Then Alex walked towards me, and instead of the fury he had just shown them, his face transformed into a careful, trembling urgency.
He knelt beside me with such speed that he almost lost his balance, and called me with a different voice, the voice of when I was a pineapple.
He asked me to look at him, to stay awake, not to let me go, and I struggled to open my eyes a little more and find his face.
I managed to say his name barely like a thread, and I saw how his expression broke as he looked at the bruise spreading over my thigh.
He asked if I had hit him, but his tone was that of someone who needs confirmation, if not that of someone who already knows and just wants to hear me breathe.
I nodded barely, almost imperceptibly, and then silence returned to the kitchen with that dense quality that precedes definitive decisions.
Alex took a very slow breath, as if he needed to hold something inside himself before doing the following, and then he took the phone out of his pocket.
He immediately dialed 911 and spoke with fierce clarity, reporting that there was a pregnant victim, domestic violence, and an urgent need for an ambulance and police.
Heleпa shouted from behind that that was a family matter, as if the word family could still serve as a refuge after such brutality.
Alex raised his gaze slowly towards her, and I will never forget that expression, that mixture of contempt, pain and moral certainty that seemed to cut through everything in its path.
He answered that he stopped being family the exact moment they laid their hands on his sister, and nobody had the courage to argue with him about that.
Five minutes later, the sirens were already outside, red and blue, filling the street with violet flashes that pierced the windows of the house like luminous knives.
The house was filled with rapid footsteps, radios, lyrics, instructions, questions, paramedics kneeling, and police officers recording everything with their body cameras.
One of the officers saw the stick lying on the ground and asked what had happened there, although the entire scene was already responding even before anyone spoke.
Nora immediately began to cry and said that everything had been a misunderstanding, using the word with the same opportunism that she had previously recorded.
A paramedic lifted my shirt slightly to check my abdomen, palpating carefully while another placed oxygen on me and controlled my racing pulse.
