For her birthday, he gave her a hand-carved wooden cat figurine, crooked, clumsy, with one ear bigger than the other.
— It’s my first attempt, — he confessed. — You can’t buy this, because it’s priceless in its ugliness.
Snezhana placed the figurine on the mantelpiece next to expensive statuettes and antique vases. It was the most valuable thing in the room.
The turning point came when Fedor Grigoryevich had a heart attack, a mild one, but enough to make Snezhana pace the corridor of the regional hospital, not knowing what to do with her hands and her thoughts. She tried to send Vitaliy home.
— It’s going to be a long night. Go, you have work tomorrow.
— Shut up, Snezhana, — he replied calmly, put his jacket over her, brought her terrible coffee from a vending machine, and held her hand for 12 hours straight, without looking at his phone, without complaining, without falling asleep.
Later, walking him to his car at dawn, when the doctors said her father was out of danger, Snezhana asked:
— Why are you so kind to me? I’m complicated, mistrustful, damaged goods.
Vitaliy stopped in the middle of the hospital parking lot and turned to her.
— You’re not damaged goods, you’re a survivor. I love you, not the heiress, not the director. I want the woman who hides under the bed to play a prank on her husband because she has a playful heart.
Snezhana froze. She had never told him the story about the bed.
— You talk in your sleep, — he smiled. — Something about dust and a mother-in-law.
Two years later, he proposed, on a Tuesday evening, while they were cooking dinner together in her apartment’s kitchen.
— Marry me. I’ve already signed the prenuptial agreement, Ulyana has seen it. It says that I leave with what I came with, my tools and my stubbornness. I only need you.
Snezhana looked at him for a long time, searching for a lie, a hidden motive, a second agenda. She found nothing but love.
— Yes, — she said. — But you can keep the wooden cat.
Five years passed. Snezhana, now the CEO of the holding (her father had passed away peacefully in his sleep a year earlier, never knowing about the illness that took him in three months), was standing by her office window when the secretary informed her that a woman downstairs was demanding a meeting and arguing with security.
Snezhana went down and saw a haggard, stooped woman in a worn coat at the entrance, whom she didn’t recognize at first. Larisa Arkadyevna now worked as a cleaner, Snezhana knew this from the detective’s reports she kept just in case, and she looked 20 years older than her age.
— I need your help, — her former mother-in-law said. And there was no former arrogance in her voice, only desperation. — Zhenya, my grandson, Vadim and Angelina’s son, he has leukemia. Angelina abandoned the child two years ago, ran off with some truck driver. Vadim is still in the colony. I don’t have money for treatment.
Snezhana looked at the woman who had once called her a country bumpkin and an arrogant empty shell, who had planned to steal her home and ruin her life. She thought of her own daughter Anna, healthy and sleeping at home under the nanny’s care. Of her mother, who had died of cancer and a broken heart, but had never lost her kindness even to those who had betrayed her.
— I won’t give you money, — Snezhana said. — I don’t trust you and I never will. But give me the name of the hospital. I’ll pay for the treatment directly, anonymously, through the holding’s charity fund.
Larisa Arkadyevna fell to her knees, right on the marble floor of the lobby, and the security guards moved to help her up, but Snezhana stopped them with a gesture. She felt no triumph, only a strange peace. She hadn’t forgiven, but she hadn’t let the darkness turn her into a monster.
A month later, a letter came from the penal colony. Vadim asked for a meeting, promising to tell why Snezhana couldn’t get pregnant during their time together. She looked at the envelope for a long time before deciding…
Comments are closed.