Mom, open up. It’s me. And I’m not alone.”
Kirill’s voice from behind the door sounded unusually firm, almost official. I put my book aside and went to the hallway, fixing my hair on the way.
Anxiety had already taken root somewhere in my solar plexus.
My son was standing on the doorstep, and behind his shoulder stood a tall man in a formal overcoat. The stranger held an expensive leather briefcase in his hands and looked at me with a calm, assessing gaze.
That’s how you look at an object you’re about to either buy or throw away.
“Can we come in?” Kirill asked, not even trying to smile.
He walked into the apartment like the owner he apparently already considered himself to be. The stranger followed him.
“Meet Igor Viktorovich,” my son said casually, pulling off his jacket. “He’s a doctor. We’ll just talk. I’m worried about you.”
The word “worried” sounded like a sentence. I looked at this “Andrey Viktorovich.”
Gray at the temples, thin compressed lips, tired eyes behind lenses in a fashionable frame. And something painfully, chillingly familiar in the way he tilted his head slightly to one side, studying me.
My heart did a somersault and crashed down.
Igor.
Forty years had erased his features, covered them with the patina of age and a life foreign and unknown to me. But it was him.
The man I had once loved madly and thrown out of my life with the same fury. Kirill’s father, who had never found out he had a son.
“Good afternoon, Anna Valeryevna,” he said in the even, well-trained voice of a psychiatrist. Not a single muscle in his eyes twitched. He didn’t recognize me. Or pretended not to.
I nodded silently, feeling my legs go numb. The world narrowed down to a single point—his calm, professional face.
My son had brought a man into my home to lock me away in a madhouse and take my apartment from me—and that man was his own father.
“Let’s go to the living room,” my voice sounded surprisingly calm. I barely recognized it myself.
Kirill immediately began laying out the essence of the matter while the “doctor” carefully examined the room.
My son talked about my “inadequate attachment to things,” my “unwillingness to accept reality,” how hard it was for me to live alone in such a big apartment.
“Katya and I want to help,” he lectured. “We’ll buy you a cozy studio near us. You’ll be looked after. You’ll be able to live on the remaining money without needing anything.”
He spoke about me as if I weren’t there. As if I were an old wardrobe that it was time to take out to the dacha.
Igor—or, as he was now, Igor Viktorovich—listened, nodding from time to time. Then he turned to me.
“Anna Valeryevna, do you often talk to your late husband?” his question was a punch in the gut.
Kirill lowered his eyes. So he had told him. My habit of sometimes commenting out loud on something, addressing my husband’s photograph, had turned in his hands into a symptom.
I shifted my gaze from my son’s frightened face to his father’s impenetrable one. Cold fury pushed out the shock.
They were both looking at me, waiting for an answer. One with greedy impatience, the other with clinical curiosity.
Well then. You want games? You’ll get games.
“Yes,” I replied, looking Igor straight in the eyes. “I do. Sometimes he even answers me. Especially when it comes to betrayal.”
Not a muscle moved on Igor’s face. He just made a short note in his notebook.
That gesture said more than any words. “Patient reacts aggressively to questions, confirming a defensive response. Projection of guilt.” I could almost see that line written out in his neat doctor’s handwriting.
“Mom, why are you saying things like that?” Kirill grew nervous. “Igor Viktorovich wants to help you, and you’re being sarcastic.”
“Help with what, son? Help free up living space for you?”
I looked at Kirill, and two feelings battled inside me: searing hurt and the urge to shake him and shout, “Wake up! Look who you’ve brought!” But I kept quiet. Laying my cards on the table now would mean losing.
“That’s not true,” he flushed, and that blush of shame was the only proof that there was still something human left in him. “Katya and I are worried. You’re all alone. Shut up here with your… memories.”
Igor raised a hand, gently stopping him.
“Kirill, allow me. Anna Valeryevna, tell me, what exactly do you consider betrayal? It’s an important feeling. Let’s talk about it.”
He looked at me with the same studying gaze. I decided to go all in. To test him.
“Betrayal takes different forms, doctor. Sometimes a person just goes out to buy bread and never comes back. Leaves you. And sometimes… he comes back many years later to take away the last thing you have.”
I watched his reaction closely. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just a faint professional interest.
Either he had nerves of steel, or he really didn’t remember anything. The second option seemed even more monstrous to me.
“An interesting metaphor,” he concluded. “So you perceive your son’s concern as an attempt to take something away from you? Did this feeling arise a long time ago?”
He was conducting an interrogation. Carefully, methodically, driving me into the corner of the diagnosis he had set. Every word, every gesture of mine he would interpret in whatever way suited him.
“Kirill,” I turned to my son, ignoring the psychiatrist. “See the doctor out. We need to talk alone.”
“No,” he cut me off. “We’re going to discuss everything together. I don’t want you manipulating me again and playing the victim. Igor Viktorovich is here as an independent expert.”
“Independent expert.” My ex-husband, who hadn’t paid child support simply because he didn’t even know he had a son.
A father Kirill had never seen. The irony was so vicious I wanted to laugh out loud. But I held back. They would’ve written laughter down as a symptom too.
“All right,” I said surprisingly compliantly. I could feel something inside me cooling and hardening, turning into a sharp icy blade. “Since you’re so eager to help me… Tell me what you’re proposing.”
Kirill visibly relaxed, pleased with my sudden pliability.
He eagerly began listing all the advantages of a little studio in a new building on the outskirts of the city. He talked about the concierge, about “grandmas just like you” on the benches.
I listened to him and watched Igor. And suddenly I understood.
It wasn’t just that he didn’t recognize me. He was looking at me with the same faint distaste with which he had always looked at everything he considered beneath him: my fondness for simple calico, my paperbacks, my “provincial” sentimentality.
He had run away from all that many years ago. And now, by a twist of fate, he had returned to pass final judgment on it. To declare it “sick” and remove it from his sight.
“I’ll think about your proposal,” I said, getting up. “And now, be so kind as to leave me. I need to rest.”
Kirill beamed. He’d gotten what he wanted. I had “agreed to think about it.”
“Of course, Mom. Rest. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
They left. Igor gave me a brief parting glance in which there was nothing but professional satisfaction.
I locked the door behind them with every lock. I went to the window and watched them leave the building entrance. Kirill was saying something animatedly, gesturing. Igor listened with his hand on his shoulder. Father and son. What an idyll.
They got into his expensive car and drove off. And I stayed. In my apartment, which they had already divided up in their minds.
But there was something they hadn’t taken into account. I wasn’t just an old sentimental woman. I was a woman who had already been betrayed once. And I wasn’t going to allow a second time.
The next day the phone rang exactly at ten. Kirill was chipper and nauseatingly businesslike.
“Hi, Mom. So, how are you, did you get some rest? Igor Viktorovich said that for the full picture he needs to have one more meeting. A more… formal one. With tests. He can come by tomorrow at lunchtime.”
I was silent, turning an old silver teaspoon in my hands—the only thing left from my grandmother.
“Mom, are you listening?” a note of impatience slipped into my son’s voice. “It’s just a formality, so everything is by the book. Katya has even picked out curtains for the living room. She says olive ones will be perfect here.”
Click.
It wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling. Something thin, stretched to the limit inside me snapped. Curtains.
They were already choosing curtains for my apartment. For my home. They hadn’t even written me off yet, and they were already divvying up my life, my furniture, my space.
“Fine,” I said in an icy tone. “Let him come. I’ll be waiting.”
I hung up without listening to his joyful effusions. That was it. Enough. Enough being understanding, weak, convenient. Enough playing the victim in their play. Time to start my own.
The first thing I did was open my laptop. “Psychiatrist Igor Viktorovich Sokolovsky.”
The internet knew everything. There he was, my former Igor. A successful doctor, owner of the private clinic “Harmony of the Soul,” author of scientific articles, TV expert.
In the photo he was smiling confidently, radiating reliability and competence.
I found the clinic’s phone number and made an appointment. Under my maiden name. Anna Krylova.
The receptionist politely informed me that the doctor had an “opening” tomorrow morning. What luck.
I spent the whole evening going through old boxes. I wasn’t looking for evidence. I was looking for myself.
The twenty-year-old he’d left while she was pregnant because she “didn’t match his ambitions.” The one who survived, raised her son, gave him everything she could.
And now that son had grown up and brought his successful daddy along to help him get rid of his “problem” mother.
In the morning I didn’t dress as usual. I put on a tailored pantsuit I hadn’t worn in many years.
I styled my hair, put on discreet makeup. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw not a frightened woman, but a general before a decisive battle.
The “Harmony of the Soul” clinic smelled of expensive perfume and sterility. I was shown into his office. It was huge, with a panoramic window and leather furniture.
Igor was sitting behind a massive dark-wood desk. He looked up when I came in, and confusion flickered across his face.
He clearly hadn’t expected to see “patient” Anna Valeryevna here. But he still didn’t understand who was in front of him.
“Good afternoon,” he gestured to the chair opposite. “Anna… Krylova? How can I help you?”
I sat down, placing my bag on my knees. I wasn’t going to shout or accuse. My weapon was different.
“Doctor, I’ve come to you for professional advice,” I began in a calm, measured voice. “I want to discuss a clinical case. Imagine a boy.”
His father left his mother when she was pregnant. Went off to build a career, to become successful. He never found out he had a son.
The boy grew up and then, many years later, he accidentally meets this father. Successful, wealthy. And he comes up with a plan…
I spoke and he listened. First with professional interest, then with growing tension. I could see his face changing, how bewilderment began to show through the specialist’s mask.
“Tell me, doctor,” I paused, looking him straight in the eyes. “Which trauma do you think turned out to be stronger?”
The one the abandoned son received? Or the one the father will receive when he finds out that the young man who hired him is his child, whom he betrayed many years ago?
And that he has just been helping this child have his own mother declared incompetent? Your ex-wife. Anya. Do you remember me, Igor?
The mask of the successful Doctor Sokolovsky crumbled into dust. A bewildered, deathly frightened Igor was staring at me.
His face turned ashen gray, and his expensive pen slipped from his weakening fingers and clattered across the desktop.
“Anya?..” he whispered. It wasn’t even a question, but a statement of a world that had collapsed.
“The very same,” I allowed myself a slight, bitter smile. “Didn’t expect that? I didn’t expect my son to bring his own father into my home to help him take my apartment either.”
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish thrown up on the shore. All his confidence, all his professionalism had evaporated. In front of me sat the same boy who had once been afraid of responsibility and ran away.
“I… I didn’t know…” he finally forced out. “Kirill… is he my son?”
“Yours. You can even do a DNA test if you doubt it. Though just look at his childhood photos. I have them with me.”
I took an old album out of my bag and put it on the table. I opened it to the page where one-year-old Kirill was laughing, sitting on my lap. A miniature copy of Igor.
He stared at the picture and his shoulders sagged. His whole life, so successful and well-calculated, had cracked.
At that moment the office door flew open and a beaming Kirill appeared on the threshold.
“Igor Viktorovich, I couldn’t reach you, so I thought I’d stop by! Mom said that today you…”
He broke off when he saw me in the patient’s chair. His smile slowly slid off his face, replaced by bewilderment and then anxiety.
“Mom? What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as you, son,” I replied without raising my voice. “I came for a consultation with the ‘independent expert.’ We were just discussing your case. Isn’t that right, doctor?”
Kirill shifted his bewildered gaze from me to Igor, who was white as a sheet. He didn’t understand anything. And that ignorance was the last straw for my patience.
“Kirill, let me introduce you properly. This isn’t just Igor Viktorovich. This is Igor Sokolovsky. Your father.”
Kirill’s world collapsed. I saw it in his eyes. Everything was reflected there at once: shock, denial, realization, shame and horror.
He looked at Igor, then at me, and his lips began to tremble.
“Dad?..” he whispered.
Igor flinched at that word. He raised his eyes to Kirill, and they were full of such pain and remorse that for a moment I actually felt sorry for him.
“It’s true,” he said in a dull voice. “I’m your father. And I… I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
But Kirill was no longer listening to him. He was looking at me. And in his gaze I saw the full depth of his betrayal.
He realized what he had done. He realized that in his chase after square meters he hadn’t just hurt his mother. He had trampled her whole life, dragging her most terrible secret into the light and turning it into a weapon against her.
He collapsed onto a chair, covering his face with his hands. His shoulders shook with soundless sobs.
I stood up. My mission here was complete.
“Sort it out yourselves,” I said, heading for the door. “One abandoned me, the other betrayed me. You deserve each other.”
Six months passed. I sold that apartment. It was poisoned by memories and betrayal.
Igor helped me find a small, cozy house outside the city, with a little garden. He didn’t ask for forgiveness—he knew it was pointless.
He was just there. We talked. For hours. About everything that had happened forty years ago and now.
We were getting to know each other all over again, and in that knowing there was no old love, but something new was being born—fragile, based on shared grief and late remorse.
Kirill called almost every day. At first I didn’t pick up. Then I started answering.
He cried, begged for forgiveness, said that Katya had left him, calling him a monster. He had paid for everything in full. His greed had destroyed his life.
One evening, when Igor and I were sitting on the porch of my new house, Kirill called again.
“Mom, I understand everything. I was wrong. I just want to know… will you ever be able to forgive me?”
I looked at the sunset, at the trees in the garden, at the man sitting next to me gently holding my hand.
I no longer felt pain. Only peace.
“Time will tell, son,” I answered. “Time heals everything. But remember one thing: you can’t build your own happiness by destroying the life of the one who gave you yours.