Part 4 — After dinner, my husband locked my son and me in the room, but the stranger who came to the door suddenly turned pale

The voice coming from the phone said:

“The child’s biological father is alive and came to your house tonight.”

Luka squeezed my hand more tightly.

Davit jumped up.

“That is impossible!”

The police officer put his hand on his shoulder.

“Sit down.”

“You do not understand,” Davit shouted. “That man will take the child away!”

“You took the child away from his family,” I answered. “Now do not blame others.”

It was three o’clock at night in the hospital corridor. The sharp smell of disinfectant stood on the floor, and Luka had a plastic bracelet put on his wrist by the doctor. His name was written on it: Luka Beridze.

But after the police officer’s words, even this name no longer seemed as solid as it had an hour earlier.

Davit called a lawyer.

“Mariam, come urgently. Everything has gotten out of control.”

He listened to the answer from the other side. His face gradually changed.

“No, don’t tell me you are withdrawing from the case.”

A pause.

“You told me the recordings had been deleted!”

He fell silent. Then the phone fell from his hand.

The lawyer refused to defend him because the orders sent from Davit’s email were already in the police’s hands. It turned out that during the last six months he had been planning our deaths with the insurance company. He had forged three signatures in my name. For Luka, he had prepared a new passport and permission to travel to a foreign country.

He was taking the money to cover his debts.

But that was not everything.

The police opened the files recorded on the card. There they found a video filmed several years earlier. A young woman was sitting in the room and holding a baby in her arms. A young Davit stood beside her.

The woman was crying.

“If you take my child, I will go to the police.”

“You yourself said you could not raise him,” Davit answered.

The date of the video was two days before Luka’s birth.

I stared at the screen. Luka’s head lay on my shoulder.

“Is that me?” he asked.

I could not answer.

The police officer said calmly:

“The woman in the video is Luka’s biological mother. She was threatened that same year over the sale of the child. The documents show that Davit convinced her that he would adopt the child temporarily. Then he created a false certificate.”

“You knew?” Luka looked at Davit.

For the first time Davit could not find a quick answer.

“I saved you.”

“No,” I told him. “You took possession of his life.”

Davit was handcuffed. He did not resist. He simply looked toward me, as if waiting for me to save him again.

But I did not go to him.

In the morning the investigator told me that Luka’s biological father, Irakli, was waiting outside the hospital. He had searched for his son for years. Davit had not passed his letters on to him and had suppressed every attempt.

Irakli turned out to be a tall, tired man. He held an old leather folder in his hands. It contained the records from the hospital where Luka was born and letters from his mother.

“I will not ask you for anything,” he told me. “Neither rights nor immediate contact. I only want him to know that I searched for him all these years.”

Luka looked at him for a long time.

“Can you come tomorrow too?”

Irakli’s eyes lit up.

“If you want, I will come every day.”

Three days after Davit’s arrest, I entered the house alone. The same table was still standing in the kitchen. On one of the chairs lay Luka’s small wooden whistle, which his grandfather had given him in childhood and which he carried only in times of fear. That night Davit had put it in the backpack, as if hurrying the preparations for taking the child away.

I picked up the whistle.

The house was empty, but for the first time I was not afraid of the silence.

In Davit’s office we put his life in order: forged signatures, debt statements, insurance contracts, and several letters that he had never sent to me. I handed everything over to the police.

In the following weeks I could no longer stay in the city. Marina offered me her sister’s small apartment in a seaside town. I moved there with Luka. In the mornings I worked in a library, and in the evenings I walked along the shore with him.

Luka continued to wake up at night out of habit.

“Mom, is the door locked?”

“Yes.”

“Is the phone with you?”

“Yes.”

“Can Dad not come?”

The answer to this question hurt me every time.

“You will never again have to be afraid of him.”

After several months Luka changed schools. In the first week he drew a house with light coming from its windows. Three people stood by the door: me, Luka, and Irakli.

We stuck the picture on the refrigerator.

Irakli slowly entered our lives. At first he came once a week. Then Luka himself asked him to attend a football game. At first they spoke to each other awkwardly, but something grew between them every day that Davit could never take away.

One evening Irakli told me:

“Thank you for telling my son the truth.”

“I only did what Davit should have done from the beginning.”

Davit’s trial took place several months later. He confessed to the crime because the recordings, the card, the video, and the results of the sleeping substance fit together exactly. He was sentenced to imprisonment and deprived of the right to receive the insurance money.

I did not look back when I left the courthouse.

I received his last letter with the first snow of winter.

“Nino, I know that I am not asking for forgiveness. Just let me speak to Luka once. I want to explain why I did everything.”

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

Then I asked Luka:

“Do you want to answer?”

He looked at the snow through the window.

“No. If I ever want to, I will tell him myself.”

I did not send Davit an answer.

I wrote only one sentence to the lawyer:

“I will no longer allow him to return to my son’s life in the name of fear.”

That night Luka put his wooden whistle on the kitchen table. Its small holes shone under the warm lamp. Then he took my hand and said:

“Can we just have dinner now?”

There were three plates on the table. One for me, one for Luka, and one for Irakli, who was supposed to come soon.

The first snow was falling outside the window.

I left the door open.

That night fear did not sit down with us anymore.