While adjusting his microphone, Viktor asked to be filmed from the left. His right eye still reddened when he spoke about the divorce, he said. Ema, an editor at the small television station, wrote his request beside the camera number. The studio smelled of burnt coffee.
The program was called Second Chance. Viktor described spending years protecting his marriage, forgiving absences and buying flowers for a wife who had fallen in love with someone else. The presenter listened with her hands folded. Viewers especially loved the story of the red umbrella under which he had waited for his wife outside the hospital.
Ema paused the recording. That umbrella was hers. Viktor had taken it when he left their apartment seven years earlier, and she had been the one waiting outside the hospital while his father underwent surgery. During the interview, he had never mentioned his first marriage. His more recent former wife, supposedly his only one, had just as much reason to be surprised.
By the following morning, Viktor had been invited to open a festival celebrating family life. The editor showed Ema the viewing figures and asked her to prepare a longer version. She did not want to turn the editing room into her own courtroom. But she could not cut his lie into something even more convincing.
She called the producer. She showed her a photograph from the hospital parking lot and old messages, but asked that they speak to everyone involved first. The second wife, Alma, agreed to bring her own records. They sat opposite each other, wary as women who had spent years being portrayed as rivals.
Alma recognized the candlelit dinner mentioned on the program. She had prepared it after Viktor admitted having another relationship. She did not want viewers to learn names or intimate details. She simply wanted her absence from his story to stop being sold as proof of his goodness.
When the producer invited him to clarify his account, Viktor offered to return his fee. "People have already heard an uplifting message," he said. For once without editing controls in front of her, Ema replied that an uplifting message could withstand accurate facts. The program published a correction, accompanied by his written acknowledgment that he had combined events and omitted his own actions.
The festival canceled his appearance. There was no applause, no final victory. After filming, Ema and Alma had coffee, talked about work and discovered that they both hated carnations. It was raining when they left. Ema opened an ordinary blue umbrella and offered Alma half of the dry space.