Albert let out one last burst of laughter—hoarse and vibrant—before catching his breath. His knotted fingers rested on the armrest of his polished wooden chair as he slowly straightened up, his eyes still shining with affection.
"Come, Annabelle. I'd like to show you something in my office."
The little girl nodded slightly, but her gaze drifted involuntarily toward her mother.
Éléna wasn't smiling. Motionless, seated under the morning light filtering through the window, she stared at Albert, her features frozen in an unreadable expression. Her brown hair, usually lustrous, looked dull. Her black eyes, devoid of light, scrutinized her husband with an emotion Annabelle couldn't name. A brief tightening pulled at the corner of her lips—a forced, almost involuntary grimace.
A doubt, as fleeting as a draft of air, passed through Annabelle. A diffuse, faceless unease brushed against her. She looked away.
"Yes, Papa."
Her voice, higher than she had intended, echoed in the quiet space. She stood abruptly, pushing back her chair with a screech that scratched the polished floor. Albert held out his hand slowly, almost reassuringly. She seized it at once, as if to cut short the shiver threatening to rise.
She followed him without turning back.
She didn't want to meet her mother's gaze again.
Something was wrong. She had felt it in the air, in the silence, in Éléna's frozen gesture.
But she didn't want to understand.
Not now. Maybe tomorrow.
Albert's office breathed warmth and order. Morning rays caressed the shelves filled with timeworn, leather-bound books, and dust floated silently in the light like suspended secrets.
He walked to the fireplace and lit a fire with his flint and striker. The spark caught the straw he had placed there, then began to consume the pine wood with its distinctive crackles. The warmth quickly drove out the autumn chill that had crept into the room.
Annabelle sat at the table, her legs not yet reaching the floor. Albert gently pulled out a heavy, leather-bound volume and opened it before her. The letters, clean and elegant, lined up on the page with an almost intimidating precision.
"We'll start with the alphabet," he said with a smile.
But he didn't need to repeat himself. As soon as he traced the first letters with his finger, Annabelle pronounced them aloud with startling accuracy. Albert raised an eyebrow. He turned the page. Then another.
She followed. Quickly. Too quickly.
He put down his pencil, watching her with growing fascination. She had that intense, focused look—the one he recognized in the mirror some mornings, when a legal problem consumed his thoughts.
"You… you already know all this?" he murmured, nearly incredulous.
Annabelle shrugged, a shy smile on her lips.
"It's easy, Papa."
A softer laugh escaped him this time, tinged with astonishment. He leaned back in his chair, hands folded over his belly. A long sigh, like an old relief.
She understood. She understood quickly.
"You're going to surpass me," he said, shaking his head.
He stood, walked slowly to the window, and placed his hands on the sill. His gaze drifted through the glass.
Annabelle. His blood, his legacy. This girl, he was sure, could become a notary. Not just follow in his footsteps—redraw them. Expand them. He imagined her, grown, in this very office. His books. Her pen. Her discipline. He saw it all.
Éléna would care for her until then. She would love her, nourish her, protect her from the world… even after his departure.
He blinked, brushed aside a heavy thought. Turned back.
Annabelle was still watching him, curious, attentive.
"You're going to do wonderful things, my daughter."
And this time, it was she who smiled—a true smile, radiant and unshadowed.
The days passed, one after the other, carried by the comforting rhythm of lessons in the study, open books, words sounded out loud, and the bursts of pride Albert no longer bothered to hide.
Winter settled outside—icy and biting—covering the landscape with its white carpet.
Annabelle learned quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. Each turned page seemed to bring father and daughter closer, binding them with a thread of invisible, precious knowledge. Albert glowed. He had never known such domestic joy, such a promise of future within these walls. He passed everything on to her—passionately, methodically—as if he wanted to leave an entire world within the mind of this sharp little girl.
But in this nearly perfect tableau, one corner remained cold.
Éléna.
Annabelle no longer spoke to her. Not really. Since that morning, something had frozen. A distance—barely visible, yet very real—had settled between them. The girl avoided her without truly realizing it, and her mother, at first, tried to maintain a polite smile when they crossed paths in the hallways.
But that smile faded.
It became less sincere. Less human. More strained. Longer, at times. As if it lingered too much.
Éléna's eyes changed too. They followed Annabelle's movements with a strange slowness, a glacial calm, as if trying to recognize something she could no longer see.
Albert noticed nothing.
Busy. Absorbed. Fulfilled.
He told himself Éléna understood. That she was just tired. That it would pass.
She knew, he thought, how important this was for him. For them. Their daughter was growing. Their daughter was promising.
So, day after day, he let the sidelong glances pass, the stretched smiles. He let the shadow settle in, convinced it was nothing.
And Annabelle, she felt something. Something in her mother's silence. Something in the way she stood longer in the doorway, not speaking.
Something she preferred not to name.
Not yet.
One morning, the air was peaceful again, bathed in soft light filtering through the curtains. In the office, the familiar scent of old paper and fresh ink enveloped the room in studious calm.
Albert corrected the lines Annabelle traced on the parchment with a watchful eye, her quill scratching softly on the page. Bent over the table, focused, she stuck out her tongue in a small unconscious gesture that was hers alone. He smiled.
But just as he was about to straighten up, a sudden emptiness opened beneath his feet. The floor seemed to vanish for an instant—barely a second, but enough to unbalance him. A pressure rose in his chest. His breathing, usually slow and deep, quickened abruptly. Air refused to fill his lungs as it once did.
He stepped back, hand braced on the edge of the bookshelf. A fine sweat beaded at his temple. His heart beat faster. Heavier.
He forced himself not to panic. To walk slowly back to his desk.
A wave of dizziness struck as he sank into his chair. He planted both hands on the wood to steady himself, closed his eyes for a second.
Just a bit of fatigue. Nothing serious.
Annabelle lifted her eyes from the page, her brows slightly furrowed.
"Papa? Are you okay?"
He slowly lifted his head, offering a calm smile. He didn't want to alarm her.
"Just tired, sweetheart," he replied simply.
Then he looked at her again, and his smile softened. He didn't want her to see. Not now. She had worked well. She deserved her peace.
He straightened in his chair, took a slower, more discreet breath, and gestured for her to continue.
She obeyed without further question.
A week later, it had already been two months since Albert had begun passing on his knowledge. His fatigue and dizziness had grown more frequent, harder to hide—but he did his best.
Albert watched Annabelle attentively, hands folded on his desk. The letters no longer posed any problem for her. She read with ease—almost with hunger—as if each word were a secret she devoured eagerly.
So he decided to move her forward.
"Let's try something else today," he said, pulling out a small notebook with worn corners. "You can read, and you'll learn to write in more detail without trouble. But numbers… numbers are another matter."
He took out a slate, drew a few simple additions, then some small sequences to complete. Annabelle tilted her head, chewed her pencil, furrowed her brow.
Albert waited, an amused smile on his lips.
"So? How much is that?"
She looked up, puzzled. She tried one answer, then another… and each time, he gently corrected her.
An hour passed.
And the only certainty was that she had no gift for numbers.
So he got up carefully and went to fetch small wooden cubes. A visual aid might help her progress more quickly—after all, his time was running out.
Albert rubbed his temples, then chuckled softly—a laugh without mockery, full of tenderness.
"Well. It's not innate, it seems. That's all right. We'll work on it."
He sat beside her, pulling his chair closer. His little round glasses slipped slightly down his pointed nose, and he pushed them back with a habitual gesture. He took up the pencil again, drew a few lines of numbers patiently while aligning the correct number of small cubes in front of each.
The storm raged outside, but they paid it no mind.
Albert squinted at the numbers chalked onto the slate. The board lay between him and Annabelle, their shoulders almost touching, and yet, he felt as though the world were starting to drift slightly around him.
He had always loved mathematics—their rigor, their quiet logic. He remembered spending whole evenings solving equations like others meditate: to find stillness, stability. He wanted to give that to Annabelle. A solid foundation.
But today, each symbol felt heavier. As if the numbers themselves refused to stay clear before his eyes.
Annabelle frowned, hesitated. She didn't understand. So she began to count the cubes placed before her, finally helping her make the connections between those numbers that had seemed so nebulous before.
Albert sighed—but without anger. It wasn't her fault. She learned well, but not this. Not numbers. So he decided to devote himself to it. To put all his time into this weakness, this gap. She'd learn the rest later, in school. But here, now, he had to build a foundation.
"Watch carefully. If we have three coins here, and we add two…"
"I know—it makes five," Annabelle replied, her childish voice ringing out. She looked at him, expecting praise, encouragement.
But he didn't have time to answer.
A smell of rot surged suddenly—again. That smell that always followed him when a wave of dizziness hit. But this time, it was stronger. More invasive.
Annabelle wrinkled her nose, not understanding where this fetid, elusive scent came from—a smell that seemed to appear and vanish like a foul breath.
A strange sensation, subtle at first. A chilling pressure rising in his throat like creeping frost. Then a grip—sharp, brutal—in his chest. His hand clenched around the pencil. His arm stiffened.
He tried to take a deep breath, but the air wouldn't come. A wave of vertigo cut his legs. A distant ringing buzzed in his ears, like a muffled vibration, disconnected from reality.
Behind him—unseen by ordinary eyes—a shadow formed in the void. Draped in a blackish-grey cloth, faceless beneath its hood, its skeletal hands passed through Albert's back to clutch his heart. Standing over him, its head tilted over his neck, and a moan of pleasure—unheard—escaped the entity. The man's vitality was being drawn from his body, gradually, until a wave of energy from the pendant at his neck repelled it violently.
It faded—only for now. It would return.
And for a second—just one—Albert thought he saw his hand's shadow detach from his own. It seemed to move with a slight delay, as though his body and his reflection were no longer perfectly aligned.
Annabelle, her eyes still on him, grew worried.
"Papa?"
He blinked. The office had returned to normal. The buzzing had faded, his breath returned—but his back was damp with cold sweat beneath his shirt. He tried to smile. He forced it a little.
"Nothing, sweetheart. Just… a little stiff."
She nodded, not entirely convinced.
He set the pencil down, observed her a moment longer. He wanted to keep standing, to keep showing her. But he knew.
Something inside him was coming apart.
It wasn't just fatigue.
It was something else.
A slow erasure. An invisible rope being pulled from within—slow, relentless.
The same that, in his family, had always snapped before its time.