”

That same morning Mother was taken to the police. Olivia was summoned for questioning as an accomplice. Father called a lawyer, but the lawyer soon refused the case.

“I cannot defend a person who used forged signatures on her own child’s account,” he told him.

Mother was still trying to regain control.

She called the bank.

Then she called my doctor.

Then she called Nika’s workplace and said that I was supposedly psychologically unstable.

But this time every call became a recording.

Marina brought Grandmother’s will, bank statements, and the signature examination to court. The expert confirmed that the signatures made in my name were forged.

Mother sat in the courtroom and kept rubbing her hands. She no longer had the voice with which she had told me for years what I should do.

The judge asked Olivia:

“Did you know that the money had been saved for your sister’s child?”

Olivia remained silent for a long time.

Then she said:

“I knew.”

Mother looked toward her.

“Olivia!”

But this was the first time Olivia did not believe Mother.

“I knew,” she repeated. “And I took it anyway.”

There was no joy in her voice anymore. No mockery either. Only weariness.

The court held Mother responsible for fraud and violence, and Olivia for complicity and the use of forged documents. Father’s participation in physical violence was not proven, but the court heard him as a witness. The heaviest thing for him was that in the end he heard his own words in the recording.

“Maybe she will learn.”

He repeated this phrase several times even after returning home, as if he could not believe that it was his voice.

As for me, I returned directly from the hospital to my small apartment.

The baby was born three weeks later.

We named her Ana.

On the first night, when Nika picked her up, only a small lamp was lit in the room. Ana’s fingers were clenched into fists, as if she were already protecting something.

“Look,” Nika told me. “She is exactly like you.”

“I hope she will be freer than me.”

“She will.”

After the court case I received a letter from Olivia. She apologized and wrote that for the first time she understood how her mother’s fear had turned into her own cruelty.

I did not write back.

It was not hatred.

Simply, by that time I had the right for the first time not to carry someone else’s remorse anymore.

Several weeks later we moved to a new neighborhood. Into a small, bright apartment where trees could be seen from the kitchen window in the morning. Nika assembled a wooden crib beside the wall. And I arranged Ana’s socks on a small shelf beside it.

I started working as an administrator at a children’s clinic. Every day I met mothers who came frightened and tried to cope with everything alone.

I always told them:

“Asking for help is not shameful. But no one is obliged to provide help.”

This sentence was new for me too.

Six months later Ana drew for the first time. On the paper were three figures: me, Nika, and a small round face with a yellow sun above.

“Who is this?” I asked.

Ana first looked at the paper, then put her finger on herself.

“Ana.”

It was her first clear word.

That night I sat beside the bed for a long time and watched her breathe.

The next day Mother called me again.

This time she was not in a cell. She had been temporarily released through her lawyer.

“I only want five minutes,” she said.

“For what?”

“To explain to you.”

“I have already heard everything.”

“I am your mother.”

I was standing by the window. Outside, the first snow was falling and slowly gathering on the balcony railing.

“Yes,” I told her. “But that no longer gives you the right to enter my life.”

“Elene, please.”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

“Are you really abandoning me?”

I closed my eyes.

“No. You yourself left the place where a mother should have stood.”

I ended the call.

That evening I took the small cloth bag out of the closet. The yellow moons were still visible, although in one corner the thread had come loose. I put Ana’s first sock in it and hung it beside the bed.

At one time this bag reminded me of the day when I fell into the water.

Now it reminded me of the day when I came out of it.

Outside the window, snow was falling silently.

Ana was sleeping on my chest.

And for the first time in my life, I was no longer hurrying to save anyone.