God only knows what was going on in Melissa’s heart. Her simple, naïve faith was deeply shaken, but it withstood. Melissa concluded that her husband’s and son’s deaths were her fault, her insufficient love for God. She became even more devout.

Robert reasoned differently. He had previously laughed at his mother’s old-fashioned outlook, and after seeing his embalmed brother in the coffin, the yellow skin resembling a wax figure from Madame Tussaud’s, he realized that there was no God and everything was made up.

There was no God. Okay. But who, then, so wisely connects people? Who throws them into the abyss of poverty and calamity, or elevates them to the heights of fame and wealth? That’s when Robert discovered the concept of Destiny.

At first, Destiny appeared to him in the form of a she-wolf—a kind of ancestral curse, devouring the men of his family. Robert was an impressionable teenager, and the image of a fierce wolf haunted him for a long time.

Then Destiny lost its animal appearance in his mind’s eye. He believed that one day Destiny would appear to him as a certain person who would radically change his life. Who will this mysterious unknown turn out to be?

Robert got admitted to college for Business and Administration, hoping to become CEO of a major financial corporation in the future. However, upon graduating, he got a job in a small agency as an insurance investigator, staying in this position for almost fifteen years. It was a cushy job but low-paying.

By the time he was forty, Robert—let’s face it—wasn’t very successful in life. And in his heart he remained an unsatisfied dreamer and an ever-ready adventurer.