He shrugged.
— “I just know what happens next.” He said it calmly, almost indifferently. As if talking about something inevitable.
— “And you…” she faltered. “You knew all this time that this would happen?”
Kirill nodded.
— “They took me in like this,” he said. “Right away.”
— “Like what?” she asked.
— “Quiet.” He thought and added: “Convenient.”
The word sounded strange, adult, heavy in a child’s voice.
— “Mom said, ‘You have to be quiet’,” he continued. “‘Otherwise, you’ll ruin everything. People will start asking questions. This way, no one asks questions’.”
Lyudmila Sergeevna felt her throat tighten, but the tears remained inside.
— “And what if you had spoken?” she asked.
Kirill squeezed the elephant so tightly that its ear crumpled. He fell silent, gathering his courage.
— “She said… She said they would send me back to the orphanage.” He looked up at his grandmother—his eyes serious, far too adult. “And you,” he added quietly, “would get worse. You would fall asleep faster.”
Lyudmila Sergeevna sat, looking at her grandson, and understood: he really knew few words, but he knew what his mother was doing, he knew how it all ended. And if he spoke today, it meant the scheme had started again. Only this time, in her house.
Lyudmila Sergeevna barely slept. The night passed in fragmented pieces: a lapse into sleep, then a sudden awakening with the feeling that someone had just left the room. The apartment was quiet, Kirill was sleeping in the next room, clutching his elephant. And in Lyudmila Sergeevna’s mind, the same fragments swirled: pills, office, sign, then didn’t live there anymore.
In the morning, she looked at herself in the mirror longer than usual. Her face seemed older than its years. And suddenly—anger. Cold, clear. The kind that comes when fear has receded and given way to resolve.
That same day, she went to the doctor. Irina Sergeevna had known Lyudmila Sergeevna for a long time. A local physician, calm, attentive, the kind who listens first and draws conclusions later. She frowned, flipping through the records.
— “You say you’ve been feeling drowsy lately, with memory lapses,” she said slowly. “But I haven’t prescribed you anything new.”
— “I’ve been drinking tea,” Lyudmila Sergeevna replied. “Herbal tea. My daughter-in-law gave it to me.”
Irina Sergeevna looked up.
— “Do you know how many elderly people are hospitalized precisely because of such herbal blends?”
She wrote a referral for tests, calmly, but a tension had entered her voice.
When the results came back, there was no doubt.
— “There are sedative drugs here,” Irina Sergeevna said, tapping her finger on the paper. “And in a dosage that, with regular use, causes confusion, lethargy, and memory impairment. This is not an accident…”
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