The Power of Love: Based on true events

By Mr Igor Dzasokhov

Gary would give anything for one more ordinary day with Natalie. He wouldn't take her anywhere special. He'd let her finish a story he's heard before, just for the pleasure of hearing her tell it. And if she asked what he was smiling at, this time he'd tell her.

He is fifty when he meets her in Pittsburgh. Natalie is twenty-six. Put it that way and people think they know the story before either of them has had a chance to tell it. Even Gary can do the arithmetic. What he can't account for is how quickly he starts saving things up to tell her. A thought he'd usually keep to himself. Something funny that happened at work. By the time he sees her again, he's forgotten half of it. It hardly matters. What he's been looking forward to all day is the moment she turns to him and listens.

They have three years together. Long enough for the extraordinary luck of finding each other to begin to feel like everyday life. Long enough to believe that whatever goes unsaid today can wait until tomorrow.

On April 6, Natalie dies. She is twenty-nine.

For a year, Gary drinks. His mother still has a son. His closest friend still has a friend. Both can see what is happening to him, and both have to live with the limits of what one person can do for another. Gary knows they love him. Some days that knowledge makes it harder to pick up the phone. He can hear the hope in an ordinary question about how he's doing. He knows how much they'd like to believe him if he said he was doing better.

Then one evening, a young man named Maxim comes to his door. He is Gary's son.

Long before Natalie, there was Liana, a young woman in Chicago. Gary can look back on those years and call them his youth. For Maxim, they belong to a different story altogether. Liana is his mother. When she became seriously ill, they had to sell their apartment. There are things about her that Gary remembers and her son has never known. And there are years of her life about which Maxim could tell his father almost everything, if only Gary knew what to ask.

Maxim stays. A day becomes a week. Eventually, six months pass under the same roof. There is time enough to get used to hearing another person come home, to notice when he's late, to begin to count on his being there. Yet how do you become a father to someone who has already grown up? Gary missed the age when he could have taken his boy by the hand. Now he has to find out whether the young man across the table even wants his advice. And Maxim has a life of his own, a woman he loves, and every reason to wonder where, exactly, he belongs in his father's house.

Then one word passes between them. A door slams. Only in the quiet that follows does Gary understand how much he had come to depend on the sound of his son coming home.

He has spent a year imagining what he would say if Natalie could sit across from him for just five minutes. With Maxim, five minutes may still be possible. But his son can answer back. He can ask where Gary was when his mother was ill. He can say that what happened hurt him. And if Gary wants to know him, he will have to sit there long enough to hear the answer, even if it costs him the version of the past he has lived with for years.

Inspired by two real-life stories, The Power of Love is a novel about falling in love at an age when you think you know yourself, about the woman whose absence changes the lives around her, and about a father and son for whom the smallest words may be the hardest to say. Gary knows exactly what one more day with Natalie would be worth. What will he do with the day he still has with his son?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HQPKDDTX
• ISBN13: 9798167666054
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 530 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"