I was running late. Late again for a meeting with the restaurant manager where, in a month, my wedding was supposed to take place. A banquet for a hundred people—the menu had to be approved today, a tasting, a discussion of floral arrangements and the seating plan—everything depended on my visit. And I was stuck in traffic, right in the thick of the evening rush hour, so helpless I was ready to cry as I stared at the endless ribbon of red taillights ahead. Every minute of delay pulsed in my temples with a nagging throb.
Sofiya Dmitrievna Gordeeva, thirty-seven, owner of a chain of five premium beauty salons called “Charm.” Businesslike, successful, an iron lady who always knew what she wanted—from her business, from her employees, from life. Except for one thing—her personal life. For ten years I had given myself completely to building a beauty empire, and there was no time left for men, for genuine feelings, for a family. My soul felt empty—until He appeared in it. Artyom. He was perfect—courteous, attentive, with impeccable taste and an equally impeccable résumé. It seemed fate had finally given me a chance at personal happiness.
I beat the damned traffic by sharply turning onto a side route, and fifteen minutes later I was jumping out of the car at the entrance to the luxurious Montblanc restaurant. My heart was pounding wildly; a list of questions for the manager spun in my head. And I almost ran straight into her.
A girl. About ten years old, barefoot, in a tattered dress worn through in places, with a huge, unwieldy armful of nearly wilted roses in her thin arms. She smelled of dust and displacement.
“Please buy some flowers,” her little voice was quiet but persistent. She held out one rose to me, its bud already drooping and shedding petals.
“No, sweetheart, not now,” I tried to get past her politely but firmly, hurrying toward the coveted door.
But she was quicker; once again she blocked my path, and the gaze of her big, far-too-adult eyes was full of desperate pleading.
“Please. I really, really need to. It’s the last bundle,” she pressed the flowers to her chest, and it seemed to me she was on the verge of tears.
“Oh God, how much more of this! I have no time for this at all!” flashed through my head.
“Little girl, you have no idea—I have absolutely no time. And besides, flowers are supposed to be given to me by men, not bought by me from street children,” I said, sounding harsher than I meant to.
I had almost dashed into the revolving doors when her voice, suddenly stronger and clear, caught up with me and stabbed into my back like an icy needle:
“Don’t marry him.”
I froze as if I’d been shocked. Slowly I turned around. My ears were ringing.
“What… what did you say?”
The girl stared at me without blinking. Her serious, piercingly clear eyes looked straight through me.
“Artyom. Don’t marry him. He’s deceiving you.”
Her words sent nasty, cold goosebumps racing over my skin. The air grew thick and viscous.
“How would you know?… How do you know my fiancé’s name?” My voice quivered.
“I saw it myself. He’s with another woman. They’re spending money together. Your money. She has the same car as you. White. And the same dent on the left fender.”
My world narrowed to a point. The dent. Yes, I’d scraped the fender last month, clipping a post in the underground garage. We hadn’t told anyone, and we hadn’t repaired it yet. How could she know?
“Were you… following me?” I breathed.
“Him,” she corrected me without a hint of embarrassment. “I was following him. He killed my mom. Not directly with his hands, but… because of him, she died. Her heart broke from grief.”
Something inside me snapped. Slowly, so I wouldn’t fall, I crouched down to her level. Now I could see every freckle on her pale little face, the traces of dirt on her cheeks, her thin legs scratched by branches.
“Explain it to me. Calmly, from the beginning. Who is your mother?” I asked, trying to sound gentle.
“Was,” the girl corrected me, and an abyssal, unchildlike sorrow sounded in her voice. “Her name was Irina. She had a flower shop. Huge, beautiful, smelled like paradise. And then he came. He said his name was Maksim. He brought a huge bouquet, started coming every day, said pretty words you could drown in. Mom fell in love like a girl.”
“Maksim?” But my fiancé’s name is Artyom. For a second, icy confusion softened the blow.
“Sweetheart, maybe you’re mistaken? It’s a different man?”
“No,” she shook her head, and her braids swayed. “The same one. He has a scar on his right arm, right here.” With a thin finger she traced a line along her wrist. “And he always wears a gray suit. Very expensive. With a tie, silk, the color of ripe cherries. You gave it to him for his birthday; he bragged about it to Mom on the phone. She cried afterward.”
My mouth went dry. The tie. Yes, I had brought him that tie from Milan a month ago. He said it was his good-luck charm. I couldn’t breathe, feeling the ground slipping away.
“Go on, please.”
“Mom invested all her money in his ‘business.’ He said he was opening a chain of restaurants, just like this one,” the girl nodded at the Montblanc building. “She sold the shop, her flowers, her dream, and gave him everything. Three million rubles. He promised to marry her, to go to the seaside with her. And then he just disappeared. Mom looked for him, sent messages, called. The number didn’t answer. She cried every day, stopped eating, stopped sleeping, just sat at the window staring out. And two months later, she was gone. The doctors said—her heart stopped. From stress.”
Three million. I had put money into his “business,” too. Four million. To open the restaurant. The exact sum he was “just looking for.”
“How do you know it’s the same man?” I whispered, but I already feared the answer.
Never taking her eyes off me, the girl reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a creased, worn photograph. In the picture, a man and a woman were hugging happily in a park. I peered at it, and my heart plunged into an abyss. Artyom. It was unmistakably him. Only with shorter hair and without the neat beard he’d grown at my request.
“Where did you get this?” My voice betrayed me.
“Mom kept it. It’s the only photo of them. I found him two weeks after her funeral. I saw him in the street. I wanted to go up and ask why he did that, but I was scared. Then I started following him. I saw how he drove up to your house. How you came out to meet him and kissed him. And I thought—I have to warn her. So the same thing won’t happen to you as it did to my mom. So you won’t die.”
I looked at this fragile, barefoot girl with dirty feet, holding in her hands the proof of my foolish happiness, and every fiber of my being screamed that she was telling the truth. Pure, bitter, merciless truth.
“What’s your name?” I asked, feeling tears rise in my throat.
“Katya.”
“Katya, are you hungry?”
She only nodded, and in that simple motion was all the pain of her solitary existence.
“Come with me. First you’ll eat, and then… then you’ll tell me everything from the very beginning. Everything you remember.”
The restaurant manager, a refined gentleman in a flawless suit, greeted me with a radiant smile, but when he saw my companion his face lengthened in astonishment.
“Sofiya Dmitrievna, you… with a child?” his voice mixed questions with a hint of disapproval.
“Yes. Please set a table for us. In the quietest corner. And menus,” I cut him off, leaving no room for discussion.
I ordered the entire dessert list and a main course for Katya—cream soup and the most tender filet mignon with vegetables. She ate greedily, yet with astonishing, innate neatness, clearly trying to behave “properly,” as her mother had taught her. She chewed every bite slowly, reverently, and I felt tears of shame for my earlier sharpness.
“Where are you living now, Katyusha?” I asked gently when she paused.
“At a shelter. ‘Ray of Light.’ Temporarily. Until child services finds a foster family or an orphanage with a vacancy.”
A shelter. Dear God, she was only ten years old, and she was alone in this cruel world. Without a mother, without a home, bearing a burden too heavy even for an adult.
“Tell me about your mother. About this… Maksim. Everything you remember.”
Katya set down her spoon, folded her hands on her knees, and began her slow, terrible story. Calmly, without a single tear, as if reading a report aloud. And that calm was scarier than any hysteria. It was the calm of someone who had already cried out every tear.
Irina was a successful, in-demand florist. Her flower boutique with delivery was known all over town; she had large corporate clients. Single, beautiful, strong, she raised her daughter alone and, apparently, desperately dreamed of a man’s shoulder to lean on. And she met the man of her dreams. Polite, attentive, with grand plans for the future. He said he dreamed of creating a chain of elite restaurants but lacked the starting capital. He promised to pay back with interest, to build a future together, to marry her.
The exact same story. Almost word for word. Only I didn’t have one flower shop—I had five beauty salons. My “real estate” was more substantial.
“And after he disappeared, didn’t your mother go to the police?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“She did. They told her it wasn’t fraud, just a failed investment. No elements of a crime. No proof of deception. Mom wrote to him in messengers, begged, asked him to return at least part—just to survive. He read the messages, the checkmarks were blue, but he never answered. She saw it and went out of her mind.”
What a bastard. What a cruel, calculating monster. I clenched my napkin until my knuckles turned white.
“Katya, you said you saw him spending money with another woman?”
“Yes. Yesterday. At the Galleria mall. He was buying her a mink coat. She laughed, loud, and kept kissing him. And he paid with a gold card. I got closer, pretended to look at handbags, and I heard the salesperson say, ‘Thank you, Sofiya Dmitrievna, enjoy your purchase.’”
With my card. He was paying with my additional card, the one I’d given him a month earlier “for small expenses, darling, to make things convenient for you.” I had trusted him. Blindly and recklessly.
“Katya, would you be able to point that woman out to me if you saw her again?” My voice was quiet and tense.
The girl nodded confidently. “She’s tall, like you, and she has the same long blond hair. And she smells like your perfume. Sweet.”
After lunch I drove Katya back to the shelter—a dreary brick building on the outskirts—and then went home. To our… no, to my apartment. The one I had bought with my own money before I ever met him.
He was home. Sitting on my couch, in my slippers, watching a movie on my laptop. He smiled at me with his dazzling Hollywood smile when I walked in.
“Hey there, my sunshine. Well, did you approve the menu? Did it all go well?” He got up and hugged me; his breath smelled of mint and coffee.
I froze in his arms for a second, then mechanically hugged him back, pressing my face to his chest. I inhaled his familiar, expensive scent that had once driven me mad and now made me feel sick.
“Yes, fine,” I managed. “Everything’s approved. In a month—our wedding.”
“I can’t wait for that day,” he whispered into my hair, his voice laced with such sweet—and such lying—notes.
I pretended, too. I played the role of the loving, happy bride. And that night, when his breathing evened out and he sank into sleep, I, like a thief, took his laptop. I knew the password—“777777,” he himself had said we should have no secrets from each other. What a bitter, cynical joke.
I opened his email. And saw hell. Correspondence neatly sorted into folders with five women. To each he wrote the same words he wrote to me: “you’re my only one,” “sunshine,” “I dream of our future.” From each he asked for money. From one—“investments in a startup,” from another—“temporary business difficulties,” from a third—“partners screwed me over; I need urgent help.” Photos. Him with different women, in different cities, in different settings. Hugging, kissing, gazing into the camera with loving eyes. In all the photos—happy, sincere, my Artyom.
And then I found the documents. A file called “Calculations.” A tidy table: name, amount, status. From Sofiya—4,000,000. From Svetlana—2,000,000. From Yelena—1,500,000. From Irina—3,000,000. From Olga—800,000. Total—eleven million three hundred thousand rubles. A plan. He had a detailed, well-worked business plan from the start. A business built on trusting women’s hearts.
I closed the laptop and lay down next to him, staring at the ceiling. Sleep, my dear liar. Sleep soundly. This is your last peaceful night in this bed.
In the morning I played my role flawlessly. Breakfast, a goodbye kiss, a tender smile in response to his “I love you.” And when the door closed behind him, I began to act with cold, measured fury.
First—a private investigator. Through reliable partners, I found an old, battle-hardened specialist and handed him all the information. He tracked down the women from the emails, found their addresses, met with them under a plausible pretext. All of them, shocked and humiliated, told the same story. Flowers, dinners, promises of paradise, requests for help—and the painful, deafening disappearance.
“Sofiya Dmitrievna,” the detective concluded, “this is a classic. A top-tier professional gigolo-con artist. He targets single, successful, emotionally starved women, wins them over with a tried-and-true script, extracts large sums, and vanishes without a trace.”
“But with me he didn’t vanish,” I noted. “He was going to marry me.”
“Because you’re his grand prize,” the detective cut in. “Five salons, real estate. That’s a juicy piece. He was surely planning that after the wedding, under the pretext of joint business, he’d make you sell assets or take a large loan secured by your property. And then… disappear with your millions.”
Of course. The wedding. After marriage, he would gain legal rights to half of what was acquired… during the marriage. And my salons would keep generating income.
“What do you advise?” I asked, feeling icy resolve boiling up inside me.
“The police. Immediately. Gather all the victims, file a collective, detailed statement. The volume of evidence is already colossal.”
That’s what I did. I tracked down three women who were ready to fight and invited them for a candid conversation. We sat in a cozy private room at my salon, four women who didn’t know one another, united by one man. It was awkward, bitter, and unbearably shameful.
“I thought he was a gift from fate,” Svetlana admitted quietly, an elegant woman of about forty with intelligent, weary eyes. “After my divorce I didn’t trust anyone, and he… he managed to melt the ice. Turns out he just cleared out all the valuables from there.”
“He’s a professional,” said Yelena with a wry smile, a young, attractive owner of a small modeling agency. “He knows psychology. Knows what to say, when to touch, how to look. I work with people myself, but his act was flawless.”
We filed statements. Detailed ones, with attached screenshots of correspondence, account statements, and witness testimony. And we handed everything to the police, directly to a major crimes investigator.
“The case is promising,” the investigator said, “but to guarantee a conviction, we need to catch him red-handed. We need to get him at the moment he receives money or while discussing a ‘deal’ with a new victim.”
“I’ll give you that moment,” I promised coldly. “Myself.”
The plan was brutally simple. I kept living with Artyom as if nothing had happened. I kissed him, laughed at his jokes, discussed wedding and honeymoon plans. I played the lovestruck, blind fool—and I played brilliantly. And two weeks later, over dinner, with an innocent air I suggested:
“Artyom, darling, let’s have a little celebration. Mark the anniversary of our meeting. At the very restaurant where we first met, remember?”
His eyes sparkled with a genuine, greedy gleam. “Of course, sunshine! Brilliant idea! We’ll book the best table, champagne, oysters… everything top-notch!”
Yes—the best table. And the police at the next table, with audio recording equipment.
That evening I put on my most expensive and elegant black dress, and the jewelry that once belonged to my grandmother. I wanted to look dignified and unbeatable at the moment when his castle of lies finally collapsed.
We were greeted at the restaurant with royal honors. A table on a dais by a huge panoramic window, candles, a live violin. Artyom was more charming than ever. He showered me with compliments, gently held my hand, looked at me with such a loving gaze that, had I not known the truth, he could have fooled me again.
“You know, I’m probably the happiest person alive,” he said, playing with my fingers. “To meet a woman like you… it’s the jackpot.”
“Really?” I smiled sweetly, raising my glass. “What about Svetlana? Yelena? Irina? Or do you prefer it when you’re called Maksim?”
He froze. The smile slid off his face like a mask. His eyes, full of tenderness a second ago, turned cold and sharp like shards of ice.
“What… what are you talking about, Sofiya?” He tried to feign puzzlement, but panic already lurked at the corners of his mouth.
“I’m saying the game is over, Artyom. Or whatever your name really is. You probably have several passports, the way you have several lives.”
He shoved his chair back to stand up, but at that moment two sturdy men in dark suits approached our table noiselessly.
“Artyom Viktorovich Medvedev? You are under arrest on suspicion of large-scale fraud. Please come with us.”
Medvedev. That was his real last name. Nothing fancy—just Medvedev. I watched as the steel bracelets clicked onto his wrists—the very ones with the scar. He didn’t resist; he only shot me one single look, so full of feral, mute hatred that the goosebumps ran over my back again.
“You… bitch,” he hissed, and it sounded so petty, so pathetic compared to what he had done.
“No,” I calmly sipped my champagne, feeling a strange, bitter liberation. “I’m just a woman saved by a barefoot girl with wilted roses. The one whose mother you drove to the grave.”
When they took him away, I stayed at the table. I finished my steak and my champagne. It was my personal celebration. A celebration of salvation.
The waiter, pale and flustered, approached timidly: “Sofiya Dmitrievna, can I get you anything? Some water?…”
“No, thank you. Everything is perfect. Please bring dessert. Napoleon cake. And another glass of champagne. I’m celebrating.”
The investigation and trial lasted nearly six months. Artyom denied, dodged, tried to present everything as business failures and mutual grievances. But there was too much evidence—correspondence, testimony from the five defrauded women, photos, financial statements. He was sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime colony. The court ordered that all the stolen money be recovered from him in favor of the victims. I received a little over two million back. The rest he managed to burn through on a luxurious lifestyle, gifts for other women, and his impeccable “packaging.”
An expensive lesson. Two million rubles for the knowledge that trust must be earned, not handed out to the first pretty smile that comes along. But the most important, the brightest thing happened after the judge read the verdict.
I went to the “Ray of Light” shelter for Katya. She was sitting on the same steps, in the same spot, barefoot despite the chilly autumn weather, staring off into the distance.
“Hi, heroine,” I said softly, sitting down beside her.
“Hi. Did they… take him away for a long time?” she asked without looking at me.
“For a long time. Seven years.”
She simply nodded, and in that gesture was all the bitterness of her loss. “Good. Now Mom can sleep peacefully. Her soul has been avenged.”
She was ten years old, and she spoke like a gray-haired sage who had come to know the world’s injustice.
“Katya, I have a very serious proposal for you. How would you feel about moving in with me? For good.”
She turned her little face to me slowly, and her huge eyes widened in amazement and disbelief.
“Move… in? With you? But… how?”
“As my daughter. I want to adopt you. If you agree, of course.”
She was silent so long I began to be afraid. Then her lips trembled, and she asked quietly, almost inaudibly:
“And will you… will you be like a mom to me?”
“I’ll try with all my heart. I know I’ll never replace your real mother, but… I will love you, take care of you, protect you. I’ll give you a home. A real home.”
“B-but why?” she whispered, tears in her eyes. “Why do you want to do that?”
A good, honest question. Why? Because I felt guilty? Because I owed her?
“Because you saved me, Katyusha. You, a little barefoot girl, saw the truth that I, a grown, smart woman, refused to see. You gave me a second chance. And because you’re alone, and I… I was very lonely too, until I met you. Maybe we can give each other the family we both dream about?”
Katya cried. For the first time in all the time I’d known her, she cried for real, like a child. Loudly, with sobs, burying her wet face in my blouse. Her tears flowed like a river, washing away layers of pain and loneliness from her soul.
“I want to,” she sobbed. “I really want to have a mom again.”
I hugged her—this little, fragile savior—and held her close. My girl. My guardian angel.
The adoption took almost half a year. Mountains of paperwork, endless child services checks, interviews with psychologists. But I pushed through it all. Running a complex business had taught me to break through any bureaucratic wall. And then Katya moved in with me permanently. She got her own sunlit room, new clothes, books, toys. And—a whole closet full of shoes of every kind. So she would never, under any circumstances, have to go barefoot again.
During the first months she behaved warily, like a feral kitten afraid it had been taken in only temporarily. She was scared of doing something wrong, saying the wrong thing. Afraid I would change my mind and send her back. But I didn’t change my mind. I drove her to the best school in the city, sat up with her at night over homework, took her to the movies, to the theater, to children’s exhibitions. I bought her everything she wanted but tried not to spoil her—teaching her the value of money and things.
“Mama Sofa,” she called to me one evening about three months after she moved in.
I froze. “Mama.” The word sounded louder than any orchestra to me.
“Yes, my joy?”
“Can I… can I just call you Mom? Without the name?” She looked at me with such hope that my heart was ready to burst with feeling. Tears sprang to my eyes on their own, warm and salty. I couldn’t speak; I just nodded, hugged her, and held her tight.
“Of course you can. That would be my greatest happiness.”
Life gradually settled down. My business flourished even more—now that my head was free of toxic “love,” I could pour all my energy into it. Katya excelled in school, turned out to be precociously bright, made friends in her new class, and at my gentle urging enrolled in an art school where her true talent emerged.
And I… I stopped feverishly searching for a partner. I found a family by a different, more reliable path. Not through marriage, but through motherhood.
One evening, as Katya and I were wrapped in one big blanket watching a family movie, she asked, her head nestled on my shoulder:
“Mom, don’t you want to get married at all? To have true love?”
“I don’t know, honey. Maybe someday, if I meet a truly good, honest man. But right now… Right now I’m so happy. I have you. You’re my true love.”
“And I’m happy with you, too. You know, back at the restaurant I was so scared to come up to you. I thought you wouldn’t believe me, that you’d get angry and chase me away like everyone else.”
“Why did you decide to anyway?” I asked, stroking her hair.
“Because I saw how my mom suffered. How she cried every day, how she faded before my eyes, how she stopped seeing the sun. I couldn’t let another mom die because of him. Another girl be left alone.”
Only ten years old. Only ten—and she took on the heavy mission of saving strangers from her mother’s fate.
“You’re not a girl; you’re a heroine, Katyusha. A real, true heroine.”
“I’m not a heroine,” she shook her head. “I just didn’t want someone else’s heart to break.”
I hugged her even tighter, feeling something tender and immense overflow inside me.
“I’m not going anywhere, my love. I promise. We’ll always be together.”
Svetlana, Yelena, and Olga called me sometimes. They thanked me for finding the strength to organize it all, for helping to stop him and restore at least some justice. Not everyone got all their money back, but at least something. And most importantly—he’d been neutralized.
And then, a year later, something I hadn’t expected happened. Katya came home from school inspired and asked with a serious face:
“Mom, could I have a brother? Or a sister?”
I choked on the tea I was drinking. “What? What do you mean?”
“Well, Masha in my class has a little sister, and Polina has a preschool-age brother. And I’m alone. Sometimes it’s boring to be the only one,” she said like a grown-up.
A brother or sister. She wasn’t asking for a toy; she wanted another child in the family.
“Katya, you understand I’m alone. To have a baby you need a dad, and we…”
“Not to have—” she interrupted, looking at me with her wise, knowing eyes. “To take from the shelter. Like me. There are many children at ‘Ray of Light,’ little ones. They need a mom, too. And a sister.”
I thought about it. And why not? I had a large apartment, a stable more-than-comfortable income, and experience with adoption already. And the love in my heart was enough for another child.
“You know, that’s an excellent idea. Let’s go to ‘Ray of Light’ next week. Just to look.”
We went “just to look.” And a month later my Katya had a little brother. Seryozha, a quiet, timid six-year-old boy with huge, saucer-brown eyes. He’d been found at a train station; his parents had been deprived of their rights for leading an antisocial lifestyle. Katya immediately took him under her unspoken but reliable wing. She taught him to use a fork, read him stories at bedtime, protected him in the yard. Either her big-sister instinct kicked in, or her kind, responsive heart simply grew larger to hold one more lonely little human.
And so we became a real family. Not a traditional one—no father—but a real one all the same. Mama Sofa and two wonderful children.
I kept developing my salons, but I hired a first-rate manager and started spending much more time at home. Business is important, but children’s laughter and trusting hugs turned out to be a hundred times more important.
One day a new client signed up at my flagship salon. An elegant, well-groomed woman of about thirty-five with an intelligent but anxious look.
“Sofiya Dmitrievna? My name is Anna. I… I heard your story. From mutual acquaintances. I’m in a similar situation now. I’m seeing a man; he… he seems perfect. But he’s already asking to borrow money, says he’s having temporary problems. And I checked—he has someone else. You’ve been through this. Tell me what I should do? I don’t trust myself anymore.”
And again. The same painfully familiar scheme. They’ll never run out—these hunters of other people’s hearts and wallets.
“Have a seat, Anya,” I said gently. “Tell me everything. No rush.”
I listened to her story. The familiar notes—dazzling charm, grand promises, requests for “temporary” help.
“Anna, listen carefully,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes. “Don’t give him a single kopeck. Verify every word he says. If necessary, hire a private investigator—it’s worth it. And most importantly—trust your intuition. If your soul, your gut, is screaming that something’s wrong, then it is. Don’t drown out that voice.”
She left enlightened and resolute. And I sat in my office thinking. How many such women are there? How many smart, beautiful, successful Annas get caught in the net of these professional actors?
That’s when I created a small but effective charity foundation. I called it “Your Second Chance.” We provided women who had fallen into the clutches of romantic scammers with free legal assistance, psychological support, and financial-safety counseling. Katya, when she found out, was terribly proud of me.
“Mom, you’re like a superhero in the comics. You save people.”
“No, my joy,” I smiled at her. “The real superhero is you. You were the first to save me. I’m just passing the baton.”
And that was the pure, simple truth. A barefoot girl with an armful of wilted roses had spotted the fake where I, a grown woman, saw only a fairy tale. She saved me from the abyss into which the same man had once pushed someone else.
Artyom served four years and was released on parole. I found out by chance from a short item in the crime column.
“Mom, aren’t you scared?” Katya asked when she saw me pondering the newspaper.
“No,” I answered honestly. “He got what he deserved. And we got our life, our family. To us he’s just a ghost from the past.”
And that was the truth. I wasn’t afraid. I had my children, my work, my mission. And him? A criminal record, a reputation ruined forever, and emptiness in his soul.
Seryozha grew up, started school, and became a more confident, sociable boy. Katya graduated with honors from art school and entered a prestigious art college—her gift for painting turned out to be real, a God-given talent. And I kept working, raising my children, and, through my foundation, helping more and more women who, like I once had, stood at the edge of an emotional and financial precipice.
One day, on the anniversary of my and Katya’s meeting at the Montblanc restaurant, I stopped by the best flower shop in the city and bought a huge, luxurious bouquet of scarlet roses. I brought them home and set them in a tall crystal vase in the living room.
“Mom, what are the flowers for?” Katya asked in surprise when she came back from classes. “Is it your birthday?”
“No,” I smiled. “Just because I want to. Remember I told you back then, at the restaurant, that flowers should be given by men? Well, I was foolish and naïve then. If I want flowers, I’ll buy them myself. Or my daughter will give them to me. I won’t wait anymore for someone else to make me happy. Happiness—it’s right here, inside. We make it ourselves.”
Katya came over and hugged me, smelling of paint and youth.
“You’re the happiest already. Without those roses and without any men.”
“You helped me find my happiness,” I kissed the crown of her head, overflowing with gratitude. “Thank you for that. Thank you for finding the courage to approach that angry, hurried lady back then. Thank you for saving me.”
“And thank you,” she smiled back, trust and love shining in her eyes. “Thank you for believing a barefoot girl with battered roses.”
Yes. I believed her. And that choice, made in haste and irritation, turned out to be the most important and best decision of my entire life. It led me to a home filled with laughter, to a heart filled with love, and to the truth revealed to me by a barefoot guardian angel: real happiness is always found where you are loved and awaited.
