The next day was a day off. From morning on, Viktor moved through the house more quietly than usual—any movement might disrupt his train of thought. He did not look directly at Anya; his gaze skirted around her, keeping its distance.
By lunchtime, he came up to her in the kitchen, while she was cutting bread and carefully arranging it on plates.
“We’ll go to the embankment today,” he said evenly. Not as a suggestion—let’s—but as a decision: this has to happen.
Anya raised her eyes. For a second, surprise flared in her.
“All right,” she answered lightly, then added, trying to make it sound right, “I’ve already gone out on my own. But together… we’ve never gone out as a family.”
He gave a short nod.
They had lunch, cleaned up after themselves, and quickly got ready.
In the car, Viktor was silent almost the entire time. Shop windows, gray facades, and trees flickered past in the city, but his gaze was somewhere deeper—he was driving not toward the water, but toward his own memory. Anya looked out the window, forcing herself to feel the ordinariness of it all: cars, people, noise. She found a strange relief in that—the concrete of the house had finally loosened its grip on her throat.
The embankment met them with wind and the smell of water. It smelled of cold iron, wet stone, something alive and open. Anya closed her eyes for a second and breathed in deeply.
They walked along the railing. Viktor kept slightly apart—half a step behind and to the side, like a shadow. He did not take her hand, did not touch her. He simply walked.
Anya said little. She did not want to chatter. It felt as if any unnecessary sound might shatter this fragile daytime normality. She looked at the water, at the bridge, at people with dogs.
Then she suddenly noticed the streetlamp. Old, massive, with some strange architectural flourish to it—metal curls, a heavy base. It seemed not like a separate object, but like part of the embankment itself.
Anya came closer and began examining it like a child given a new toy: tilting her head a little, narrowing her eyes, trying to understand how it had been made.
“It’s beautiful…” slipped out of her. “Look at this detail… like a leaf, only metal.”
She raised her hand, reached toward it, but for some reason never touched it.
Viktor stopped.
Anya felt it. She turned and saw him standing a little aside. Not where he had been a second before. He had shifted automatically to a particular spot by the railing—precisely measured, marked in memory—and frozen.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He was not looking at the streetlamp. He was looking slightly to the right, slightly lower, into empty space, waiting or wishing for someone else to appear beside him. His face was motionless and blank.
Anya noted it silently: there he was—not the architect, not the master, not the controller, but simply a man who, for one second, had lost his connection to the present.
Then Viktor blinked and “switched on” again.
“Enough,” he said sharply. “Let’s go. It’s time to go back.”
Anya did not object.
“All right.”
On the way back, he was silent again. Anya tried a couple of times to say something warm:
“It was nice. The air is so fresh there… and you can feel the water.”
Viktor nodded without looking at her. He was not agreeing with her, but with his own decision that it had been “necessary.”
At home, she smiled more than usual. Tried to bring the tone of the daytime walk back into the walls.
“Thank you,” she said when they found themselves in the kitchen. “Really. We went out like normal people. Took a walk. It was wonderful.”
She meant it sincerely: for a couple of hours, she really had felt lighter.
Viktor listened, but remained muted. He answered briefly, in a tired voice, and looked somewhere past her—the streetlamp was still standing in his head, along with that spot by the railing that would not let him go.
…
Night came quietly.
Anya turned off the light and lay down, trying to relax. Nothing was happening outside. The house was silent. But what remained in her memory was not the daylight, or the sun, or the water, but the way Viktor had stood so straight and motionless.
She fell asleep only after a long while.
And when she woke, it was exactly three, as if someone had flipped a switch inside her.
At first, she felt strangely calm. Then cold fear began to show through.
She slowly sat up in bed, lowered her feet to the floor, stood, slipped soundlessly into the corridor, and approached his door just as before.
Thud.
Thud.
“Da…ddy…” she breathed.
Thud.
The door opened a crack, quickly and more confidently than the last time. Viktor’s face appeared in the gap. He was pale, but composed. He had been waiting. And there was something terrible in that waiting: he was no longer trying to understand. He was trying to accept.
“Anya?” he whispered. Then, more softly, “Anechka?..”
Anya raised her head a little higher. Her face remained empty. Her eyes were too steady, too “not here.”
“Da…ddy…” she said, and in the same empty voice asked, “When are we… going… to the embankment?”
Viktor exhaled, and there was relief in that breath.
“But we were… there today.”
Anya was silent for five seconds—strained, pressing, heavy, endless. Her chin lifted almost imperceptibly.
“But Da…ddy…” she drew the word out, and there was something hurt in it, something childish, alien. “You took… her there.”
Viktor froze.
She drew in air. Her chest rose, her shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly. It should have been only the silent intake before the next sentence.
But the next words did not come from her—they emerged on the inhale, ragged, hoarse, unnatural, as though another voice had settled over hers: alien, distorted, out of sync with her own.
“Not me…”
And the silence turned thick.
The house went flat, the corridor turned into a stage set. He saw Anya, saw the crack of the door, saw the darkness behind her back—and could not fit it all together, could neither step back nor step forward. He could not even express horror, because the horror was not an emotion, but a stop.
He looked at her without blinking, and there was no rage in his eyes, no control. Only the emptiness of a man who had been split open from the inside and left standing on both halves at once.
Anya turned and walked back down the corridor with the same even, unnatural step. The white fabric swayed in the darkness and disappeared into her room.
Viktor remained in the doorway, still holding the door ajar.
He could not close it, could not open it wider, could not step back. He only stood there and stared into the darkness where she had stood a minute before.