Viktor hardly showed himself all Sunday. The door to his room remained closed, and Anya caught only rare sounds: heavy steps somewhere upstairs, a short creak of the floor—and then silence again. He was clearly trying to go unnoticed in his own house.
Sunday night into Monday
At exactly three, she woke and slowly sat up in bed, as if every movement had to be agreed upon with the darkness. She remained like that for several seconds, listening to her own breathing, and only then got up.
The corridor was dark. She approached his door.
Only when she was right by the handle did an icy thought pierce through her: I am doing this myself. Nothing was forcing her now: not Viktor, not circumstances. Now it was her choice. She was standing at night in someone else’s corridor, about to say a word that did not belong to her.
Thud.
Thud.
“Da…ddy…”
The door did not open—not a click, not a rustle.
“Da…ddy… doesn’t want… to see… me.”
A pause.
No answer. The silence was ringing—he was surely standing on the other side of the door, holding his breath.
Thud.
Thud.
And again, in the same even, alien tone, like a conclusion, like a verdict she was pronouncing on herself:
“Da…ddy… doesn’t want… to know… me.”
She did not repeat it many times. Even that was enough for a nauseating wave to rise inside her: from the role sticking to her skin, from the way the word “Daddy” sounded in this house.
She stood there for a second, turned, and went back—just as evenly, without speeding up, as if this were simply part of her nightly routine.
In her room, she lay down and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Her body remembered the kitchen—the knife, the weight, the air that would not reach her lungs. But what horrified her was not that. It was how easily she had said the word “Daddy.”
Monday night into Tuesday
She did not go to him. Anya lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, and listened to the house. It was a conscious decision—to wait. To create a pause and raise the tension to its limit. To deprive what was happening of the pattern he was so used to. The absence of footsteps, when they are expected so desperately, wears a person down far more surely than the footsteps themselves.
Daytime
In the morning, the overhead light was on in the second-floor corridor.
It caused Anya a brief, disorienting surprise. He always turned it off. Always. For him, this was not about saving electricity, but about absolute order: the house had to look the way he had decided it should look, and the corridor had no right to be lit for no reason.
She stopped, looked at the burning lamp as if at something impossible, and went on without changing her expression. But something inside her marked it coldly: he had stopped keeping up with himself. He had begun to forget.
Hidden-volume note:
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He has shut himself away. Viktor doesn’t come out and doesn’t talk, which means it is hard for him right now. Probably harder than it is for me.
I know him: if he truly wanted to hurt me, he would say so directly. He is always honest. He would never break his own rules without a serious reason. That means I must have done something wrong, if he lost control like that.
I want everything to become the way it was before. I just want to believe that he is near. This waiting behind the door is the most unbearable thing.
If it would make Viktor calmer, he can send me back to the basement. That is not frightening at all. Only one thing is frightening—when he turns away and pretends I don’t exist. I can survive his anger. I cannot survive his absence.
Tuesday night into Wednesday
At three, she got up again. Everything was the same: she slowly sat up, waited, listening both to the house and to herself. Then she went out.
At Viktor’s door, she became a pendulum again.
Thud.
Thud.
“Da…ddy…”
She was silent a little longer than the last time. That same sticky horror still rose inside her—but now she knew how to hold it down.
“I… need… you…”
A pause.
“You… didn’t come.”
Not a click. Not a footstep.
Thud.
Her voice grew quieter—she did not want him to hear a woman. What she wanted to reach him was not her voice, but that other one: dead and impossible.
“You left… me…”
Silence again.
But this time, Anya heard a barely perceptible sound, dry and short. Viktor had touched the handle and immediately let it go.
She said nothing more. She simply turned and left.
Wednesday
In the morning, for the first time since Sunday, they crossed paths.
Anya came down to the kitchen earlier than usual and froze in the doorway. Viktor was sitting at the kitchen table.
He was already dressed—in a shirt and suit, ready for work—but he looked as if the suit had been put on a mannequin. His back was hunched, his shoulders hanging heavily. He held the cup of coffee in both hands, as if warming frozen fingers against it. His face was gray and ashen. Deep, dark shadows lay under his eyes. On his chin, a little to one side, a fresh razor cut stood red. For a man whose movements were calibrated to the millimeter, it was the equivalent of falling down the stairs.
He slowly lifted his eyes to her. His gaze was cloudy, heavy. There was no Architect in it, no master of the house. Only the bottomless, hollowed-out exhaustion of a man who had not slept for three days.
“Good morning,” Anya said evenly, without looking away from his face.
He did not answer. Only his Adam’s apple jerked as he swallowed, and then he slowly, with visible effort, got up. The cup clinked against the saucer—his fingers were trembling slightly.
He walked past her into the corridor without saying a word.
Anya went over to the countertop. In the trash bin, on top of the neatly folded paper packaging, lay a crumpled piece of cotton. Dark blood had dried on it—a smeared trace from where he had pressed it to the cut made by his shaking hand. She was finally certain: he was on the edge.
Wednesday night into Thursday
Anya stayed in bed. No footsteps in the corridor. No knocking. Once again, she deprived him of the pattern. After her visit the night before, he had surely been waiting for a continuation, preparing for the blow, sitting tense until dawn. The silence wore him down, forcing him to fight the emptiness.
Thursday
In the morning, she approached his door—the very one behind which he was now almost always “unavailable.” She stood there, waited, so as not to look hurried, and said into the silence:
“Viktor… I’ll need to go out for groceries.”
No answer.
She did not knock, did not press. She waited another couple of seconds—exactly long enough for it to count as a request, not an attempt to “pull” him out—and went back to her room.
Anya dressed and went out for groceries.
This time, she chose them more carefully, planning the next evening, although from the outside it looked like an ordinary trip to the supermarket. The bags pulled at her hands, but the physical weight helped keep her head cold.
She came back a little over an hour later, though the store was nearby. She carried the bags into the kitchen, put the groceries away, and started lunch.
When she finished cooking, Anya immediately began cleaning. She washed the floors, scrubbed the basement and the rest of the house to a surgical, frightening shine. She polished the surfaces in the living room, aligned the chairs in the kitchen along invisible lines. Methodically, step by step, she returned the house to its perfect, sterile state.
She was doing it deliberately. In this scrubbed, impeccable space, where every object lay in its proper place, Viktor’s own disintegration had to feel even sharper, even more wrong. The house was in perfect order. Its master was not.
In the evening, he came home from work—a shadow of a man, gray and soundless. He walked along the gleaming corridor without even looking around and disappeared behind his door.
Thursday night into Friday
She did not come again. She broke the “every other night” rhythm, leaving it for later. She understood that two nights of silence in a row would hit him harder and more painfully than any knock. Tomorrow, she would strike another blow—but not at all the one he was expecting.