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Just One Decision - ebook
Just One Decision - ebook
Sometimes, one decision is all it takes to change everything. Brzeziny Dolne, at the beginning of the twentieth century. A small provincial town of cobbled streets, gas lamps, and evenings when the fog quickly swallows familiar places. Leonard Burski leads what appears to be an ordinary life. He has a steady job, a respectable position, and a woman he cares about. But he also has a weakness - one that is slowly beginning to take control of him. When events suddenly take an unexpected turn, Leonard is faced with a choice. In a single moment, he must decide what to do next. And that moment will change everything. Just One Decision is a dark psychological crime story about fear, responsibility, and the consequences of choices that cannot be undone. A criminal mystery intertwines with the story of a man who gradually discovers that there are some things you simply cannot run from. Because sometimes, the hardest person to hide the truth from is yourself.
Ta publikacja spełnia wymagania dostępności zgodnie z dyrektywą EAA.
| Kategoria: | Kryminał |
| Język: | Angielski |
| Zabezpieczenie: |
Watermark
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| Rozmiar pliku: | 9,9 MB |
FRAGMENT KSIĄŻKI
Brzeziny Dolne is a fictional town, but the world in which this story unfolds was conceived in the image of a provincial town at the beginning of the twentieth century - with its railway, tenement houses, assembly halls, newspapers, and an everyday life in which seemingly minor events could set consequences in motion that no one could foresee.
Just One Decision is a crime and psychological story in which the choices made by the characters, and the circumstances that lead them to those choices, matter as much as the event at the heart of the plot. The story is not based on any specific criminal case; its characters, locations, and events belong to literary fiction.
I leave it to the reader to decide where the line lies between a mistake, responsibility, and a decision whose consequences can no longer be undone.
CHAPTER 1
In the late autumn of 1907, few people came willingly to Brzeziny Dolne. The town lay in a broad valley cut by a river that flooded its banks in spring and, in autumn, covered the surrounding countryside in a heavy, milky fog. From October until March, the cobbled streets were almost never dry. Carriage wheels splashed through mud, gutters murmured with rain, and after dark the gas lamps lost their glow only a few paces from the pavement. Brzeziny Dolne was not large. Yet it possessed everything a provincial town convinced of its own importance required: passenger and freight stations, a post office, a courthouse, a small garrison, two hotels, a theatre, several restaurants, more than a dozen taverns, and an assembly hall on Młyńska Street. Several times a month, wrestling matches were held there. They drew merchants, labourers, soldiers, and clerks. Some came for the sport. Others were far more interested in the money changing hands before each bout. In time, Leonard Burski became one of the latter. Burski was forty-two, though he looked older. Thin and slightly stooped, with a carefully trimmed moustache, he dressed better than his actual income allowed. For several years he had managed a three-storey tenement house on Garbarska Street, owned by a merchant who lived outside Brzeziny Dolne. His duties included collecting rents, seeing that bills were paid, arranging minor repairs, and accounting for the owner's money. The job did not make him wealthy, but it gave him a comfortable life. It should have been enough. It was not. At first he went to the wrestling matches out of curiosity. He liked the silence that fell just before a bout began and the sudden roar when one man gained the advantage. He placed his first wager for amusement. He won. The next time he wagered more, and later more still. Gradually the
