The sheet of paper lay on the kitchen oilcloth—white and out of place among familiar mugs and scattered bread crumbs.

It smelled of ozone, cheap printer ink, and that sterile, clinical kind of fear that twists your stomach into a knot. I stared at the black lines of the final report, but the letters swam, dissolving into meaningless scribbles.

My eyesight seemed to shut down, as if my brain had thrown up a shield and refused to let reality in. Probability of maternity: 0%. The sentence burned into my vision and pulsed at my temples with a dull, aching throb.

“This can’t be real. It’s some horrible mistake,” my voice dropped into a hoarse rasp; I coughed, tasting metal. “They mixed up the tubes in the lab—there are so many people, it’s a conveyor belt.”

Oleg stood by the window with his back to me, and his hunched shoulders in that faded house T-shirt looked foreign now—like they belonged to someone else.

He didn’t turn around, as if something beyond the cloudy glass mattered more than our life cracking apart. The refrigerator hummed, its monotonous drone boring into my ears, tangled with the smell of frying onions wafting from the neighbors.

That smell suddenly turned unbearable, sickening. Nausea hit so hard I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from sliding off the chair. I slammed my palm onto the sticky oilcloth, making teaspoons clink against a glass.

“Oleg, turn around! It says I’m not related to my own child! Tomorrow we’re going to the regional center, to a private clinic, and we’ll redo this ridiculous test.”

My husband turned slowly, and I flinched: his face was gray, earthy, like all the blood had been drained out of him. I’d seen him like that only once—back in that cursed, icy November of 1995.

“There’s no need to go anywhere, Ira. No retest will change a thing,” he said, his voice muffled, as if it rose from a deep well. “The test isn’t wrong. The lab didn’t mess up.”

The air in the kitchen thickened, heavy as cooled jelly. It became hard to breathe. In my chest a cold lump grew, pushing out my heart, my lungs—my life.

“What are you even saying? Artyom is our son! I was in labor for twelve hours! I remember every contraction, the cracks in the ceiling of the delivery room, the midwife with the gold tooth!”

I shouted, as if sheer volume could bend reality, overwrite the numbers on that page. It felt like if I was convincing enough, the universe would take pity and cancel the nightmare.

Oleg came to the table, but he didn’t look at me—he stared at that damned sheet as if he could scorch it with his eyes. He dropped heavily onto the stool across from me, lacing his fingers so tight his knuckles blanched.

“Artyom isn’t your son, Ira. Biologically, he never was.”

The world swayed. The floor fell away and I gripped the table edge until my nails ached. I wanted to splash water in his face, hit him, snap him out of it—but my body locked up.

“Your son isn’t yours,” he repeated, lifting a heavy, inflamed gaze. “I know. I switched him at the maternity ward…”

The words landed like stones in muddy water, stirring up the silt of thirty years. I froze, forgetting how to inhale, one thought looping in my head: he’s gone mad—dementia—nonsense.

“Our baby boy died during delivery, Ira. He didn’t cry. The cord was wrapped too tightly. The doctors missed it. It was a dirty, chaotic time—no one cared.”

I remembered that November: slush and cold, no heat in the ward, gray sheets. I remembered slipping into anesthetic haze, trembling with fever—yet I’d always been certain I heard a cry.

“You lost a lot of blood. You were on the edge. The doctor came out into the hallway to me—shaking, white as a wall. He said, ‘The boy is dead, and the mother… if you tell her now, she won’t survive. She’ll jump straight out the window from the ward.’”

I looked at my husband and saw a complete stranger—an animal I’d shared bed and bread with for thirty years.

“And you decided to play God? You decided for me?”

“I asked if there was any other way. I was ready to do anything to keep you alive. There was an abandoned baby in the next room. A seventeen-year-old girl gave birth and ran off an hour later through the back entrance. Healthy boy—sturdy—howling like a foghorn.”

“You… bought a child?” The whisper scraped out; my throat burned.

“I gave the doctor everything we had—every ruble we’d saved for a Zhiguli, five years of saving. Then I borrowed from my brother, lied and said it was for medicine. That night they changed the tags, swapped the charts. When you woke up, they brought you Artyom—and you didn’t notice.”

I shot to my feet, knocking the stool over. It crashed to the floor, but I didn’t even flinch.

“You lied to me for thirty years! Every birthday, every time I searched his face for my features, every time I nursed his colds—you looked me in the eye and lied!”

“I was saving you!” Oleg shouted for the first time, the desperation of a cornered animal breaking through. “You had postpartum psychosis. The doctors said any shock would finish you! I chose you, Ira! And that boy would have rotted in an orphanage in the ’90s—turned criminal or junkie!”

“And ours? The real one? Where is my son?”

“He’s buried in the Northern Cemetery, in the section for the nameless. I put a little cross there. I go twice a year. I told you I was going fishing or to the garage.”

I vomited until there was nothing left. Bile burned my throat. I doubled over, gulping air. My entire life—every happy moment, first steps, graduation, our son’s wedding—had been built on a lie and a grave.

Oleg didn’t try to touch me. He knew that right now I could kill him. He sat hunched and stared at one spot on the floor, waiting for the verdict.

“Who is he? Whose child is he?” I asked, wiping my mouth on my robe sleeve.

“I don’t know. The documents had a dash—single mother.”

“Lie harder! You’re paranoid. You’d have dug up the earth to learn his genetics, to make sure he wasn’t born to drunks!”

Oleg lifted his eyes—full of pain and exhaustion.

“I did. Of course I did. I bribed a cleaner and got her address from the maternity ward archives.”

“Talk.”

“An ordinary last name—Sinitsyn. They live in the next district, in the Khrushchyovkas by the factory.”

“We’re going there,” I said, and felt something inside me freeze into hard determination. “Right now.”

“Why, Ira? It’s been thirty years. Why stir that swamp? Artyom is ours. He loves us. We’re his parents in every way that matters.”

“We’re thieves. You stole someone’s fate—and I was an accomplice without knowing it! I have to see them. I have to know who I took a son from!”

“You didn’t take him from anyone. They threw him away like trash!”

“Write the address, or I go to the police and confess everything!”

Oleg gave a crooked, ugly little smirk.

“Go on. Lock me up. I’m sixty—let me do time in my old age. But what will you tell Artyom? ‘Dad’s a hero and Mom’s hysterical’? Or the truth: ‘Dad’s a criminal, and you, son, are a foundling—an alcoholic’s kid’?”

He struck exactly where it hurt, precisely and coldly—he knew every soft spot I had

“I need to know we didn’t ruin his life,” I said, each word sharp as a stamp. “Start the car.”

We drove without speaking. Only the engine of Oleg’s old Ford filled the cabin.

Outside the windows, gray apartment blocks, garages, wastelands slid past—like the city had gotten stuck in that same 1995, bleak and hopeless.

Inside it smelled of gasoline and worn upholstery. That scent used to calm me; now it felt like a tomb. Oleg drove steadily, hands firm on the wheel—he’d always been like this, solving problems even when the solution was monstrous.

“That’s the building,” he nodded toward a shabby five-story block with peeling paint.

By the entrance, a group of people of indeterminate age lounged on a bench; cigarette butts and sunflower shells littered the ground. A depressed courtyard: rusty swings, laundry on lines like flags of surrender.

“Apartment twelve. Second floor,” my husband said dully.

We got out. My legs felt like cotton, as if I were walking to an execution. I felt like a thief returning to the crime scene to stare at the ashes.

We climbed to the second floor, stepping over trash on the stairs. The door was padded with old cracked vinyl, stuffing poking out; the doorbell button was melted at the edges.

Behind the door came drunken voices and the blare of a television. I lifted my hand to knock, but fear locked my body: what if monsters lived there? Or miserable people who had mourned a stolen baby their whole lives?

The door swung open suddenly, as if someone had been waiting right behind it. A woman in her fifties stood there—heavyset, wearing a washed-out robe.

Her face was puffy, webbed with burst capillaries, but her eyes… her eyes were Artyom’s. Brown, deep, with the slight squint I loved on my son.

Heat hit me like a wave; my heart skipped.

“Who do you want?” she snapped, breathing out the stink of alcohol.

Behind her, a thin, unshaven man in a stained undershirt hovered in the dark hallway.

“We—we’re from social services. A census,” Oleg blurted, stepping in front of me.

The woman spat onto the floor—right at our feet.

“What census, to hell with you? Get out of here. People like you come around looking for what to steal.”

“Zina, who is it?” the man rasped from deeper inside.

“Some witnesses or something!” she barked over her shoulder.

“We knocked on the wrong door. Sorry,” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes from her face.

In her features I could see my son—but twisted, coarsened by years of drinking, bitterness, and cheap food. It was a grotesque mirror of Artyom: the frightening future he might have had, if not for Oleg.

“What’re you staring at?” she snarled when she noticed. “I said get lost, before I let the dogs out!”

She slammed the door in my face. The lock clicked, cutting us off from that other reality. We stood on the filthy landing that smelled of cat urine and sour cabbage.

“Seen enough?” Oleg asked harshly.

“She… she looks like him,” I managed.

“Only on the outside, Ira. They don’t have a soul left. They drank it away years ago.”

“Do they have other children?”

“No. I checked the records every year. She never gave birth again. They both drank themselves to the end.”

We went back down. I sat in the car and closed my eyes, trying to erase Zina’s face. In my mind was Artyom—my Artyom—in a white lab coat, defending his dissertation: smart, kind, human.

“If you hadn’t taken him…” I began, my voice trembling.

“He’d be there,” Oleg said, jerking his chin toward those cloudy second-floor windows. “Or in an orphanage. A boarding school for troubled kids. Best case: factory and vodka. Worst case: prison and a grave at twenty.”

“Genes aren’t a sentence, Ira. Upbringing and love—that’s what makes a person a person.”

“You stole his fate,” I said, but the fury had drained out. Only endless exhaustion remained.

“I gave him a different one. I gave him a chance to become who he is.”

A young man about Artyom’s age shuffled past the car in a tracksuit, a can of beer in hand, eyes empty and dead. I pictured my son in his place, and something inside me clenched with animal terror.

The fear I’d carried for Artyom all these years changed shape. Before, I’d feared illness or an accident. Now I feared only the truth—the truth that could destroy him.

“They’re not looking for him,” I said flatly.

“They don’t care. They forgot him the day after discharge. They drank the money I gave them and moved on.”

“And if Artyom finds out? DNA tests are everywhere now—people hunt for their roots.”

Oleg tightened his grip on the wheel, staring straight ahead.

“Then we have to make sure he never wants to look. That he has enough of us.”

“How?”

“Just love him. Like before. Even more.”

I pulled the crumpled lab report from my bag—the same page that had felt like a death sentence that morning. I looked at the numbers, the names, the stamp.

Then I flicked my lighter. The tiny flame danced in the draft from the cracked window.

Oleg watched in silence, not stopping me. I brought the fire to the corner of the page. The paper caught quickly, eagerly.

The flame crept toward the names, devouring the truth, turning it into black, weightless ash. I opened the window wider and tossed the burning wad onto the asphalt. The wind grabbed it at once and scattered it.

“Let’s go home,” I said, watching the last sparks die. “Artyom said he’d drop by tonight. I need to make dinner. I’ll fry potatoes with mushrooms, the way he likes.”

Oleg looked at me. For the first time all day, relief flashed through his eyes—along with something else: deep, aching gratitude.

“Chanterelles?” he asked softly.

“Honey mushrooms. They smell better.”

We drove out of the courtyard, leaving the five-story block, Zina, and the life my son could have had—but, thank God, didn’t. I no longer felt remorse.

Only a dull pain under my ribs for the baby boy beneath an unnamed cross in the Northern Cemetery. And a wild, instinctive fear of losing the one who was alive and warm.

“Oleg,” I said when we merged onto the highway.

“Yes?”

“Show me our baby’s grave next weekend.”

He nodded without taking his eyes off the wet asphalt.

“I will. It’s time, Ira.”

Epilogue

That evening Artyom came over in a light-colored coat, smelling of expensive cologne, snow, and success. He brought me flowers, and for his father some fancy set of tools.

They sat in the kitchen drinking tea, talking politics, laughing, arguing. I stood at the stove, stirring the sizzling potatoes, and watched them from the side.

They were astonishingly alike—in their gestures, in the way they furrowed their brows, in their booming laughter. Blood is just liquid, a set of red and white cells.

Family is what you build over years: sleepless nights, checking homework, shared vacations, fights and reconciliations. It’s memories you own together, jokes only the two of you understand.

“Mom, why are you frozen like that?” Artyom asked, coming over and putting an arm around my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

I breathed in the scent of his hair—the scent of my son, dearer to me than anyone in the world.

“It’s nothing, sweetheart. I just drifted off. I’m a little tired from work.”

Oleg met my eyes over his cup. In his gaze was a wordless plea—and a promise. We would keep this secret. We would carry it to the grave, pour cement over it in the foundation of our family.

Because sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. Sometimes the truth kills—smashes, ruins, tramples. And a lie told to save someone is, at times, the only thing keeping the world from tipping into chaos.

“You’re the dearest thing in the world to me,” I whispered, pressing closer to Artyom’s shoulder.

“Mom, come on,” he smiled, embarrassed. “Not again—getting sentimental in your old age?”

But I could feel he liked it.

I stroked his cheek. His skin was warm—alive, real. No lab paper, no test, no analysis could change that.

I served him a heaping plate of potatoes and mushrooms. The smell filled the kitchen, wrapping the room in comfort and safety.

“Eat before it gets cold. You must be starving after work.”

Outside, sleet began to fall, washing the grime from the roads, thinning the city’s gray. But some stains in a life can’t be washed away—you can only accept them, endure them, and keep living.

For love. For family. For a son who will never know that his happy life was purchased at the price of a crime—and at the price of my conscience.