Picking mushrooms to survive on my small Social Security check, I fell into an underground hideout… What I saw inside made my hair stand on end…

Please, leave. Don’t disturb him.» She wanted to close the door, but I managed to say.

«Please, I won’t harm him. I just need to show him something. It concerns not only him, but my family too.

It concerns the truth.» I saw in her eyes not only fear, but curiosity. And some long-standing pain.

She hesitated. This meeting was just the beginning of the most difficult conversation in my life. Lisa looked at me for several long moments.

And in her eyes, I saw a storm of emotions. Fear, curiosity, distrust, and some dull, long-standing sorrow. It seemed she had waited and feared this moment her whole life.

Finally, she sighed heavily, as if shedding an invisible burden from her shoulders, and stepped aside, silently inviting me in. — Come in, — she said almost in a whisper. — But please, be careful.

He’s very weak. I entered the small, modestly furnished house. Inside it was clean and smelled of medicine.

In an armchair by the window, with his back to me, sat a hunched old man, wrapped in a warm blanket. He was looking at the trees in the garden, and his thin, age-spotted hands lay limply on the armrests. It was him—Arthur Black.

Nothing remained of that confident handsome man from the photo. Time and, as I now understood, a guilty conscience had worn him down, leaving only a pale, feeble shadow. — Dad, someone’s here to see you! — Lisa said quietly.

The old man slowly turned his head with a creak. His faded eyes slid indifferently over me, but when I stepped closer, recognition flashed in them, then wild, animal fear. He clutched the armrests with his fingers, his body tensed.

— Who are you? Leave! I didn’t call anyone! — he rasped, his voice weak but full of panic. — I’m Mary Thompson, — I said as calmly as possible, though my heart was in my throat. — Wife of John Thompson, son of Robert.

The name Robert hit him like a blow. He recoiled as much as the chair allowed and shook his head. — I don’t know any Robert! — he shouted, rising to a squeak.

— Get out! Lisa, throw her out! Lisa ran to him, put a hand on his shoulder. — Dad, calm down, please! You can’t get excited! But he wasn’t listening. He was shaking.

I realized words were powerless here. I approached the table next to the chair and silently placed the old leather-bound notebook on it. Arthur froze, his gaze fixed on the diary.

He recognized it. I saw it by how his pupils dilated, how the last color drained from his face. He looked at the notebook like a ghost from the past come to take his soul.

— What? What is this? — he whispered, though he knew perfectly well. — This is the voice of the man you betrayed, — I replied, opening the diary. — The voice of your friend who trusted you like a brother.

Allow me to read you just a few lines. And I began to read. I didn’t read about the betrayal, not about the apartment.

I chose the part where Robert described with rapture the birth of his son John, where he wrote about holding him for the first time and vowing to do everything to make his boy happy. My voice was steady, without tremor. I read simple words full of fatherly love, and in the resounding silence of the room, they sounded like a sentence.

Arthur stopped shaking. He slumped in the chair, hunched even more, and large, elderly tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. He didn’t sob; he cried silently, soundlessly, and it was more terrifying than any scream.

Lisa looked from her father to me, her eyes full of incomprehension and horror. She saw something irreparable happening, that the world she lived in was crumbling. When I finished reading, Arthur raised his eyes to me, full of such torment and remorse that my own breath caught.

Forgive me. Forgive me, Robert. And after that, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud, shaking his whole body like a child.

Lisa rushed to him, hugged him, tried to calm him, but he just pushed her away and repeated the same thing. I’m guilty. Guilty of everything.

I stepped to the window, giving them time. I felt no gloating or triumph, only heavy, all-consuming bitterness. Bitterness for two broken lives, for forty years of lies, for a secret that poisoned everything around.

When Arthur calmed a bit, he began speaking without looking at me. He told everything from the beginning, about the envy that gnawed at him since childhood. Robert was luckier, more talented; everyone loved him…