Hey everyone!
I’ve been working on Victor’s return lately, and it made me realize something about how I’ve approached Behind Closed Doors.
For most of the earlier chapters, Victor is important without actually being there.
His house, his rules, his relationship with the MC, Elena being his wife… all of that is constantly sitting in the background while he is away.
And that made writing his return much more interesting than I expected. Because I couldn’t just have him walk back through the door and suddenly reset everything. Too much has already happened in that house.
The MC and Elena have crossed boundaries that didn’t exist before. They’ve become more comfortable with each other. They’ve started creating their own little normality while Victor was gone.
So when he comes back, the problem isn’t simply that they now have to hide what happened. They also have to behave like nothing changed.
A simple look can suddenly mean too much. Something that felt completely normal yesterday can become risky just because he is now standing in the room.
That was one of the things I really wanted to preserve while writing these scenes. It would have been very easy to make Victor awful enough that nobody really cares what happened behind his back. That would also make the whole situation much simpler. But I think it would remove a lot of what makes it interesting.
Victor has flaws. His relationship with the MC is far from healthy, and there is a lot of frustration and resentment between them, something players will learn more about during Chapter 4. But he is still his father. And Elena is still Victor's wife. I don’t really want to erase that just to make the player feel better about what happened.
At the same time, I also don’t want the game constantly pointing at the player and saying, “You should feel guilty now.” That would get annoying quickly. The situation already speaks for itself.
For me, the interesting part is seeing what the characters, and ultimately the player, will do in that situation.
Those are the kinds of things I’ve been thinking about while writing this chapter.
It also made me look at the MC a little differently. He spends a lot of the story wanting freedom from Victor.
But there is a difference between actually making your own choices and simply doing the opposite of whatever your father expects from you. If “Victor would hate this” is the main reason you want something, Victor is still influencing the decision. Just in a different way. That becomes difficult for the MC to ignore once Victor is physically back in his life again.
Elena has her own version of the same problem. I don’t want her to suddenly become passive just because Victor returned. Whatever developed between her and the MC while he was gone also happened because she allowed it. So her behavior now has to reflect that too. She can’t simply return to being “Victor’s wife” as if the last few days meant nothing.
And I think that is the part of this section I’m enjoying the most. Not the question of whether they can keep the secret. The question of whether they can actually go back to being the people they were before Victor left.
I’m not sure they can.
It starts as a forbidden affair. But what happens once that affair stops feeling temporary?
And that is probably going to make breakfast scene considerably more uncomfortable than it has any right to be.
Ennushka
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