He didn’t ask unnecessary questions, didn’t offer advice or recommendations, just placed the thermos on the bedside table and said to Varvara Rodionovna, who was looking at him with surprise, “Get well soon. Taisiya misses you without you.” Varvara Rodionovna smirked with just the corners of her lips. “Seems like a decent man, not a chatterbox.” When he left, her mother looked at her daughter with a long gaze and said something Taisiya would remember for a long time. “A person is known by their deeds, daughter, not their words. This one acts.” After her mother’s discharge, Gordey Alexandrovich invited them both to lunch at his house in the Sosnovy Bor cottage community to celebrate his son’s full recovery, who was already running around the yard and didn’t even remember the hospital.
The cottage turned out to be large, but without the ostentatious luxury Taisiya had expected to see from the owner of a construction company. A solid brick house on fifteen acres with pine trees, a wooden terrace, and a swing in the yard. The five-year-old boy ran out to meet them with a joyful shout of “The doctor is here!” and hugged Taisiya’s legs so tightly she nearly lost her balance. “Mitya, let the woman through!” Bondar said, but there was a softness in his voice that Taisiya hadn’t noticed before. The lunch was simple but delicious. A housekeeper had cooked, but Gordey Alexandrovich set the table himself, arranging the plates with the same concentration he probably used when signing million-dollar contracts.
At the table, he spoke briefly about himself, without unnecessary details, but honestly. His wife had died of cancer three years ago, he was raising his son alone, there were times when he wanted to drop everything and leave, go wherever his eyes would take him, but his child kept him afloat. “I know what that’s like,” Varvara Rodionovna said quietly, “raising a child alone. My husband passed away ten years ago, Tasya was still in university.” After lunch, her mother deliberately went to see the garden with the boy, who was pulling her by the hand towards his strawberry patches, leaving Taisiya and Gordey Alexandrovich alone on the terrace. They were silent for a few minutes, looking at the pine trees, and this silence wasn’t heavy, but rather calm, as it is between people who don’t need to fill pauses with empty words.
On the way back in the car, Varvara Rodionovna asked, “So, what do you think of him?” “I feel calm with him,” Taisiya replied after a pause. “Calm is good. But don’t rush into anything, daughter. You’ve been burned once already.” One evening, Bondar arrived with a bag of medicine for Varvara Rodionovna. She had mentioned in his presence that the pharmacy was out of her needed blood pressure pills, and he had remembered the name and dosage. Her mother accepted the medicine but immediately sat him down at the kitchen table with the air of a judge seating a defendant. “What do you want from my daughter?” she asked directly, without beating around the bush. “Are you planning to marry her or just have some fun?”
Gordey Alexandrovich did not look away. “If Taisiya allows it, I would like to be with her. If she’s not ready, I will wait. I’ll remain a friend, I won’t push.” “She doesn’t need a rich man,” Varvara Rodionovna spoke harshly, but without hostility. “She needs someone who won’t run away in a difficult moment.” “I keep my word,” he replied simply. Her mother sighed, looked at her daughter standing in the kitchen doorway, then back at him. “Alright, we’ll see. But I’m warning you, my daughter won’t trust anyone easily again.” A month later, Regina Valeryevna called to request a meeting. Her voice on the phone was quiet, without its former metallic ring, and Taisiya, after some thought, agreed.
They met in a coffee shop near the hospital, a public place, during the daytime, in case her former mother-in-law decided to make a scene. But Regina Valeryevna entered as a different woman, aged, stooped, with a sickly puffiness on her face from her heart problems. There was none of her former arrogance left, only the fatigue of someone who had understood something too late. “I was wrong that day,” she said, not looking up from her cup. “Those words should have been said long ago.” “Why did you treat me that way?” Taisiya asked calmly. “I was afraid of what the relatives would say, of losing status. I thought, my son is marrying some doctor, not a decent girl from a good family…”
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