Part 4 — After lunch, my son and I were thrown to the floor, but when my husband returned, the smile disappeared from his face

When I heard these words, it was as if the air disappeared from the room.

“Who?” I asked.

The policeman held out the phone to me.

An unknown number was flashing on the screen.

“Niko Beridze,” he said. “He is alive.”

David began calling at that very moment.

First the police station.

Then his lawyer.

The third call came to me, although I had already blocked the number. The lawyer sent me his voice message.

“Sarah, this is a misunderstanding. Do not speak until I come.”

The same calm tone stood in his voice that I had trusted for years.

But now every word was like a knife.

That same evening the lawyer, Irakli Menabde, refused to defend him.

“I cannot remain in this case,” he told David in the meeting room.

“You are my lawyer.”

“I was.”

“I will double your money.”

Irakli closed the folder.

“When a client asks me to hide evidence from me, money no longer changes anything.”

For the first time David shouted loudly.

“You do not know what you are doing!”

“No, David. Now I know exactly.”

The police brought Niko into a small conference room at the hospital. He was pale, there was an old burn mark on his left hand, and he leaned on a cane.

“It was not a car accident,” he told me. “David drove my car off the road because I found his money transfers. I survived, but everyone thought that I had fled the country.”

“Why did you not contact me?” I asked.

Niko lowered his eyes.

“I tried. David had your email. I sent you a letter once, but in reply I received a threat from him.”

He put an old folder in front of me.

Inside were copies of accounts, signatures, bank transfers, and a small voice recorder that had been found in Niko’s car. David’s voice could be heard there too.

“If Sarah asks questions, I will get rid of the boy first, then her.”

I held my hands on my knees. I wanted to cry, but tears no longer came.

“You said all this yourself,” I told David when they brought us to a meeting before the trial.

He sat behind the glass.

We turned on the recording.

His own voice sounded in the room. Every word. Every threat. Every lie.

At first David lowered his head. Then he pressed his hands over his ears.

“Turn it off!”

“That is your voice,” the investigator told him.

“I do not remember.”

“We remember.”

The case moved quickly. The attempted poisoning, financial fraud, forgery of documents, and attempted murder of Niko were placed into one file. In court David denied everything until Marina’s call recording and the camera footage were shown.

The camera stood in the neighbor’s yard. It showed how David came out of the garage, how he hid the phones, and how he returned to the kitchen.

While watching the video, he heard his own footsteps from outside for the first time.

Heavy.

Slow.

Certain.

Then his voice was heard: “It is better this way for everyone.”

David looked at the screen and hid his face in his hands.

I no longer tried to relieve him.

Nor to find a justification for him.

The verdict was announced several weeks later. He was sentenced to a long prison term, and the court returned the company’s money to Leo’s account. The house was temporarily left to me and my son, because we could no longer live there.

When I entered the kitchen for the last time, everything was strangely quiet.

Of the three plates on the table only one remained. And on Leo’s chair lay his small wooden airplane, which he hid under the table before every lunch.

The house looked empty.

I was no longer afraid.

Leo needed almost a month to recover. From the hospital window he watched the city’s roofs and every morning asked me the same question.

“Mother, will we go home again now?”

“No,” I told him once. “We will live in a new place.”

“Will there be a telephone there too?”

“There will be.”

“A landline?”

His question made me smile. Probably for the first time since that night.

“Definitely.”

Two months later we moved to a small seaside town. I started working in a library. In the mornings I dusted the books, in the afternoon I taught children to read, and in the evening I checked Leo’s homework.

He was still afraid of strong smells. Therefore I prepared food at home slowly, in front of his eyes. Every time I left the room, he asked me:

“Will you come back soon?”

“In a few minutes.”

And I always came back.

On the first day of winter Leo drew our new house on a sheet of paper. There were yellow curtains at the windows. A small red bell at the door. And in the kitchen there were four chairs.

“Why four?” I asked.

“For a guest,” he told me. “If a good person wants to come.”

Niko often visited us. He helped us open a small workshop in the town and taught Leo to make wooden airplanes.

One morning I received a letter from David.

“Forgive me. I made wrong decisions. You and Leo were the only family I had. Visit me.”

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

Then I put it in the trash bin.

Leo looked at me.

“You will not answer?”

“I already answered.”

“What did you tell him?”

I went to the window. The first snow was falling outside.

“That our door no longer opens there.”

That evening we hung the old landline phone on the wall. It was white, with a round dial and a small copper bell. Leo touched it with his hand.

“Is this that phone?”

“Yes.”

“The one that saved us?”

I stood beside him and picked up the receiver. A calm, clean silence could be heard in the line.

“No,” I told him. “We survived because that night I did not choose to give up.”

Leo took my hand.

The telephone rang once.

This time the sound no longer frightened me.

It was only a ring.

And we were home.