I felt my legs begin to shake.

— What are you talking about?!

Artyom looked as though he was about to collapse.

— Twenty years ago… before you… I was with another woman. She got pregnant. But I panicked. I ran away. I left her alone.

I stared at him, unable to believe what I was hearing.

— What are you saying?…

— A few months later, she died in a car accident… and the child was taken in by relatives. I never saw them again.

The wind whipped through the trees around us while rain poured relentlessly.

— What does that have to do with our daughter?! I shouted.

He whispered:

— Because Lily is the exact image of that child…

The world seemed to spin around me.

— What exactly are you trying to say?…

He ran his hands through his soaked hair, completely shattered.

— After the birth… when I saw her face… I thought I was losing my mind. The same eyes. The same expression. Even that tiny crease between her eyebrows…

He struggled to breathe.

— So I started searching. Investigating. Trying to find that family.

I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

— You suspected me?…

He closed his eyes.

— I didn’t want to… but I couldn’t understand what was happening. None of it made sense.

A sharp pain cut through me.

— While I was recovering from childbirth… while I thought I was dying… you were doubting me?

— No! That’s not it! — he shouted. — I was terrified! I thought the past had come back to destroy me!

I slowly stepped backward in the rain.

I no longer recognized the man I had loved for ten years.

— So all those nights… you came here?

He nodded.

— Yes…

— And what did you discover?

His face crumbled.

Then he said the words that froze my blood.

— That girl… she really was my daughter.

The silence became unbearable.

— What?…

— She lives here.

At that exact moment, the old door behind him slowly opened.

A young woman stepped into the doorway.

She looked to be in her twenties.

And when the light illuminated her face…

I screamed.

Because she looked terrifyingly similar to our baby.

The same eyes.

The same mouth.

The same tiny crease between the eyebrows.

It felt as though I was looking at Lily twenty years into the future.

The young woman watched us silently, her arms crossed against the cold.

Then she looked at Artyom with eyes full of pain.

— So… is this her? she asked quietly.

Artyom didn’t answer.

He looked crushed beneath the weight of his shame.

My heart pounded in my throat.

— Who is she? I whispered.

The young woman stepped toward me.

— My name is Sofia.

Her voice trembled.

— I’m his daughter.

The world stopped.

I looked at Artyom, unable to speak.

He was crying silently.

— My whole life, — Sofia continued, — I believed my father abandoned us because he didn’t want us. After my mother died, my grandmother raised me alone. Then she died too. I had nobody left.

She looked at Artyom with endless sadness.

— And now he comes here every night… because he’s trying to repair twenty lost years.

I felt anger rising inside me.

— Repair?! I repeated. By destroying our family?!

Artyom stepped toward me.

— I never wanted to hurt you…

— But you did!

My voice broke.

— You left me alone after the birth of our child! You looked at me as if I had betrayed your trust!

— I know… he whispered.

I could see in his eyes that he regretted everything.

But some wounds come too late to be healed.

Sofia lowered her eyes.

— I never wanted to destroy your life, — she said softly. — I only wanted to understand why my father disappeared.

The wind howled around us.

And suddenly, I realized something terrible.

We were all victims of the same past.

A mistake made twenty years earlier had exploded in the middle of our lives.

Artyom dropped to his knees in the mud.

— Forgive me… please… I’m begging you…

But in that freezing rain, at that moment, I no longer knew whether my heart would ever be capable of forgiving him.