“Well then, mommy, ready to meet daddy?” the nurse smiled, handing me a tightly swaddled bundle. “Look—everyone’s already gathered under the windows with flowers.”
I nodded, pressing my son to me. His tiny face was serious, almost frowning. My boy. Our boy—Oleg’s and mine. I went to the window, searching for my husband’s familiar car, but it wasn’t there. Only strangers’ happy faces, balloons soaring into the sky, and bouquets that looked like clouds.
The phone in the pocket of my robe buzzed. Oleg. At last.
“Hello! Where are you? They’re discharging us already,” I blurted out before he could say a word. “I’m already dressed, and the baby’s ready.”
I heard a noise like the hum of an airport in the receiver, and a woman’s laughter somewhere in the background.
“Anya, hi. Listen, here’s the thing…” His voice was oddly detached, cheerful. “I’m not coming.”
My smile slid off my face.
“What do you mean? Did something happen?”
“No, everything’s great! It’s just that I’m flying out. To relax. You know, a last-minute package came up—how could I say no?”
I looked at my son. He snuffled in his sleep.
“Flying… where? Oleg, we have a son. We were supposed to go home. All three of us.”
“Oh, come on, it’s no big deal. I asked your mom, she’ll meet you. Or take a taxi. I transferred money to your card.”
Money. He said “money.” As if buying us off, like we were an annoying mistake.
“Are you flying alone?”
He hesitated. And in that brief pause, I heard everything. All the deceit, all his late-night “meetings” and “urgent business trips.” That sticky fog of lies I’d stubbornly refused to notice.
“Anya, don’t start, okay? I’m just tired, I want to unwind. I’ve got the right.”
“You do,” I said evenly. The air in my lungs suddenly ran out. “Of course you do.”
“Well then, great!” he brightened. “Okay, they’re boarding. Kisses!”
The line went dead.
I stood in the middle of the ward, furnished with government-issue pieces, and looked at my son. He was so real, warm, alive. And my whole former life had just turned into a cheap stage set.
The nurse peeked into the room.
“Well? Did Dad make it?”
I slowly shook my head, my gaze never leaving my son.
“No. Our dad went on vacation.”
I didn’t cry. Something inside simply turned very hard and very cold, like a stone thrown into icy water. I took out my phone and dialed my mother’s number.
“Mom, hi. Can you come pick me up?… Yes, alone. Please take us home. To your place. To the village.”
Father met us at the maternity hospital gates in his old Zhiguli (Lada). Wordlessly, he took the bundle with Misha from me and, awkward but careful, pressed him to his broad chest. He didn’t say a word the entire drive to the village, just watched the road while the muscles in his weathered face worked.
That silent support was better than any words.
The village greeted us with the smell of smoke and damp leaves. Our old house, where I hadn’t lived for ten years, felt foreign. Everything there was steeped in a different, forgotten way of life: creaking floorboards, a stove that had to be stoked in the morning, water from the well. My city life, with its comforts and illusions, was somewhere far behind us, hundreds of kilometers away.
The first weeks blurred into one endless day filled with Misha’s crying and my despair. I felt like a burden. My mother sighed when she looked at me, a quiet sorrow fixed in her eyes. My father withdrew, and I knew he blamed me—not for coming back, but for choosing Oleg once, ignoring his parental instinct.
Then he called. Two weeks later. Cheerful, judging by his voice—rested and full of life.
“Hi, love! So how are you two doing, you and the champ?” he practically shouted into the phone, as if that conversation at the hospital had never happened.
“We’re at my parents’,” I answered curtly, wiping Misha’s bib.
“Ah, right, right. Good—fresh air, nature. That’s good for him. I’ll be back soon too; I’ll drop by and play with the heir.”
The heir. He spoke of his son like some object you could set aside and pick up later to play with.
He started calling once a week. He asked me to show Misha on video, cooed sweetly at the phone screen, and then quickly signed off. He acted as if we were just temporarily living in different places by mutual consent. As if he hadn’t left me alone with a baby in my arms.
Then one of my city “friends” sent me a screenshot from social media. A photo. The same woman whose laugh I’d heard on the phone sat at a café table, and in the background Oleg stood behind her, arms around her shoulders. Happy. In love. The caption read: “The best decision of my life.”
I looked at the picture, then at my own hands with their broken nails, at the mountain of diapers I had to wash in icy water. And I understood. He wasn’t just on vacation. He was building a new life.
And we—Misha and I—were merely an annoying obstacle to be bought off with paltry handouts so he could sleep at night.
The screen went dark, but the photo stayed before my eyes. The humiliation was almost physical; it burned my cheeks and squeezed my throat.
I stopped writing to him and calling. I just waited.
Oleg called himself a month later. His voice was businesslike, collected, with no trace of his former playfulness.
“Anya, hi. We need to talk. I’ve decided to sell our apartment.”
I sank down onto the old wooden bench in the yard. Misha was asleep in the stroller beside me.
“Our apartment? Oleg, that’s our only home. Where am I supposed to go back to with the baby?”
“Listen, it’s business. I need the money for a new project. I can’t keep it frozen in concrete. I’ll allocate you your share, of course. I think three hundred thousand will be enough to start.”
Three hundred thousand. He valued his son’s future at three hundred thousand rubles.
“Oleg, you can’t do this. By law, half belongs to me and Misha.”
He gave a cold, unpleasant little laugh.
“By what law, Anya? The apartment’s in my mother’s name, remember? ‘So there’s no hassle.’ You agreed to that yourself. So sue all you like. Good luck.”
And that was the last straw. Not the cheating. That cold, businesslike tone with which he stripped his own son of a future.
That evening I sat on the porch. My father came out of the house and sat beside me.
“A man, Anya, isn’t the one who talks pretty,” he said at last. “He’s the one who acts. You have to do what’s right for your son. Your mother and I are here.”
His simple words flipped a switch inside me. Enough of being a victim.
The next day the pump in the well broke. Father called someone, and an hour later an old motorcycle rolled into our yard. A tall man of about thirty-five swung off it. Sergey. A neighbor from the other end of the street whom I vaguely remembered from childhood. Calm, laconic, with strong, calloused hands. In half an hour he had the pump apart and fixed, refusing payment.
“Neighbors should help each other,” he said simply, wiping his hands on a rag. His gaze fell on Misha in the stroller, and he smiled ever so slightly. “He’s going to be a stout little warrior.”
When Sergey left, I went inside. I took a folder of documents from the cabinet: our marriage certificate, Misha’s birth certificate, where “Oleg” stood in black and white in the “father” field. I found the number of a city lawyer.
My fingers no longer shook. My voice was steady and firm.
“Hello. My name is Anna. I want to file for divorce and for child support. My husband refuses to support his child.”
The court process wasn’t quick. Oleg didn’t appear at the first hearing, sending an expensive lawyer who announced that his client doubted his paternity.
A low blow, meant to make me back down. I only clenched my fists tighter.
“What are you doing, you fool?” Oleg hissed over the phone after the court ordered a DNA test. “Trying to clean me out?”
“You chose this path yourself, Oleg.”
The test, of course, confirmed paternity. The court set child support at a quarter of all his income. His lawyer tried to prove Oleg’s business wasn’t profitable, but my attorney dug up all his shady schemes.
The amount turned out to be substantial—so much so that his “best decision in life” quickly packed her things and vanished from the picture.
While the court cases dragged on, my life in the village began to take shape. Sergey started dropping by more often—patching the roof, playing with Misha. One day he brought Misha a little wooden horse he’d carved. Misha, who had just turned two, hugged the toy at once.
“Papa!” he said, showing the horse to Sergey.
Sergey froze and looked at me. I just smiled. Because my son had chosen his father himself.
We married a year later. Quietly, without a lavish wedding. Sergey adopted Misha and gave him his name. He turned out to be the kind of man people mean when they say, “with him, you’re as safe as behind a stone wall.”
A few more years passed. We built a new, spacious house. We had a daughter.
Oleg showed up on our doorstep one autumn evening. Older, hollow-cheeked, in a worn jacket.
“Anya, I… I came to see my son,” he mumbled.
Sergey opened the door.
“Misha!” he called into the house. “Someone’s here to see you.”
Five-year-old Misha ran out onto the porch. He looked curiously at the unfamiliar man.
“Hello.”
“Hey there, son…” Oleg reached a hand toward him. “I’m your…”
He didn’t finish. He looked at me, at Sergey, at the sturdy house behind us. And he understood he was too late.
“Sorry, I’ve got the wrong address,” he said quietly, and trudged away.
Ten years passed. We sat on the veranda of our house. Our eleven-year-old Katya laughed as she tried to steal the ball from fifteen-year-old Misha. Tall, broad-shouldered—he looked so much like Sergey, not by blood, but by something far more important.
“Mom, Dad, we’re off to the river!” Misha shouted.
I leaned into my husband. Oleg’s betrayal didn’t break me. It threw me out of a fake world into reality. I heard that Oleg went bankrupt. His chase after easy money and a flashy life ended in collapse. He never learned how to build anything real, anything lasting.
I looked at Sergey’s strong hands resting on my shoulders. I am a happy woman.
And my happiness began not in spite of that betrayal, but because of it. Sometimes, to find the right road, you first have to get lost and hit bottom—so you can push off and swim. Toward the light. Toward a real life.
