Nikolai Semyonovich had been exhausted by life for a long time—more precisely, by the miserable existence he’d been dragging behind him all these years. It wasn’t that he wanted to die. No. He had simply stopped wanting to wake up. Every morning was the same: cracked lips, a bitter taste in his mouth, the dim light from the window falling across the empty half of the bed.
Valya used to sleep there.
She had gone missing twenty years ago. Not left—vanished. She’d left a kettle cooling in the kitchen, an open book on the couch, and a coat still hanging in the hallway, as if she were about to walk through the door at any moment. But Valya never returned.
At first Nikolai Semyonovich called the police, went to morgues, and pasted up flyers. Later he just… walked. He wandered the streets, searching the faces of strangers, stepping into cafés where they sometimes used to sit together. But Valya disappeared without leaving a single trace. He and his wife hadn’t argued—everything had been fine. She ran out for milk, or whatever it was she meant to buy at the store… and simply never came home.
Now Nikolai Semyonovich’s life had become a chain of gray days. A job in the archive office, shifting dusty folders from one place to another. The road home, where he bought the same congealed pizza from the same kiosk. An apartment where time seemed to have frozen. Why live like this? Why did she disappear? If only he could get an answer—was she alive? What happened to her? Was she suffering?
Sometimes Valya came to him in dreams. In his sleep she was alive—laughing, talking, taking his hand. Then Nikolai Semyonovich would wake up and see the empty bed again. That was exactly why he didn’t want to wake up at all. What was the point? At least in his dreams they could remain together and enjoy each other’s presence. Only in those brief, enchanted meetings did he feel any desire to keep living.
The business trip was sprung on him unexpectedly. Before, he had always refused—afraid he’d leave the apartment and Valya would return, and not find him there. But you couldn’t argue with the boss. He’d lose his job, and then there wouldn’t even be money left for this pitiful existence.
Looking at him with either pity or disgust, the supervisor held out an envelope with tickets.
“You’re going to the capital, Semyonych. Tomorrow. We requested some documents from the archive there—we need them urgently. They can’t be sent because they’re highly important papers. You’ll go yourself, personally. Don’t forget—you’ll answer for them with your head. So don’t fool around there, don’t drink, do the job and come straight back.”
Nikolai Semyonovich nodded. He didn’t care. By now he no longer believed Valya would return after so many years. He wasn’t afraid of missing a possible reunion. He didn’t believe in anything anymore. He simply carried out orders like a mechanical doll. It was easier to run out his days that way, without letting emotions wake up and hurt him again.
At first, the lonely women at work tried to cheer him up. A handsome, handy man was wasting away. Each of them wanted to draw his attention, but they quickly understood it was pointless. Nikolai Semyonovich remained faithful to the woman he loved, even though she had been gone for a long time. He had shut down his feelings, tried not to hurt so much—yet sometimes the pain still flooded him.
The train to the capital departed in the evening. Nikolai Semyonovich arrived at the station early, bought a sandwich with rubbery sausage from a kiosk and a small bottle of vodka—not for celebration, just so sleep would come faster.
The compartment was empty—apparently the vacation season hadn’t started. Nikolai Semyonovich put his suitcase up on the rack, took off his jacket, carefully hung it on a hook, and sat by the window. The city lights flickered past the glass, then dark fields. His neighbor was quiet—lying on the upper berth, reading a book. All the better. He didn’t have the slightest desire to talk.
Nikolai Semyonovich unscrewed the cap and took a swallow of the burning liquid. It hadn’t done much for him for a long time, didn’t really help, but he drank out of habit. Another swallow… a third… After emptying the bottle, he lay down, wrapped himself in the stiff railway blanket, and closed his eyes.
Sleep came surprisingly quickly—heavy and deep.
He dreamed of Valya.
She was standing on the platform in a light summer dress, even though everything around her was buried in snow. Valya seemed not to feel the cold. She smiled at her husband, but her large blue eyes looked at him as if they were scanning his soul.
“Where are you? Why are you tormenting me and not coming? How long do I have to wait for you to return?” Nikolai Semyonovich asked, taking a step toward her—yet she seemed to draw farther away.
“You already know,” she said. “Let me go, Kolya. Live on. Nothing can be changed anymore. I’m guilty before you. Forgive me for leaving you.”
The train jolted, and Nikolai Semyonovich woke up.
It was dark in the compartment, only the weak glow of lamps outside the window snatching the worn carriage walls out of the shadows.
He reached for the bottle, but it was empty.
The train jerked sharply again. A book fell from the upper berth, and a photograph fluttered out of it. Dropping his feet to the floor, Nikolai Semyonovich turned on the light and was about to pick up the book, but his gaze stuck to the photo and his heart began to pound. It felt as if someone had grabbed him by the throat and squeezed with clawed fingers.
There was Valya—so young, so full of life—smiling from the picture as if the years hadn’t passed, as if twenty years weren’t behind them. The photo looked recent, but was that even possible? Could she really be unchanged? Not a single wrinkle. Not one gray hair. It was as if time had never touched her.
A young man climbed down from his bunk and reached for the photograph, but Nikolai Semyonovich only clenched it tighter and stared at his neighbor.
“Where… where did you get a photo of my wife?” he asked in a trembling voice.
There couldn’t be a mistake. It was her—those huge blue eyes, the dimples at the corners of her lips, the birthmark on her neck. His Valya.
“My wife?” the young man said, stunned. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken. That’s my wife. Vera.”
It was as if Nikolai Semyonovich had been struck with the back of an axe. His vision swam, but he still couldn’t release the photograph. Shaking his head, he pulled a picture of his beloved from the inside pocket of his jacket and showed it to the young man.
“My Valya. She went missing twenty years ago. This is… her exact double. How can that be?”
The man introduced himself as Igor. He said he had been on a business trip and was now returning to the capital to his beloved wife. Vera had only recently turned nineteen. They had married a few months earlier.
“You should meet her and talk to her,” Igor said. “Maybe her parents can tell you something. I know Vera grew up in an adoptive family. Her mother died during childbirth, and nothing was known about the father. Vera said she’d like to learn at least something about her family. Maybe you really are connected somehow.”
Nikolai Semyonovich sobered up instantly. He looked at the two photographs and couldn’t believe that this random trip could give him even the smallest clue in such a tangled story. He had searched for the woman he loved in every passing face, and in all those years he hadn’t lived at all. Now he was afraid he was too late—afraid he hadn’t been able to protect her.
Right after the train, he went with Igor. He needed the truth. Work was impossible to think about at a moment like this. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Vera had nothing to do with Valya. But the resemblance was too striking to deny.
Vera’s parents invited Nikolai Semyonovich for tea on their summer veranda. Vera herself was at work, so he couldn’t meet her yet.
“We didn’t know anything about the woman we took in,” Anfisa Olegovna began, after Igor gently told them about the hard life of his compartment neighbor and their meeting on the train. “My husband and I were driving back from vacation. On the highway we saw an exhausted woman and stopped to offer help. She didn’t remember anything about herself. At the hospital they said she’d had a stroke, which could have caused the memory loss. She didn’t even know her own name, couldn’t explain what had happened to her.
“It turned out she was pregnant, but she didn’t remember that either—or perhaps she never knew. She chose the name Nadya for herself. My husband and I decided to shelter her. We sent all the necessary information to the police, but it felt like our report wasn’t taken seriously. The investigator said there were many cases like this, and finding relatives happened only rarely. I don’t know how it ended up that they didn’t react, even though you had filed reports about your missing wife.
“By letting Nadya stay under our roof, we hoped she would remember everything and be able to go home. Nadya helped around the house, she was a very bright, kind person. We became close friends. Her pregnancy wasn’t easy. Tormented by nightmares, waking in cold sweat, she cried for a long time and kept saying she had to remember someone very important. Maybe the pregnancy problems were caused by all that stress…
“Nadya spent so much strength during labor and lost so much blood. Before she died, she begged us to care for her daughter, not to abandon Vera. And my husband and I decided to adopt the baby, since we didn’t have children of our own. It felt like a gift from heaven. Of course it was hard—there’s no joy when a child loses her mother. But I promised I would do everything to become a good mother for that little girl.
“We buried Nadya with dignity. We did everything we could. You searched for your wife and suffered all these years, but if you want to be sure Nadya was Valya, and that Vera is your biological daughter, you should do a DNA test.”
Nikolai Semyonovich was ready to agree to anything.
Having come on his boss’s orders, he arranged to finish all his tasks as quickly as possible and then go to a clinic for the test. Anfisa Olegovna worried about Vera, so she asked that Nikolai give his sample at a different time from the girl—because if it turned out they were strangers, it wouldn’t be right to torment each other’s nerves with an early meeting.
After giving his sample and finishing his work, Nikolai Semyonovich had to return to his hometown. The thought of what came next gave him no peace. He lived only by waiting for the results.
He kept thinking about what might have happened to his wife—if it truly had been her. By now it would be impossible to find and punish those responsible. But he could lay flowers on her grave, say goodbye properly. He could meet his daughter.
Two weeks later, the results came back, confirming that Nikolai Semyonovich was indeed Vera’s father. He requested unpaid leave and rushed back to the capital. Anfisa Olegovna and her husband didn’t stand in the way of father and daughter getting to know each other. They understood the situation and felt sorry for Nikolai Semyonovich.
Vera reacted cautiously to her biological father. She wanted to learn something about her real family, but she was scared. Igor stayed by her side and promised he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
Together with Nikolai Semyonovich, Vera went to her mother’s grave to lay flowers. Nikolai Semyonovich wept for a long time, saying farewell to his wife. He promised that now he would do everything so his daughter would know what a wonderful woman her mother had been—and so she would never lack for anything.
As he told his daughter what life had been like with Valya, Nikolai Semyonovich brought back to life every bright moment they’d shared. They had only just met, but they were family, and they were ready to support one another.
Anfisa Olegovna and her husband offered to help Nikolai Semyonovich move to the capital and find work there, but for now he couldn’t leave the place where he had lived with Valya. Their apartment held too many memories. He promised to show everything to his daughter and tell her more about her mother. He gave his word that once he truly let go, he would be able to move—so he could care for Vera and stay close to her.
A chance meeting on a train helped a father and daughter find each other. Nikolai Semyonovich had lost the hope of reuniting with his wife—but now he knew she was watching him from heaven, and he spoke to her every day. He begged the Almighty for justice, for punishment of those whose actions made Valya lose her memory and kept her from finding her husband. He thanked Anfisa Olegovna and her husband for caring for his beloved and raising their daughter. He thanked Igor for surrounding Vera with love.
And Nikolai Semyonovich, at last, seemed ready to release the past and live on—for those who needed his support. He knew he would never forget Valya. But now their meeting would happen later, when his short life was over, and he could be reunited with his wife in heaven.
