I married an old man to save my sick father

The plan

The next day, when Julian left “on business” in the city, I started looking.

I may have been naive sometime, but I wasn’t stupid. I graduated in biology, worked for a year in a laboratory, I knew how documents are arranged, how they hide clues, what no one can completely erase.

In the suede headboard of the bed there was a slight, almost invisible slit. I put a small voice recorder there – a gift from a journalist friend who had been forgotten in the drawer until now. I set it to turn on in a sound.

I took the pill again tonight.
I disappeared again.

In the morning, when Julian went out for a meeting with his lawyers, I waited for the car to move away and pulled out the voice recorder. My hands were shaking so hard that I could barely press “play.”

I expected… I don’t know what. Heavy breathing, whispering, maybe something much uglier.

I heard… crying.

A male, choked, raw cry like I’ve never heard of him.

“Night one hundred and twenty-second…” his voice hoarsely whispered. “The synaptic transfer is sixty percent.” Her brain takes the data better than any simulation. Its neural networks are… fertile ground.

My heart is frozen.

“That night he smiled in a dream,” he continued. “He smiled just like Catherine as the lilacs bloomed in the western garden.” For a moment I forgot that I was looking at a stranger.

Catherine.

That portrait in the hallway, the smoky pictures in frames, the yellow newspaper clippings in his files. Katerina Zlatarova‐Tarneva – a famous neurologist who died in a “laboratory accident” twenty years ago.

I sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the voice recorder, and the sound kept hitting me.

“I know you hate me, Clara,” Julian heard himself again, but this time he spoke as if he were bent over me. “I know you see in me a monster, an old, rich freak who buys foreign daughters.” But I’m dying. My memory is falling apart. Alzheimer’s eats everything – her voice, her laughter, her formulas, even the way she tied my tie. I can’t let Catherine die a second time.

His voice broke.

“If I can’t keep it in my head, I’ll keep it in yours.

My breath stopped.

The pills.
Nights without sleep.
Foreign memories.

He didn’t put me to sleep.
He was recording me.

The Greatest Sin

The voice in the voice recorder became even more broken, almost inarticulate.

“I must confess my greatest sin, the one who bound us the three of us,” said Julian. “Your father… Ilian… did not fall ill by accident.”

My blood stuck in my ears so hard I could hardly hear.

“He was Catherine’s partner in the lab. Her most trusted man. He made that “mistake” in the contest. He locked the door outside to save himself and… the papers. He came out almost unharmed. She… no.

A torn sobbing.

“When you signed our deal, I already knew everything. I know how he hid the money offshore, how he bought silence, how he kept silent in front of you. I know that without him, Catherine would be alive.

My fingers got into the voice recorder.

Julian continued:

“I didn’t marry you to punish you, Clara. I married you because only your DNA is compatible with the prototype of the Catherine Neural Bridge. I give you everything – not only the memories of her, but also the truth about your father. And his sins. Let at least one person in this world know what actually happened…

The recording ended with a long, desperate cry.

I was sitting in the silence, and my head was roaring.

My father – the man for whom I married an unknown old man, the man who had sung lullabies to me when I was little – turned out to be a saboteur.

The life he had given me was bought with someone’s death.

And the pills…

They weren’t just obliterating me. They filled me with his version of the story. With his love, pain, anger. With every sound of that explosive day that I hadn’t experienced, I already remembered.