Alena turned pale. The smile vanished, as if erased. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again.
— “It’s a fantasy,” she said finally. “He overheard conversations. He has his peculiarities.” She turned to Sergey. “You know. He can repeat things…”
— “Enough!” Lyudmila Sergeevna interrupted.
She walked to the table and turned on a voice recorder. Alena’s voice filled the room—calm, confident, familiar. Words about doses. About “while they’re still lucid.” About “we’ve done this before.” About “it will all be settled later.”
Sergey listened without moving. His face changed slowly, as if he were reliving it, but this time with his eyes open. Lyudmila Sergeevna placed a folder with the test results next to it. Then printouts. Addresses. Dates. Surnames.
— “This is enough,” she said. “Even without the child’s words.”
Sergey looked up at his wife.
— “Alena…” his voice broke. “Is this true?”
Alena looked around, as if searching for an exit. Then she straightened up sharply.
— “You will regret this,” she said. “You have no idea who you’re up against.”
— “We have an idea,” Lyudmila Sergeevna replied. “All too well.”
Kirill walked over to his grandmother and took her hand. He hadn’t said everything. But it had been enough. Because from then on, the documents spoke. The recordings. The test results. And the adult words that had finally found their place.
The investigation moved slowly but surely. Like a puzzle that had long been scattered on a table and then suddenly began to assemble itself, piece by piece. Alena’s recordings formed the basis of the case. Dry, business-like, without emotion. The voice of a person accustomed to calculating doses, deadlines, and seeing people not as people, but as stages. The tests confirmed the drugs. The documents—the chain of transactions. Notaries, apartments, elderly people who first became confused, then moved out, and then disappeared from others’ lives as quietly as they had once entered them…
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