Not a fictitious illness. Not a mythical clinic. But the real, compelling reason that had forced a healthy, energetic woman to fake her own death.
If she found that reason, the entire skillfully constructed legend Kira had built would collapse like a house of cards. She began feverishly going through everything David had told her in her memory. All his lies were now like a map of a minefield, and somewhere on that map there had to be a key.
He had constantly gotten tangled up. At the very beginning, he had said Kira died in a car accident. That was his first, official version for everyone.
But then—Anisa strained her memory, recalling that terrible evening when he had returned after her visit to the penthouse. He had come home late, drunk, crushed. He had muttered something, cried, asked for forgiveness.
And in that drunken delirium, one phrase had slipped out. Anisa hadn’t paid attention to it then, too absorbed in her own shock. But now that phrase surfaced in her consciousness with perfect clarity.
He had said, “It’s all because of that boat, the damned motorboat, the accident.” A boat. A motorboat.
Not a car. A discrepancy. A small, insignificant one, but it was precisely such details that destroyed the most carefully crafted lies.
Why had he suddenly mentioned a boat? It meant the first version, about the car accident, was a lie from start to finish. And the second, drunken, accidental slip of the tongue, could have been much closer to the truth. She decided to start from there.
The next day, she took time off from the factory. She said she wasn’t feeling well, and that wasn’t a lie in the slightest. She felt terrible.
But instead of lying at home feeling sorry for herself, she went to the city library. The library was quiet and smelled of old paper. She went to the archival department, where bound volumes of local newspapers were kept.
A young librarian looked at her request with surprise. “All newspapers for a three-month period, five years ago. Autumn.”
“September. October. November…”
They wheeled out several heavy, dusty carts with huge folios. She sat down at a far table, away from prying eyes, and got to work. It was a painstaking, exhausting task.
She scanned page after page, peering at the yellowed columns. City news, crime reports, announcements, obituaries. She was looking for any mention of David or Kira.
Any note about an accident, an incident on the water, something unusual. An hour passed, then another. Her eyes were tired from the small print.
She went through all the newspapers for September. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
No car accidents involving Dobrynina or Malinin. No incidents on the river. She felt despair rising in her throat.
Maybe she was wrong? Maybe David’s drunken ramblings were just that—ramblings and nothing more? She forced herself to continue. She took the volume for October. And again, page after page.
Farm reports, the city preparing for winter, a report on a concert at the local cultural center—nothing. She was ready to give up. But something made her pick up the last, thickest folder—November.
She began turning the pages, almost mechanically now, not really hoping to find anything. And then her gaze caught on a small headline on the third page, in the crime section. The article was tiny, just a few lines, lost between a report about stolen chickens from a coop and a complaint about noisy neighbors.
The headline read: “Local Man Missing.” Anisa leaned closer. The article said that a week ago, late in the evening, a local businessman, Arkady Viktorovich Filatov, had left his country house on the river in his personal motorboat and had not returned.
The next day, his empty boat was found washed up on the shore several kilometers downstream. No signs of violence were found on board. The search for Filatov himself, which involved divers, yielded no results.
The investigation’s main theory was an accident. The man might have fallen overboard in the dark. The name Arkady Filatov meant nothing to her.
A usual tragic accident, one of many. She was about to turn the page, but the date stopped her. The publication date of the article.
It was printed in the exact same week when, according to David’s first legend, Kira had died. A coincidence? Perhaps. But Anisa no longer believed in coincidences.
She took out her notepad and carefully wrote down the name: Arkady Viktorovich Filatov. She continued flipping through the volumes, now looking for mentions of this name. And she found them.
Filatov was a fairly well-known figure in the city. The owner of a small but very aggressive construction company, “Monolit.” In the newspapers from the previous months, she found several articles mentioning his firm.
And then a guess struck her. She put the newspapers aside and typed two names into the search engine on her phone: the construction company “Monolit” and the firm where David worked, “StroyGarant.”
The result appeared instantly. Several links to local business portals. Articles from two or three years ago, before she had met David.
The headlines spoke for themselves: “Construction Wars.” “Monolit Accuses StroyGarant of Unfair Competition.” “Arkady Filatov Threatens Lawsuit Against His Main Rival.” “Two Largest City Construction Projects Fight for General Contract.” Everything fell into place. The missing businessman was not a random person. He was a sworn enemy.
The main commercial competitor of the company where David held the position of senior engineer. And he had disappeared without a trace in the exact same week that Kira had disappeared. Anisa sat in the dusty archival department of the library, but she saw not the yellowed newspapers before her, but a crystal-clear picture.
Kira’s disappearance and Filatov’s disappearance were not two separate events. They were two parts of a single whole. She felt it in every fiber of her being.
This wasn’t an illness. It wasn’t a family drama. It was a crime.
And somewhere at its center stood her husband, David. Now she had something more than just guesses. She had a lead.
A name. A fact. She took a photo of that very article about Filatov’s disappearance with her phone.
And she knew what she had to do next. She would no longer wait, defend herself, or react to their moves. She would go on the offensive.
And her main target, her weak link, was David. She knew where to find him. He was living with Kira in that penthouse….
