The silence after that is absolute.
Mama stops crying for one breath.
Irina looks from me to Papa, suddenly less pleased than she was a minute ago.
My father’s face changes very slightly. Not loss of control. He would never give me that. But something colder moves in. “You’re upset,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You’re also in no state to question me.”
“I’m in exactly the right state.”
He takes one more step toward me. “Do not make this harder than it already is.”
I almost laugh again. As if this is a household inconvenience. As if we are discussing scandal and not children and fear and the sick certainty that something inside this house has already gone rotten.
Mama touches my shoulder. “Come upstairs with me.”
I don’t move.
Not because I want to fight. Because if I move now, if I let them send me upstairs and close the door on me, I will lose whatever little ground I still have.
Papa gives in so suddenly that for a second I think I imagined it.
He looks at me, then at Mama, then at the hall full of people pretending not to listen, and something in his face settles.
“Come,” he says.
Just that.
No apology. No concession. But he turns toward the study instead of sending me upstairs, and that’s enough.
I follow him at once.
Mama comes too. Irina starts to, but Papa says, without looking back, “No.”
She stops.
The study door shuts behind us with a heavy click. The room smells like old paper, leather, and the faint trace of Papa’s cologne. One of his security men is already there by the monitor wall, pale and sweating, clearly wishing he had been born into a simpler profession.
Papa says, “Show it.”
The man fumbles only once before pulling up the feed.
We watch in silence.
School corridor. Empty at first. Then the tutor leaving in a hurry, distracted, exactly as Mama said. A minute passes. Then another.
Then he appears.
My whole body goes cold.
The same man.
The same broad shoulders. The same walk. Even through the bad angle and flat security light, I know him instantly. The guard who stopped me the day before. The one with the tattoo on his arm.
There is no confusion now. No maybe.
