The door opened, and Arina walked in, dressed in a white suit — calm and cold as the March ice on the river. She silently threw a folder onto the floor, and photographs scattered across the linoleum: Yana with Timur at a restaurant, in a car, at the entrance to his building, statements of stolen money transfers, a medical report on the term of pregnancy and the fetus’s blood type.
Arseny grabbed the pictures. His face twisted, turning purple.
— The baby is not mine…
— Blood type B, — Arina said without expression. — You have type O. Basic genetics, high school biology.
He backhanded Yana across the face with such force that she flew into the wall. She fell to the floor and screamed, her voice breaking into a shriek:
— You idiot! Your mother is an old hag! I hate you both! I’ve always hated you!
Then Arina took out her phone and played the recording from that dinner. Arseny’s voice filled the room, echoing off the walls. “Yana is a burden, the baby is a mistake.” “I’ll send my mother to a nursing home — I’m tired of her ailments.”
Alla Mikhailovna, tethered to the dialysis machine, entangled in tubes and wires, heard every word. Her son, the one for whom she had humiliated Arina, demanded a stranger’s kidney, destroyed another’s life, was planning to put her in an old folks’ home, to get rid of her like worn-out furniture. The monitors began to beep alarmingly, the numbers on the screens darting about. The old woman wheezed, reached a bony hand towards Arina, clutching at the air.
— Help me… daughter… I beg you…
Arina walked over to the bed and looked at that hand — the very one that had waved dismissively when her mother-in-law called her an orphan from the gutter and used goods.
— My kidney was a gift of love. I was giving it to a mother — the mother I lost at nine on a highway in an accident. You are not my mother, Alla Mikhailovna. You are the person who ordered her son to divorce me while I was lying in intensive care after surgery, bleeding and not knowing if I would survive.
The monitor erupted in a hysterical screech, turning into a flat line. Arseny was sobbing on the floor, smearing tears across his face. Alla Mikhailovna’s heart had stopped not just from kidney failure, but from the betrayal of her own son, heard with her own ears in the last moments of her life. Arina turned and walked out of the room, not looking back at the screams and commotion behind her.
The arrest took place two days later, at his mother’s funeral. The ceremony at the cemetery was pathetic: a few distant relatives who came out of a sense of duty, and the funeral home staff, indifferently doing their job. News of the bankruptcy and criminal case spread through the city instantly, turning the Rossinskys into pariahs everyone shunned. Yana had been detained the day before at the airport trying to fly to Dubai with a suitcase full of cash: Article 160, “Misappropriation and Embezzlement on a particularly large scale.”
When the priest finished the service and the gravediggers began to lower the coffin into the frozen earth, two plainclothes men with stone faces approached Arseny. The handcuffs clicked shut on his wrists right by the fresh grave, under the gazes of the few witnesses. They were leading him to the service car when he noticed a black executive-class Mercedes on the cemetery lane, in the shade of old birch trees. The tinted window lowered a few centimeters. There, wearing sunglasses despite the overcast day, sat Arina. She looked at him without gloating, without triumph, without any visible emotion. Just looked, as at a finished painting, as at a closed chapter. The window slid smoothly up. The car started and disappeared around a bend in the lane.
A year later, Arina stood at the cemetery before two modest gray granite headstones. She placed white lilies on her parents’ graves — now well-tended, with trimmed grass and fresh flowers in vases, and spoke quietly, telling them how her life had changed over the past year. How she now helps people who have found themselves in similar situations, pays for treatment for those who cannot afford it, hires lawyers for those who are being deceived just as she was…
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