She had been battling breast cancer for seven years, but this time I heard something new in her voice - a quiet resignation to the situation. She asked me if I had any home-grown produce, because she wanted to eat unsprayed food. I was happy to bring her chard and radicchio from my garden.
When I entered her apartment, I was shocked. Anita was a shadow of the vibrant painter who once spent hours mixing colours to capture the perfect light on canvas. As her illness progressed, she was exhausted and thin. She told me that her daughter comes to see her after work, but she cannot take time off because these opportunities are now very limited in the workplace. I then suggested that she come to me for a while. She nodded tiredly.
When she arrived, I soon realised that her condition was not going to turn around. She could hardly eat; every mouthful made her tired. One morning she asked me to bring her a canvas and paints. She wanted to paint. She chose the smallest canvas and painted a bouquet of red roses.
»To remember,« she said.
»Don't talk like that,« I whispered, but I could see in her eyes that she was saying goodbye.
The next morning I had to call an ambulance. She went to hospital, and two days later I received a call that she had died. I was left with a bouquet of red roses - her last touch on the canvas.
Her daughter soon came to collect her mother's things. She asked me, a little reluctantly, if Anita had done anything to offend me or be rude to me. I replied, surprised, that she had not. But she asked me the same question every time we met. Finally I asked her what was bothering her. She then told me that her mother had €3000 in the flat from the sale of the car and that this money was nowhere to be found.
I was shaken.
»I didn't even know about the money,« I struggled to get out. »And I was never alone in her apartment.«
After the funeral, I told all her relatives to go to the police to clear the matter up. Those were difficult days - sick because of the injustice that stung me under the ribs.
Then, a few days later, the phone rang. It was Anita's daughter. »I found the money!« she almost shrieked with relief.
She explained that she had given some of Anita's things from the cellar to Bernarda Vodnik, a long-time friend of her mother's from Gorenjska, to sell at a flea market. Among those things was a money wrapper. And Bernarda - honest and quiet, as she always was - returned it as soon as she found it.
I thanked her in my mind. In that moment I realised that it was Bernarda's honesty that had made all the confusion calm again.
That night I finally slept without any weight on my chest. I looked at Anita's bouquet of red roses and thanked her for her last message and for the people she had by her side.
Honesty is not something that is confirmed by the police or by paper. Honesty is something that people like Bernarda have inside them - quiet and firm like the roots of a rose, which even after the flowers have faded, still nourish life for a new beginning.
Justina Strašek, 21 Oct 2025
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