“Because Natalya told me she only found information about Mom six months ago. She said she had been searching for twenty-three years and only learned her name and address six months ago. And that Mom was already dead by then. She couldn’t have come to you three years ago if she only found out the address six months ago!”
Her father froze. Confusion flickered across his face—or was it well-acted bewilderment?
“She said that?” he asked slowly. “That she only found you six months ago?”
“Yes. At the café. Today. She said, word for word: ‘Six months ago, I finally got lucky. I found a woman from the orphanage… She remembered the last name of the family that took Olya.’ And then: ‘I came to the grave the same day I found out.'”
“Then she’s lying,” her father’s voice grew firm. “I remember that day perfectly. Three years ago. Early autumn. Olya was at work, you were at school. I opened the door and saw her. A woman with my wife’s face. I thought I was going crazy.”
“Or maybe you’re the one who’s lying?” Dasha stared at him. “Maybe you’re making this up now so I won’t trust Natalya?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re afraid she’ll tell me something else? Something I’m not supposed to know.”
Her father shook his head.
“Dasha, listen to me carefully. I understand you’re angry. I understand I’ve lost your trust, maybe forever. But I’m not lying to you now. Natalya was here three years ago. She stood on this very doorstep. She was crying. She said she’d been looking for her sister her whole life.”
“And what did you do?”
He looked down.
“I didn’t let her in. She stood there, crying, begging me to give her a chance to see Olya, just once. And I…” his voice became almost inaudible, “I closed the door. I told her to leave and never come back. I said if she showed up again, I’d call the police.”
Silence. Dasha looked at her father and felt two conflicting emotions warring inside her. On one hand, disgust at what he had done. On the other, the realization that his story was too detailed, too specific to be a lie. He remembered the season, remembered where her mother was and where she was. You don’t make up details like that on the spot. But then why did Natalya lie?
“Why?” Dasha’s voice broke. “Why did you send her away?”
“Because I was scared.” He looked up, and Dasha saw tears in his eyes. For the first time in two years. For the first time since the funeral. “I was scared that everything would change. That Olya would find out the truth not only about her sister, but also about the fact that I knew and kept silent. That she wouldn’t forgive me. That our family would fall apart. I was a coward, Dasha. A pathetic, selfish coward.”
“Mom never found out…”
“Didn’t Natalya try to contact her another way?”
“She tried. She wrote a letter, I found it in the mailbox a week after her visit. It was long, several pages. I…” He fell silent.
“You destroyed it.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
Her father nodded.
“I burned it. Without reading it to the end. I saw the first lines, ‘Dear Olya, you don’t know me, but I’m your sister,’ and I burned it. And then I lived with that. Every day. I would look at Olya and think: she could have known. She could have met her sister. She could have found the family she lost as a child. And I took that chance away from her.”
Dasha felt a wave rising inside her—dark, hot, uncontrollable. Anger. Real, adult anger, the kind she had never felt before.
“And then Mom got sick,” she said in an icy voice. “And died. Without ever knowing she had a sister. Without ever seeing her. Because of you.”
“Dasha…”
“No!” She slammed her fist on the table. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare make excuses! You stole the last year of her life. Do you understand? She could have spent it with her sister. She could have learned the truth about her past. She could have… she could have not been so alone in her final months.”
“She wasn’t alone. I was there. You were there.”
“But Natalya wasn’t. She had the right to be. Mom had the right to know.”
Her father covered his face with his hands. His shoulders began to shake—silently, terrifyingly. He was crying. This grown, strong man, who hadn’t shed a single tear at his wife’s funeral, who had turned into a stone statue after her death, was now sobbing like a child.
Dasha looked at him and felt no pity. Only confusion. If her father was telling the truth, then Natalya had lied about when she found their family. Why? What was she hiding? And if her father was lying—why would he invent such a story?
“There’s something else,” her father said, lifting his head. His face was wet, his eyes red. “Something I didn’t want to talk about. But you need to know before you meet with her again.”
“What?”
“When Natalya came three years ago… she didn’t just want to meet her sister. She asked for money. She said she was seriously ill, that she needed an expensive surgery she couldn’t afford. That her only hope was help from her blood relatives.”
Dasha felt the ground give way again.
“Money?”
“Yes. She named a sum—a large one. Very large. She said that without the surgery, she would die within a year. That she had been looking for her sister not just to meet her, but to save her own life.”
“And you didn’t believe her?”
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