He looked up at her and smiled his usual, slightly tired after-work smile. “Oh, you’re back? I decided to make dinner.” “Did you get held up?” His calmness, this domestic, familiar scene, made her feel sick.
She silently took off her coat and hung it on the rack. Her movements were slow, deliberate, as if she were afraid of spilling the fury boiling inside her. “Has something happened?” he asked, putting the newspaper aside.
His smile faded as he saw the expression on her face. “You look pale.” Anisa walked into the kitchen and stopped opposite him.
She didn’t shout. She simply took out her phone and handed it to him. “Explain this.”
He looked at her uncomprehendingly, then took the phone. The screen glowed with the photograph of the granite headstone and the scattered flowers. David looked at the picture for a few seconds, his face slowly changing.
Confusion gave way to recognition, and then to panic. The color drained from his cheeks; he went white as a sheet. “Where did you get this?” he whispered, his voice hoarse.
“I was there.” “Today,” Anisa replied in a flat, lifeless tone. “I wanted to lay flowers. To pay my respects. I thought it had been five years since she was gone.”
“That’s what you told me, David. Five years. But there, there’s a date from last week. What does this mean?” He was silent, looking from the phone to her and back again. His eyes darted around like those of a trapped animal. He opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came out.
“Talk,” metal grated in Anisa’s voice for the first time. “What in God’s name is going on?” And then he broke. It happened in an instant.
His strong body went slack; he slid from the chair onto the floor, covering his face with his hands. His shoulders shook. At first, it was a quiet, stifled moan, which quickly escalated into desperate, masculine sobs.
He was crying as people cry from unbearable grief or unbearable shame. “I’m sorry,” he whimpered, rocking on the floor. “Forgive me, Anisa, I… I lied to you.”
“Forgive me.” Anisa looked down at him, at this big, strong man who now seemed pitiful and small. And she felt nothing. No pity, no sympathy.
Only a cold, ringing emptiness. “I want to know the truth,” she said. It took him a long time to calm down.
Anisa poured him a glass of water; he drank it in one gulp, his teeth chattering against the rim. He was still sitting on the floor, leaning back against the kitchen cabinet. Anisa sat on a chair opposite him.
She waited. “Kira didn’t die in an accident five years ago,” he began in a hollow, broken voice, staring at the floor. “There was an accident, but she survived.”
“Only… it wasn’t really her. She… she had a mental break. A full psychotic breakdown.”
“The doctors said a head injury triggered something that had been dormant in her for a long time. She became—different. Dangerous.”
“To herself and to others.” He spoke slowly, choosing his words, and Anisa listened without interrupting, trying to find a grain of truth in what he was saying. “Her parents…”
“They insisted we keep it quiet. You know this town. You know how people look at things like that? It would have been a lifelong stigma.”
“For her, for me, for their whole family. We found a clinic. A very good, very expensive one.”
“In Switzerland. A closed facility, high security. We placed her there.”
“No visitors, no contact with the outside world. Complete isolation. For everyone else, for the whole town, she died in that accident.”
“It was easier. No need to explain anything, no sympathetic or curious looks. I… I buried her alive, don’t you see? I put up a headstone on an empty grave.”
He looked up at her, his eyes full of tears and pleading. “I met you two years later. I fell in love with you, Anisa.”
“And I couldn’t tell you, how could I start our relationship with such a monstrous story? To say, ‘Hello, I’m David, my wife isn’t dead, she’s insane and locked away in a clinic on the other side of the world.’ You would have run from me.”
“Anyone would have run. I wanted to protect you. Our future…”
“From that horror.” He fell silent again, catching his breath. The story was monstrous, but it had its own terrible logic.
Anisa knew how far the rich and influential in their town would go to protect their reputations. “And now?” she asked quietly. “The date on the stone.” David hung his head again.
“A week ago, I got a call from the clinic. She… she had a massive stroke. Suddenly.”
“They couldn’t do anything. She died. For real.”
“And I… I had to finish this. I ordered a new plaque, with the real date. I brought her body back, buried her.”
“Quietly, without anyone knowing. It was my final goodbye. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how.”
“How to explain one lie without revealing another, even more terrible one. I was trapped, Anisa. I just wanted it all to be over.”
He started crying again, this time more quietly, exhaustedly. He crawled toward her on his knees and laid his head in her lap. “Forgive me.”
“I’m begging you, forgive me. I love you more than life itself. All those lies, that was the past.”
“It was so that you and I could have a present.” Anisa sat motionless, her hand automatically resting on his head. She was in shock.
Drained. Deceived. But deep down, something akin to relief stirred.
It was horrible, tragic, but it was an explanation. Understandable, human, even in its ugly cowardice. He hadn’t fallen out of love with her.
He wasn’t leading a double life. He was just a weak man who had once made a terrible choice and then couldn’t find a way out of it. She wanted to believe him.
God, how she wanted to believe him, just so this nightmare of a day would finally end. The evening passed in a haze. They barely spoke.
Anisa mechanically reheated the dinner David had made. They ate in silence. He watched her with a guilty, dog-like devotion, ready to fulfill her every wish.
She felt drained, utterly spent. The lie was exposed; the truth, such as it was, had been told.
Now she had to find a way to live with it. Late that night, when David was already asleep, having taken a sedative, Anisa wandered through the quiet apartment. She felt like a stranger in her own home.
She gathered the clothes they had thrown over the chair in the bedroom to take to the laundry. His jacket, her blouse, his trousers. A familiar ritual.
She started checking the pockets, as she always did. Keys, loose change, a handkerchief. In the side pocket of his woolen coat, the one he’d worn to work that day, her fingers found a crumpled piece of paper.
Probably a receipt from the gas station or a store. She pulled it out to throw it away. It was indeed a receipt.
Or rather, not a receipt, but a credit card slip. She unfolded it in the dim light of the nightlight. The paper was thick, expensive.
Her eyes scanned the lines. It wasn’t a bill from a Swiss clinic. Nor was it a receipt from a funeral agency.
At the top, in an elegant font, was printed: “Capital Fur Salon.” Anisa went cold inside. “The capital? Furs?” She looked at the date. The day before yesterday.
Two days ago. The amount was enormous, enough to buy a used car. The item description: “Mink coat, ladies’, model: Cataleya.”
And at the very bottom, in the “Cardholder Signature” field, was a clear, sweeping signature. For a few seconds, Anisa stared at it, unable to make out the familiar letters her brain refused to assemble into a whole. Then she read it.
It wasn’t David’s name. It was written in a confident, female hand. K. Dobrynina.
The small rectangle of paper in her hand felt heavier than lead. Anisa stood in the middle of the bedroom, listening to David’s even breathing from behind the wall. Asleep.
After his heart-wrenching performance, after the tears and pleas for forgiveness, he was sleeping peacefully, doped up on sedatives. And she was standing here with proof that it had all been not just a lie, but a well-rehearsed act. The pity that had stirred in her for a moment back in the kitchen evaporated without a trace…
