“Tomorrow? After school? Around four?”
“I’ll be there.”
Dasha wanted to say goodbye and hang up. But something stopped her. The question that had been tormenting her all this time.
“Natalya?”
“Yes?”
“You said you searched for Mom for twenty years. But why did you start searching? You were just a little girl when you were separated. How did you even know you had a sister?”
Another pause—long, heavy. When Natalya spoke, her voice had changed. It was deeper. More tense.
“It’s a long story, Dasha. Too long for a phone call. But I’ll tell you everything. Tomorrow. I promise.”
She hung up. Dasha sat on her bed, clutching the phone to her chest, and thought about what Grandma Zina had said. “People are not always who they seem. Be careful.”
Outside, the rain started again. The drops trickled down the glass, leaving crooked paths, like tears on cheeks. The girl lay down, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
She didn’t know that at that very moment, Grandma Zina was picking up the phone in her apartment. She didn’t know what number she was dialing. She didn’t hear the short conversation—just a few words, spoken dryly, almost in a whisper: “She found Dasha. We need to talk. Urgently.” And she couldn’t see how, on the other end of the line, a man’s hand—her father’s hand—slowly put down the receiver, and Alexander Terekhov’s face contorted into a grimace Dasha had never seen before. A mixture of fear and something else. Something that looked like guilt.
The “Three Cups” café was located in an old two-story building, squeezed between a pharmacy and a stationery store. Inside, it smelled of cinnamon and fresh pastries, quiet music played, and it was never crowded—which was exactly why Dasha loved the place. You could sit for hours with a single cup of cocoa, and no one would give you a disapproving look.
She arrived 15 minutes early, took a table by the window, ordered a cocoa, and began to wait, nervously fiddling with a napkin. She had barely slept all night: tossing and turning, thinking, replaying the conversation with her grandmother in her head, trying to understand what that strange phrase meant: “People are not always who they seem.” What did her grandmother mean? That Natalya was a fraud? A scammer? But why would a scammer seek out a niece from an ordinary family? They had no money, no connections, nothing of value. Unless…
The thought was cut short. Natalya appeared in the café doorway. She looked different today than she had at the cemetery. Then, in the gray autumn haze, she had seemed almost like a ghost—pale, blurred, unreal. Now, in the warm light of the lamps, she was alive and real. She was wearing a simple dark dress, her hair was gathered in the familiar ponytail, and a worn leather bag was on her shoulder.
She saw Dasha, smiled, and again that painful resemblance to her mother hit the girl like a punch to the gut.
“Hi,” Natalya said, approaching the table. “Have you been waiting long?”
“No, I just got here.”
Natalya sat opposite her, ordered a black coffee, and was silent for a while, as if gathering her thoughts. Dasha was silent too. There was an awkwardness between them—that special kind of awkwardness that exists between people who are connected by something important but don’t know each other at all.
“You wanted to know how I found out about my sister,” Natalya finally began, “and why I started looking for her?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not a simple story. And not a very happy one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
Dasha nodded. Natalya took a sip of her coffee, looking past the girl out the window, at the street, at the passersby hurrying about their business.
“I was adopted when I was three. Just like your mother. Only she was taken by a childless couple from an educated family—Raya and her husband, while I…” She hesitated. “I was taken by other people. The Dorokhov family. A husband and wife, both in their late thirties. They already had a son—grown, married, living separately. They wanted a girl. They wanted to hear a child’s laughter in the house again.”
“And how was it? How was your life?”
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