Ten days passed in a deafening, almost tangible silence. Anya lived like a wound-up mechanism: waking up, watering the flowers, reading, a meager breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She rationed the food, turning every meal into a calculation. She knew Viktor was watching. She wanted to show him absolute devotion—a woman who would sooner vanish than violate his order.
But on the eleventh day, he didn’t return. Not on the twelfth, either.
By the fourteenth day, hunger had turned from a dull ache into a cold, sharp blade that sliced her stomach from the inside. Anya grew weaker; her movements became slow, as if underwater, but her gaze stayed firm.
On the fifteenth day, the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator held nothing but emptiness. She had eaten everything—even the sugar. There was nothing left in the house but water and dust.
Anya stood in the middle of the kitchen, bracing a hand on the countertop so she wouldn’t topple over from dizziness. She looked straight into the lens of the camera hidden in the corner. Her face was pale, her cheekbones sharpened until they seemed to pierce the skin, but there was no panic in her eyes. Only icy certainty.
“Viktor,” she whispered, and her hoarse voice sounded in the emptiness of the house like a verdict. “You promised ten days. It’s been fifteen.”
She wasn’t angry. She was simply recording a system failure. His system. This was no longer her screw-up. It wasn’t a miscommunication. It was his architecture collapsing from within. He had abandoned his “value” to fate, and now she had every moral right to make a countermove.
“Sorry, I don’t want to die of hunger in here,” she added.
She went up to the bedroom. Her hands trembled a little as she pulled on warm tights and a wool dress. Over it—an elegant gray coat he had bought her for autumn walks. She wrapped a scarf, carefully smoothed her hair. Even exhausted, she had to look perfect. Like his triumph made flesh, stepping out onto the street.
She went down to the entryway. The money and the key lay on the little table, where he had left them. Anya took them. The metal of the key bit into her fingers with cold.
The click of the lock rang out unnaturally loud in the silence, like a gunshot. The door that had been her horizon for months gave way. Anya stepped onto the porch.
It was overcast; the sky was covered with gray clouds. For the first time she saw the enclosed yard—an alien, unfamiliar space with a gravel path and a fence that cut the house off from the rest of the world.
She took her first step. Her legs felt like cotton; every movement cost colossal effort, but Anya forced herself to walk straight, head held high.
One step beyond the perimeter—and the real world crashed down on her.
The air outside was completely different. During her walks in the garden it had always felt still, sealed off; now it hit her with a wild draft. Wind from the open street brazenly slipped under her coat, carrying the smells of wet asphalt, unfamiliar damp, rotting leaves, and frightening, limitless freedom. After controlled space, that scale felt unbearably sharp.
The world was stunningly huge. Too loud. Somewhere in the distance cars hummed; a dog barked with a hollow echo. The street in front of her was empty; only a few golden leaves spun in the air.
The “Near Home” convenience store was only a couple hundred meters away. For an ordinary person—a minute of unhurried walking. For her—a crossing of an ocean.
She didn’t understand how she covered the distance, moving her feet on sheer stubbornness alone.
The bell above the door jingled, announcing her arrival. The smell of fresh baked goods hit her so hard that for a moment her vision darkened. She grabbed the edge of a shelf, breathing heavily.
A young guy at the register glanced at her briefly, then dropped his eyes back to his phone. To him she was just a pale girl in an expensive coat. An ordinary person in an ordinary world. That normality was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Anya took a basket. Her hand shook as she reached for bread. For milk. For cheese.
At the checkout, she got in line.
“Anya? God, Anya—is that really you?”
The voice hit like thunder out of a clear sky. She flinched and slowly turned.
Artem stood behind her. He looked so… ordinary—in his jacket, with tousled hair, with that warm, sincere smile that used to feel like something taken for granted.
“Hey!” He almost dropped a bag of chips as he leaned forward. “I can’t believe my eyes! How are you? When did you get back? Listen, Paris definitely suits you—you’ve lost so much weight, like a model! I saw your photos on social media—the Eiffel Tower, those breakfasts on the balcony… it looked unreal! How was the Seine? Wasn’t it too damp?”
Artem’s words fell on Anya like heavy stones, one after another. “Paris.” “Breakfasts.” “Photos.” She listened, and something inside her turned over. The weight settling on her shoulders was unbearable. While she rotted in that house, counting days and bread crumbs, her “digital ghost” strolled down the Champs-Élysées. Viktor hadn’t just stolen her life—he had replaced it with a happy picture for everyone else.
“Hey, are you okay?” Artem’s smile dimmed a little. “You don’t really look like yourself. You’ve got this look in your eyes, as if you’d come back not from Europe, but from war.”
Her icy mask, her “ancient cold,” cracked in an instant. Her eyes filled with hot moisture; her lips trembled. She wanted to throw herself at him, grab his jacket, and scream to the entire store: “That wasn’t me! Help me! There’s a monster there—cameras, sensors—he’s drawing my life instead of me!”
The world around her began to blur.
At that moment, behind her came a dull thud and a strangled cry.
Some old woman in line for bread had lost her balance and fell hard onto the dirty tile floor. She flailed helplessly, trying to brace herself against the counter with one weak hand; her string bag tore, and red apples rolled under customers’ feet, into the dirt and slush. She looked pathetic, broken, and utterly dependent on other people’s mercy.
Anya turned. She looked at the woman, and in her mind, like a magnesium flash, a thought flared: I won’t be like that. If I scream now, if I throw myself at Artem’s feet—I’ll look the same. Pathetic. Helpless. I won’t let myself be a victim, and I won’t let Viktor turn anyone else into one.
It was the point of no return. Panic retreated, instantly displaced by a coldness as sharp as an electric shock. The tears dried before they could run down her cheeks.
She blinked, and when she turned back to Artem, her face was already under control.
“Hi…” Her voice betrayed a tremor, but she steadied it at once. “Sorry, I’m tired. Paris… well, you know. It was unforgettable.”
She forced herself to smile, though the muscles in her face ached with strain, as if after being frozen for too long.
“Hey, what about that restaurant on Montmartre you wrote about?” Artem perked up, not noticing her state. “The one where they serve snails in garlic butter? You posted a story saying it was the weirdest thing you’d ever eaten.”
Anya felt the ground drop out from under her. Snails? Montmartre? She had spent fifteen days scraping together the last remnants of anything she could find.
“Uh… yeah,” she started quickly, nervously throwing groceries into a bag. Her hands were shaking. “The snails… they were very… garlicky. Honestly, I didn’t really love them. I ordered them just for the shot.”
“Funny. In your post you wrote you fell in love with the taste and now you’d cook them at home every Friday. It was a whole ode to French cuisine.”
Anya felt icy sweat run down her back. She was walking through a minefield without a map.
“Well, you know—after tasting so many things, everything kind of got mixed up in my head,” she joked lightly, thrusting money toward the cashier with desperate urgency. She needed to get out. Immediately.
“And that flea market in Saint-Ouen?” Artem wouldn’t let up, clearly eager to discuss “her” adventures. “You found that vintage brooch you’d dreamed of, right? Remember, you even wrote, ‘the find of a lifetime, I can’t believe my luck’?”
Anya froze with the bag in her hand. A brooch? A market? She had no idea what he was talking about. Every phrase was like a hammer blow, driving nails into the lid of her coffin.
“I… I decided not to take it,” she breathed out the first thing that came into her head, trying to sound rational. “It seemed too expensive. Not worth it.”
“What do you mean, not take it?” Artem’s eyes went wide. “You posted a selfie with it! Right there by the stall—it was already on your lapel! With the caption, ‘It’s mine now.’ Anya, are you okay? You’re… weird. Slow. Are you sure you’re alright?”
Anya grabbed the bag. There was no air left in the store.
“Sorry, I’m just horribly tired. Jet lag, no sleep, time zones… everything’s scrambled. I need to go—my taxi’s waiting.”
“Anya, wait!” He stepped toward her. “Let me walk you—you look like you’re about to pass out…”
“Don’t!” She recoiled from him as if from fire. “I can manage on my own!”
She bolted out into the street without looking back. Cold wind slapped her face, but she didn’t feel it. Her heart was pounding somewhere in her throat, drowning out the street noise.
Artem stayed by the register, staring at the door as it swung shut. His smile slowly slid off his face.
Jet lag? Jesus, it’s Paris, not Tokyo…