He began to dissolve into the snowfall, stepping back, his silhouette becoming more and more transparent. “I’ll be waiting for you at the end of the road,” his voice sounded distant now, like an echo between the buildings. “Don’t hurry. We have an eternity ahead of us.” She woke up with her face wet with tears, but for the first time in all these years—without the heaviness in her chest, without the leaden plate that had been pressing on her for seven years.
May. Odesa. The waterfront, bathed in the evening sun, the smell of the sea and blooming acacias. A cafe with a view of the water—the very sea they had dreamed of seeing together, which they had talked about on long winter evenings. Angelina sat at a table right by the water. In front of her were two glasses of wine: one for her, the second for the empty chair opposite, on the back of which hung his old sweater, which she had taken from that terrible room in Lukianivka.
The black card lay on the table next to the glass. “See? — she said quietly, looking at the empty chair. — I’m spending your money. Staying in a nice hotel with a sea view, just like you wanted. I bought a dress—red, just how you liked it. I still dress like a beggar out of habit, of course—seven years are not so easily erased—but I’m working on it. You would scold me, I know.”
The sea breeze tousled her grown-out hair, and on her finger was still the wedding ring she had never taken off and never intended to. She never remarried. There were men who tried to court her: some sincerely, some for the money, some simply out of curiosity about the wealthy widow. But every time someone took her hand, she compared.
And the comparison was not in favor of the living. The love she had experienced was too deep, too painful, too real. After something like that, it’s impossible to fall in love again. You can only learn to live with that love inside you, to carry it as a part of yourself. She got up from the table and walked along the waterfront, past palm trees and laughing vacationers, past children with ice cream and couples in love.
The sun was setting over the horizon, painting the sea in gold and purple. Her shadow on the warm stones was long and lonely, but not broken, not bent under the weight of the past. Yegor was waiting for her at the end of the road. Somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, where the sun meets the sea, where there is no pain and no lies, where they can finally be together.
And someday, after many years, lived fully and happily, she will come to him and tell him about everything she saw, about all the places she visited for both of them, about all the sunsets she admired with his eyes. But for now, she lives. For herself and for him.
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