Mom, are you still waiting? Don’t wait.

Anya looked up. Something fragile, almost childish, flickered in her usually cold and wary eyes. She didn’t smile—she merely tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something inside her. Then she nodded. Once. Briefly. But there was more in that nod than in any promise.

After the girl left, already in the dark, Valentina Pavlovna stood on the porch for a long time. The night air was damp, saturated with the scent of rotting leaves and the distant smoke from someone’s stove. She wrapped herself in an old shawl and thought that happiness isn’t the absence of pain. It’s when pain finally finds its place: not in the chest, squeezing the heart, but somewhere to the side, like an old, healed wound that sometimes aches before the rain, reminding you that you’re alive.

Somewhere deep in the garden, a maple tree rustled. And it seemed to her that in that rustling she discerned a quiet, almost inaudible voice—not Sergei’s, not Anya’s, but her own, finally at peace.

She closed the door, but didn’t lock it. She left it slightly open. Just in case.