Page 54 of Captured By the Pakhan

I didn't notice at the time. That's the part I'll think about later — I don't notice, because you don't notice when you stop doing a thing; that's the entire nature of stopping.

What I notice is the fourteenth day, standing on the terrace at six in the morning with coffee, when it occurs to me that I could not currently tell you the state of the north fence, that I haven't walked the service path since Tuesday, and that I have not once in a week checked whether the gate on the pool house is locked.

Fourteen days.

I go and check it. It's locked.

That doesn't help at all.

The attack comes at two in the morning on a Sunday, and it is a bad one.

I'm through my door and halfway down the corridor before I'm properly awake, and I get to Sergei's room, and he's sitting bolt upright in the dark making the sound that isn't crying, and I put my hand on the lamp⁠—

—and stop.

Because Ilya is already in the doorway.

Not six feet back in the corridor with his hand flat on the wall. In the doorway, one hand on the frame, and he's looking at his son, and his whole face is a man standing at the edge of very cold water.

He looks at me.

And I do the hardest thing I have done in this house.

I step back.

I take two steps backward out of that doorway, and I put my shoulder against the corridor wall, and I fold my arms, and I say nothing at all, and I let him go in.

He is terrible at it.

He puts on the wrong light — the overhead, the hard one — and Sergei flinches like he's been hit, and Ilya says something under his breath in Russian, turns it off, and gets the lamp instead.

He's too loud. He says the boy's name three times at a volume you'd use across a car park, and every one of them lands like a slap.

He asks a question. "What is it, what happened?" — which is the single worst thing you can say to a child who can't get air, because it demands a sentence from somebody who doesn't have one, and I get half a step forward before I lock my feet down.

Let him.

He stands there for a second, and I watch him realize he's failing. I actually watch it happen — the shoulders come down, and something in his face gives up on being the man who fixes things.

And then he gets down on the floor.

He gets all the way down, onto his knees beside the bed, so he's looking up at his own son, and he puts both hands up flat and empty.

"Sergei." Quiet, this time. "Two hands. Count them."

Nothing.

"Two hands. Count them for me."

"...two."

"Two." His voice cracks in the middle of the word, and he keeps going anyway. "Now five things. Five things you can see. Say them."

And Sergei counts. The lamp. The window. The model on the shelf. His father's hands, which he says as two separate things, and Ilya lets him have it — doesn't correct him, doesn't say that's the same thing, says "good," and waits, and asks for four things he can hear.

It takes nine minutes.

At the end of it, the boy is breathing, shaking, and soaked through, and Ilya is still on his knees on the floor, and neither of them seems to know what happens next.