Kirill was called in several times. Without pressure. Without a courtroom. He sat in an office with a psychologist, clutching his elephant, and answered as best he could. Briefly. Simply. Sometimes with gestures, sometimes with fragments of phrases. “I went with her.” “There was an uncle with glasses.” “She spoke quietly.” “Then the grandma left.”
It was enough. Because Kirill was not a child with a scheme. He was the one who saw the beginning. The one who saw the end. And the one who managed to point in the direction where the adults finally started looking.
Alena held out until the very end. At first, confidently. Then sharply. Then angrily. She tried to talk about slander, about illnesses, about fantasies. She tried to make Kirill convenient, quiet, dubious, unreliable again. But it didn’t work anymore. The recordings spoke louder. The documents were more precise. And the calm, steady voice of a child who was no longer hiding shattered the whole construction for good.
The sentence was real. No probation. No leniency. When Lyudmila Sergeevna left the courthouse, she felt a weariness for the first time in a long while—an ordinary, human exhaustion. The kind after which you can go to sleep and wake up without anxiety.
Arranging for guardianship took time. Paperwork, committees, interviews. But now she knew: this time was working for them. At first, Kirill hardly spoke. Sometimes the words got stuck. Sometimes he got confused. Sometimes he was just silent, out of habit. And Lyudmila Sergeevna no longer rushed him.
He started small.
— “Grandma…” another time he suddenly asked, “Can I talk all the time now?”
She hugged him and nodded.
— “Always. As much as you want, my sunshine.”
He was learning to speak again. Without rules. Without threats. Without conditions.
And Lyudmila Sergeevna found herself thinking more and more that the most terrifying thing in this story was not the pills, the documents, or the apartments. The most terrifying thing is when a child is taught to seem sick and be convenient for the system and illegal operations. When silence becomes a way to survive.
A child doesn’t need legal terms to understand that something bad is happening nearby. And they feel it before the adults do.
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