The same house, the same light falling through the windows, the same emptiness that wasn’t really empty.
I was in the living room on the sofa, Krystyna bouncing on top of me. Everything was following the pattern it had followed so many times before that my mind had stopped marking it as something separate. Everything went down in the usual rhythm, but then the door opened, and from there, everything happened too fast. That’s the only honest way to describe it.
A presence where there wasn’t supposed to be one.
Both our heads turned at the same time toward the doorway, and there he was.
Bartosz.
He didn’t look surprised. As if something he had already known had finally decided to reveal itself.
Everything after that fractured.
Movements without sequence and sound without structure. Krystyna jumped off the couch, leaving me completely exposed, grabbing a blanket to cover herself.“No, Bartosz, please, listen to me, you don’t understand–”
Her voice broke apart on his name.
She clutched the blanket tighter around herself, knuckles pale beneath the fabric, her whole body folding inward like she could somehow make herself smaller. Disappear inside it.
“It wasn’t– this isn't what you think!”
Her words stumbled over each other, tripping, desperate to reach him before he reachedme.
“I was helping him, I was trying to teach him, he doesn’t know anything, I was just–”She swallowed hard, breath catching, eyes flicking toward me for a fraction of a second before snapping back to Bartosz.
“He pushed me, he wanted, he wouldn’t stop–”
The lie landed in the room like something alive. Constructed in real time out of panic and survival.
“I tried to stop it, I swear, Bartosz, please–”
She stepped toward him then, just one step, hands trembling as they reached out like she thought she couldtouchher way out of what he had just seen. He didn’t even look at her. Like she had already stopped existing the moment he walked through the door.
He moved, and when he did, the air shifted with him, heavy and compressed. Every step he took forward erased something from the room. The illusion that this could be explained. Krystyna’s hands found his arm.
“Please, just let me–”
A single movement of his shoulder, his arm, his weight, enough to send her back into the wall behind her. The sound was dull. Her body hit, slid, and collapsed.
The blanket stayed clutched around her as she dropped, her breath breaking into something rough and uneven, the apology dissolving into quiet animal sounds.
Still pleading, still trying, but weaker now.
Because she understood something I hadn't fully grasped, that she was no longer the focus.
He was in front of me, too fast,too close. I didn’t move. My body hadn’t caught up yet. There’s a delay, sometimes, between seeing something and understanding what it means.
The first hit didn’t hurt the way you’d expect. It didn't make everything clear; instead, it disoriented me. A cutting, bright interruption that erased everything else for a second. Sound disappeared until the only thing I could hear was my pulse trying to escape my body.
My head snapped to the side, the room tilting with it, the world briefly losing its structure before slamming back into place. I didn’t have time to recover; there was no space for that.
The second came before the first had finished existing, and then another.
And another.
And another.
Each one landing with intent, not emotion. That’s what made it worse. This wasn’t the rage I thought I saw in his eyes, it was correction.
