Part 4 — Returning to my parents’ house, I found a strange girl with my own face waiting for me, and one word from her froze my mother on the spot

Levan’s phone rang again before anyone had time to breathe.

He answered the call.

“I’m listening.”

Everyone in the room fell silent.

Levan listened, while the color slowly drained from his face.

“The recording really exists?” he asked. “Where are you? Do not give it to anyone. We are coming right now.”

He ended the call.

“Who is that woman?” I asked.

“The daughter of the hospital’s former administrator. Her father recorded everything before he died. She says that in the recording there is another signature besides your father’s.”

“Whose?”

Levan looked straight at me.

“Your financial director, David’s.”

My heart contracted.

David was the first employee of my company. I trusted him as if he were a member of the family. He knew all my accounts, all my contracts, all my old affairs.

At that moment the phone rang.

It was David.

“Where are you?” he asked me in an excessively calm voice.

“In the village.”

“Mariam, we have a problem in the company. Several accounts have been frozen. If you do not return immediately, everything may collapse.”

Levan gestured to me with his hand to keep quiet.

“Who froze them?” I asked.

“The bank. I am handling it.”

“No,” I told him. “You have already handled many things.”

Silence fell.

I could clearly hear his breathing through the phone.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the hospital record mentions your name.”

David immediately changed his voice.

“Mariam, do not believe anyone. Your parents want to take your property away.”

“Then why are you calling so quickly?”

He did not answer anything.

“Did you know that Elene was my daughter?” I asked.

“I am hearing it for the first time.”

“You are lying.”

David ended the call.

That same evening we returned to the city. Elene came with us, but sat in the back seat and looked out the window the whole way. I did not know how to begin speaking with her.

“Do you want to ask me something?” I said.

“Why did you not come earlier?”

“I did not know where you were.”

“Mother thought you knew.”

“Your mother is not me.”

Elene looked at me for the first time.

“But you are?”

The answer to this question turned out to be more difficult than a word.

“I am your biological mother. The rest we must build slowly.”

She nodded.

“Will Nino be angry with me?”

“When Nino finds out about your existence, she will probably be afraid. But she is also my child. No one can change that.”

At night I called Nino. I told her everything, although I had to pronounce the hardest words several times.

She was silent for a long time.

“Mother, so I am not your child?”

“You are my child. Blood does not decide that.”

“Then who is that girl?”

“Your sister.”

Nino cried quietly.

“She too was deceived all her life, wasn’t she?”

“She was.”

“Then bring her home.”

That was the first door that someone opened for me that night with love.

The next morning David called an emergency meeting at the office. When I arrived, all the directors were already gathered. Files were arranged on the table, and the movement of my accounts was visible on the screen.

“Mariam is making incorrect decisions because of nervousness,” David told them. “Management must temporarily pass to me.”

“Temporarily?” I repeated.

“You are now having a family crisis.”

“And you are always ready to take a place in someone else’s crisis.”

Levan entered the room and turned on the audio recording.

First the hiss of an old machine was heard. Then the voice of a young father.

“The child will stay with me. And we will tell Mariam that nothing happened at the hospital.”

Then my mother’s voice sounded.

“But the second child?”

My father answered:

“Mariam will take her. The main thing is that the village must not find out.”

All the directors froze.

Then a third voice sounded.

David’s.

“I will handle the documents. Only in the future you must cover this debt for me.”

David stared at the screen. He heard his own voice and for the first time I saw how a person lost himself.

“This is falsified,” he said.

Levan played the second recording.

David’s voice was already older.

“If Mariam ever returns, she still will not be able to use her money. All the contracts pass through my control.”

David grabbed the chair.

“Turn this off!”

“You were saying it yourself,” I told him.

“Mariam, I saved you!”

“No. You used my trust.”

That same day the bank unblocked my accounts, because Levan had previously obtained a temporary protection order from the court. David was forbidden to enter the company building. An investigation began against my parents for falsifying documents and concealing the child’s identity.

My mother called me the next day.

“Please, do not send your father to prison.”

“I am not sending him. Your own actions are taking him there.”

“But we are your parents.”

“Then you should also remember the night when you closed the door on me.”

She began to cry.

And for the first time I did not try to calm her.

In court my father sat with his head bowed. The judge played the recording for him. When he heard his own voice, he tapped his fingers on the table.

“I did not say it like that.”

“You said it exactly like that,” Levan replied.

My mother turned toward me.

“Mariam, give us at least one chance.”

“I gave you a chance twenty years ago. You closed the door.”

The verdict was announced several months later. My father and mother were given suspended sentences, a fine, and were ordered to restore the lost documents. David was sentenced to actual imprisonment for fraud. I was not happy about any of the decisions.

That evening I entered my parents’ house to take Elene’s remaining belongings.

In her room there was only one small bed, two books, and an old photograph attached to the wall. In the photograph Elene stood as a child beside my mother. In the corner, that photo frame had remained empty because someone had taken out my picture.

In the desk drawer I found the silver bird pendant.

The one I had hung on Nino’s cradle twenty years ago.

Or I thought I had hung it on Nino’s cradle.

When Elene saw it, she picked it up.

“Was this mine?” she asked.

“Apparently, yes.”

“Then what did Nino wear?”

“Nothing. Probably my voice.”

Elene smiled for the first time, but a tear immediately followed the smile.

“Can we both be yours?”

“We already are.”

Several weeks later Nino and Elene sat at the same table. At first they only passed cups to each other. Then they discovered that both liked spicy food, both read the last page of a book first, and both raised their left eyebrow when angry.

I stood by the kitchen door and watched.

“Mother,” Nino said, “you have two daughters.”

“I know.”

“And both are difficult.”

Elene chuckled.

“You are not easy either.”

The house that I had once bought for loneliness filled with voices. In the mornings I went to the stores, and in the evenings I had dinner with the girls. Elene entered college, while Nino worked at a new branch of my business.

When the first snow came, Elene drew a small bird on the window. Under it Nino wrote: “Lost, but found.”

I did not correct these words.

Three months later I received a letter. My father wrote that he regretted it, that my mother could no longer sleep, and that I should transfer money to them.

The last line read: “Family is still family.”

I held the letter in my hand for a long time. Then I handed it to Levan.

“Should I send an answer?” he asked me.

“Only one sentence.”

“Which one?”

“‘I will no longer protect you from the consequences of your choices.’”

That is exactly what he sent.

The next day I found the same small silver bird pendant on the kitchen table again. Elene had put it there, and Nino had tied a small red ribbon beside it.

The wind shook the window, and the bird began to jingle.

This time the sound no longer meant leaving.

It meant returning home.