Anna froze on the threshold, and a cold steel plate of bewilderment seemed to stab beneath her rib. The door was ajar. Only by an inch or two, but even that upset the entire order of things. Her mother-in-law, Margarita Stepanovna—a woman of iron discipline and principle—forget to lock the dacha? Unthinkable. That simply didn’t happen. Ever.
She pushed the door, and the old wood yielded with a quiet, almost living groan, admitting her into the house’s silent, congealed air. The smell hit her first—not the familiar scent of old timber, floor wax, and dried mint, but a heavy, musty, sweet-rancid reek of someone else’s presence. Anna froze, listening to the silence. It was thick, ringing, and not empty. Someone else’s life pulsed inside it.
The veranda looked as if looters had swept through. On the rough wooden table stood two cups with cloudy dregs of coffee; in one, an oily brown sludge floated. A plate held dried-out macaroni and a petrified chunk of bread. On the floor nearby lay someone’s sweater—dark, rumpled, the sleeves unnaturally turned inside out, as if someone had yanked it off in a hurry. An icy, nauseating fear seized Anna. People in their family didn’t live like this. Here perfect order reigned; every thing knew its place. This was their solid, reliable little world, and now it had been desecrated, broken into.
Who? A drifter looking for a night’s shelter? Mischievous teenagers? Her thoughts fluttered like frightened birds. There were stores in the cellar—grains, canned stew, jars of pickles her mother-in-law had left “for a rainy day.” She and Alexey had only laughed at her prudence until, a year ago, a flood cut them off from the world for two weeks. Then those jars had been their salvation.
And then another thought pierced her, sharp as a razor blade, freezing the blood in her veins. What if Alexey? What if he wasn’t on a business trip? What if he was here, behind that very door to the living room, with some… other woman? And that cup, that sweater—were these the traces of their sin, their secret hideout? Anna clapped a hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. No, that was paranoia! They had been married only two years, he loved her, he would never… But rational arguments drowned in a panicked, animal terror.
Just then a sound came from the living room. A quiet, barely audible creak. The way the spring of an old sofa creaks when someone sits down on it. Someone was in there. Right now.
Her heart hammered, trying to burst from her chest. Her legs turned to cotton. She ought to run, call for help, but some unknown force—a blend of despair, jealousy, and searing curiosity—pulled her forward. “Come what may,” she whispered, drew a deep breath, and flung the door open.
The air in the room was stale, smelling of sleep. And on the green sofa, wrapped in a checkered plaid blanket, a girl was sleeping. Very young, almost a child. A ray of spring sunlight, breaking through the dusty glass, gilded her tousled fair hair on the pillow. A sweet, girlish face with dimples in her cheeks and a mischievous snub nose. The girl muttered something in her sleep, turned restlessly, burrowed deeper into the blanket as if she were cold. And suddenly her eyes half opened—cloudy, drowsy, cornflower blue. They met Anna’s eyes.
“Mom, is that you?” she whispered in a voice thick with sleep. “I got soaked in the rain and fell asleep…”
Blissfully smiling at something of her own, she let her lashes fall and slipped back into sleep, as if nothing at all had happened. As if Anna’s appearance were the most natural thing in the world.
The world around Anna swam, spun, shattered into a billion shards. She recoiled; her back struck the doorjamb painfully. This wasn’t their sofa. Theirs was brown. The walls were a different shade. This wasn’t their house! She darted outside, gulping icy gusts of wind, and almost collapsed onto the bench by the steps. Another blow—there was no such bench here! Only two stumps with a fresh, resin-scented log laid across them.
Her head was spinning. Anna squeezed her eyes shut, trying to suppress the surge of panic. “Count to ten,” her grandmother’s gentle voice sounded in her memory. “Slowly. And everything will fall into place.” She obeyed. One… two… by three her breathing had evened out… by ten the world was slowly settling back where it belonged.
She opened her eyes. She was sitting on that very new log Alexey and his father had put in place over the weekend. Her phone vibrated in her pocket.
“Anya, where are you? This is my third try! Are you okay?” It was Alexey, and his voice—so dear and anxious—brought her back to reality.
Gasping and stumbling over her words, she blurted out about the open door, the mess, the sleeping stranger on the green sofa.
“That’s impossible!” her husband exclaimed, genuinely astonished. “Who would have any use for us out there? Are you sure? Maybe you imagined it?”
“I saw it with my own eyes! She… she called me Mom!” Anna’s voice climbed to a shrill note.
“Annyushka, my love, maybe you’ve overworked? Why did you go there alone? Wanted to make a surprise? Listen, maybe call Dad and let him come pick you up? I can’t get there until tomorrow. And besides, darling, our living-room sofa is brown, not green—you chose it yourself.” He spoke so gently and tenderly that Anna felt ashamed again of her wild suspicions.
She glanced at the ajar door. In the strip of light she could see the corner of a… brown sofa. No girl. Everything clean and empty. Had she really imagined it? She drove home, not daring to stay. The strange incident gradually wore away under the film of daily routine—and soon under wonderful news: Anna learned she was pregnant.
Years passed. A whole life. The dacha story turned into a vague, almost fairy-tale memory that Anna herself hardly believed. It seemed merely a strange waking dream, a game played by a tired mind.
Their daughter, little Sonya, grew—rosy-cheeked, merry, with two snow-white bows in fair, flaxen braids. Then the braids gave way to a fashionable bob, and the bows to headphones. And now their Sonya—a tall, slender beauty with those same cornflower-blue eyes and a playful snub nose—was celebrating her sixteenth birthday.
“Mom, let’s have my birthday at the dacha! It’s warm already, we can make a bonfire! My friends will come, and… and Mitya Nazarov will be there. Please, Mom?” Sonya looked at her pleadingly, and Anna couldn’t resist.
The plan was set. As always, Alexey was to return from his business trip on Friday evening, and Sonya begged to go ahead alone to get everything ready for the party. Mitya, the son of their old friends, newly licensed, was to meet her at the station.
On Friday, after finishing her errands, Anna rushed to the dacha to help her daughter. The air smelled of wet earth, grass, and freshness. After a recent rain everything gleamed emerald green. Mitya’s car wasn’t at the gate. Anna went into the house.
Silence. And again… the same, painfully familiar tableau. The door flung wide. On the veranda a chair held Sonya’s jacket, soaked through. On the table stood a cup of half-drunk tea.
An icy hand squeezed Anna’s heart. Barely breathing, she stepped into the living room. And she was stunned.
On the green sofa, wrapped in that very checkered blanket, her daughter lay sleeping. Her fair hair was tousled on the pillow, her cheeks were flushed. The room was flooded with that same golden light. The spring creaked; Sonya stirred and half opened her eyes. Cornflower-blue, drowsy.
“Maa-om, I’m so glad you came!” Her voice was thick with sleep, exactly as it had been that time, many years ago. “Can you imagine, Mitya’s car died, I walked from the station through the woods, in the rain. I got soaked, I was freezing. Mitya came later, poured me tea, he’s gone now to get some medicine—I started sneezing. Mom, he’s so caring… do you like him?…”
She sat there, wrapped in the blanket, on the green sofa. That very one. They had bought it five years earlier, when the old brown one finally fell apart.
“I’ve seen this before,” Anna whispered to herself, and goosebumps ran down her spine. Not fear, but a reverent, soul-chilling awe before a miracle. That day. The sounds. The creak. The sleeping girl. The word “Mom.” It hadn’t been a hallucination. It had been a fleeting window, a crack in time through which she had been shown her future. Shown her daughter.
That evening she tried to tell Alexey everything.
“Ah, Annyushka, my love,” he only laughed, hugging her. “As beautiful as ever—and a first-class dreamer, too. You never change.”
Anna didn’t insist. Men rarely believe such things. But now she knew for certain. She had seen a reflection of tomorrow. And the sofa back then had been green. Absolutely green.
Miracles do happen. It’s just that not everyone is meant to notice them.