Anna

Chapter 1

The commuter train heading toward Sydney’s central business district shuddered rhythmically against the rail joints. The repetitive thud echoed through the carriage frame and resonated throughout her entire body. Anna leaned her forehead against the cool glass, watching as the dismal, waking landscape of Sydney’s suburbs drifted past like a slow-motion film, casting long shadows under the morning sun. High corrugated iron fences, the crumbling facades of old buildings, chaotic mounds of rusty shipping containers, and endless rows of identical tiled roofs stretched into the distance, as far as her eyes could see, toward the horizon.

In the glass reflection, she saw her own pretty face, shadowed by a hint of fatigue. The strands of chestnut hair she had styled into a neat bun that morning. Her brown eyes, which once glowed with curiosity, now seemed like deep, dark pools full of unshed sadness, yet also strong determination.

At one hundred and sixty-eight centimeters tall, Anna always held herself with an innate poise, trying not to slouch, but today her shoulders involuntarily slumped under the weight of a large leather bag containing a battered laptop, a folder of reports, and a water bottle. She felt like a grain of sand in this gigantic, indifferent metropolis, where it was every man for himself, and human compassion was a scarce commodity.

The commute from Mount Druitt—the area where she rented her tiny "hutch," as she called it to herself—to the office in central Sydney took about an hour and a half. Anna’s morning began long before the first rays of the sun, while the city was still asleep. She would wake up to the harsh sound of her alarm and always snooze it for another ten minutes. Those ten minutes always felt the sweetest.

Then, on tiptoe, trying not to make unnecessary movements so as not to wake the neighbors sleeping behind the thin wall, she would start getting ready for work. In the small bathroom, where the tiles were covered in ingrained gray mold in places, and rusty water flowed from the tap with a piercing whistle and grinding sound, Anna would tidy herself up. Every such morning was a trial for her, an attempt to put on a mask of a normal life, to hide the pain of an unhealed and still bleeding emotional wound. She looked in the mirror, trying to find in her eyes the Anna of old, the confident girl who made plans years ahead, but she saw only the shadow of a person who had almost lost herself.

After getting ready, it was a ten-minute brisk walk to the station under a cold morning wind. Waiting for the train on a drafty platform. Then the crushing crowd in the carriage, where sleepy people, buried in their phones, merged into one indistinguishable mass that noticed nothing around them. Sometimes Anna managed to get a seat on a worn-out, battered bench, and closing her eyes, she would drift off for a moment, retreating from reality, and the shoving of the crowd would give way to memories.

Another world would emerge before her eyes. A spacious suburban house, filled with light, with a wide veranda draped in thick ivy, where the whole family would gather in the evenings. There, far from the densely built-up city, the air was completely different. The scent of freshly cut grass, damp earth after a summer downpour, enhanced by a thin ocean breeze. The smell of Mom’s homemade baking, especially the cinnamon pie she often made on weekends.

Anna vividly remembered how her father—a tall, stately man with a kind smile—was always fixing something in the yard. Either cleaning the clogged irrigation system, touching up peeling paint on the fence, or tinkering in the garage, extending the life of an old 1964 Holden ute that he had inherited from his father. And his father, Anna’s great-grandfather, from his. Back then, Anna didn't understand why he loved that car so much and clung to its life despite having a brand-new Tesla.

Her father was always busy with something. He constantly kept everything around him in an orderly and working state. He never allowed himself the weakness of idleness.

She herself, while still very young, helped her mother in the kitchen and around the house, and for her father, even though she was a girl, she would hand him wrenches, screwdrivers, and pliers, hold up a loose board, or just be present, watching his work with interest and thereby supporting him morally. Throughout all this, she managed to study, and study excellently. Her energy and young, bright mind were enough to grasp everything on the fly without making much effort. Back then, the future seemed to her a straight, smooth, and very wide road, where every point, every segment, would proceed strictly according to her plan.

Anna finished school with honors, then college. Her parents couldn't be happier with her success. In their eyes, she saw so much pride and love that this feeling gave her a sense of absolute security. Every family celebration, every joint trip to the ocean, everything seemed to Anna unshakeable and eternal, as the world itself seemed eternal and unshakeable.

But the world, with all its monumental weight, collapsed onto the young girl's shoulders in one short, but blood-chilling, terrible second.

That phone call, a year ago, still remained in her call history. The person on the other end of the line, in a hoarse, slightly shaky voice, introduced himself as a police inspector.

A highway catastrophe. In broad daylight. Due to an unclear set of circumstances, her parents' car got trapped between two trucks. Their Tesla was literally flattened between the truck standing in front of it at a red light and another one that rammed it from behind. A massive fire erupted from the impact. Anna was later told that it was almost impossible to extinguish the fire from the burning lithium-ion batteries. The flames simply melted what was left of the vehicle, leaving not the slightest chance of survival. Some parts of the car remained on the hot asphalt as frozen puddles of aluminum.

Whether the driver fell asleep or the brakes failed, no one will ever know, as the culprit of the catastrophe and his truck were destroyed in the same fire.

And they had only gone to the supermarket for groceries.

In that instant, time seemed to compress into a single point. Anna didn't remember the funeral or the few days after. Only a feeling of all-consuming emptiness.

It wasn't just grief. It was an insatiable black hole that slowly but surely devoured everything. The previous atmosphere of the house, her belief in the justice of this world, her confidence in the future, in her clear life plan. She felt like a tree whose roots had all been severed. Whole on the outside, but withered on the inside.

The world became colorless. For several weeks, Anna existed as if in a dream. She began to come to her senses when there was a knock on the door. On the porch stood two men in rumpled suits. They were extremely polite and, in words, even sympathized with her situation. Playing subtly with words in an attempt to express participation, they still, with artificial expressions on their faces, cynically did what they had come for.

"Here is a notice of late payments, Miss. You must resume payments for the house and settle the existing debt; otherwise, next time it will be an eviction notice. Sign right here."

Anna, without reading and without uttering a word, affixed her signature.

The bank representatives apologized dryly and left.

She herself had no savings. All the bills and household bookkeeping had always been handled by her father.

She had no idea in which banks their savings were kept, or if they existed at all. The next visit from the bank clerks was only a matter of time.

Now, her reality was that very hutch on the outskirts. The walls here were thin as paper. Anna knew every neighbor by sight, heard their nightly quarrels, the crying of children. And on the street near the house, in the stairwell, and inside the apartment, there was a persistent aroma of their cooking mixed with cigarette smoke around the clock. The wallpaper in the hallway was constantly peeling off the damp walls, and the old wiring in the house required careful handling. If you turned on the kettle at the same time as the heater, the fuses would blow. In the evenings, returning from work, Anna caught herself thinking that she was afraid to go inside, so foreign and uncomfortable this apartment was. She tried to lock the door with all the bolts as quickly as possible, as if it could protect her from a soulless reality.

The train jerked sharply as it approached Central Station. Anna opened her eyes, returning to the real world. She loved her job. Economics, analytics, numbers, complex financial reports, charts—all of this had a surprisingly calming effect on her. At work, she felt she was in control of at least some process. She was gifted. Where others saw gibberish and chaos, Anna easily calculated patterns and clear logic. She liked to get to the bottom of things, optimize data, and bring matters into impeccable order. Work was the only place where she felt like herself, and not just a lost orphan huddled in rented housing. There, she was a professional. There, she was valued for her sharp mind, analytical thinking, and incredible attention to detail that others overlooked. It was this professional streak that kept her afloat, preventing her from slipping completely into apathy. She knew her work brought real value, and that was the only thing that mattered in her new, colorless life.

However, adjusting the bag on her shoulder, she involuntarily winced. Anna knew well that behind the office door, not only work awaited her. Something that was becoming harder to ignore every day awaited her. There was a small nuance. The thought of it made everything inside her tighten as she entered the office.

This nuance poisoned every working hour, turning her beloved job into a battlefield where she constantly had to defend her boundaries.

The train doors slid open noisily. A dense stream of people carried her onto the platform of Town Hall station. Anna merged with the crowd, taking a deep breath to calm her racing heart. Ahead was another long workday, and she knew that, as always, she would have to be extremely composed. She smoothed her hair and hurried along George Street. Her company's building was already visible a couple of hundred meters away.