“What are you doing?!” I screamed, staring at the monitor as the screen instantly went black.
Tamara Borisovna was standing by the socket under the desk, holding the plug of the power strip in her wrinkled hand.
“You’re wasting electricity, and the country is in crisis,” my mother-in-law grumbled, without even bothering to take off her shoes. “Enough poking around with your little games. Go pour me some tea instead. My blood pressure is up.”
It had all started three days earlier. Ilya had brought his mother straight from the train station without warning. From the trunk of the taxi, he unloaded an old Soviet suitcase.
“Mom needs to recover after a mini-stroke,” my husband announced as he walked into the kitchen. “Ksyusha, come on, what’s the big deal? You’re home anyway, doing nothing. You can look after her, give her injections. Is that so hard for you?”
I stared at him in silence. My workday as an independent financial auditor lasted twelve hours. I had a contract on the line with a major retail chain from Yekaterinburg. Every kopeck went toward the rehabilitation of our seven-year-old daughter Polina: speech therapists and special-needs specialists cost a fortune. Our daughter still only made humming sounds.
“I have a strict deadline, Ilya, and a contract with a serious client. I’m not just sitting at the computer. I’m working.”
“Oh, come on. You just press buttons. Show some womanly compassion. My mother is sick.”
And now his mother had “recovered.” My mother-in-law was wandering around the apartment, imposing her own rules.
I looked back at the monitor. On it had been an open spreadsheet for restoring transactions from the past three years. Four hours of painstaking manual reconciliation, with no autosave because of the client’s specific software. All of it had vanished into nothing.
“Do you understand what you just did?”
“Oh, so what, something got erased! You’ll type it again. Your hands won’t fall off. Ilyusha! Come here, your lady of the manor is glaring at me like a wolf again!”
That night, as snoring came from my mother-in-law’s room, I sat down at the kitchen table.
I opened my laptop, logged into the State Services portal, and sent a request to the Central Catalog of Credit Histories. Two minutes later, a PDF from the credit bureau arrived in my inbox. I flipped through the pages until my eyes caught a bright red marker next to an active obligation.
A loan for three million eight hundred thousand rubles. Status: active guarantor. Borrower: Smirnova Tamara Borisovna. Car loan for a brand-new Chinese crossover, a Geely Monjaro.
I had never taken out a loan in my life, and I had never signed as anyone’s guarantor. Especially not for Tamara Borisovna, who had never even had a driver’s license.
I did not sleep a wink until morning. By ten o’clock, using old work contacts at the bank, I was already holding scans of the credit file in my hands.
My lawful husband, Ilya, had forged my signature on the guarantee agreement. Attached to the document package was a fake 2-NDFL income certificate from Vector LLC, a company belonging to his close friend Pashka. According to the paper with the blue stamp, I, a senior auditor with a Swiss certification, was listed there as a secretary-referent with a salary of thirty-five thousand rubles.
But the worst thing came when I pulled up the statements from our joint savings account. On the twelfth of every month, eighty-five thousand rubles were automatically withdrawn from it.
I had thought Ilya was transferring that money to a special subaccount. We were saving for a six-month rehabilitation course for Polina at a private speech center. Every ruble there had been earned by my night shifts.
It turned out my husband had simply been paying off his mother’s car loan at my expense. Meanwhile, our daughter, on the other side of the wall, was trying in her sleep to pronounce one simple word: “Mama.”
I closed the laptop. A clear plan formed in my mind.
Saturday. My mother-in-law’s anniversary celebration. The perfect time for an audit.
The Uyut Café on the edge of town greeted us with the smell of cognac and mayonnaise salads. The relatives were loudly chewing shashlik. In the place of honor at the center of the table sat Tamara Borisovna, her gold crowns gleaming.
“Our Ilyusha is pure gold!” Uncle Tolya slammed his shot glass down onto the tablecloth. “He bought his mother such a car, three million rubles! All by himself, hard worker that he is. And he keeps his wife at home too. Ksyukha just pokes around on the computer all day, doesn’t know real life.”
Ilya smiled with satisfaction, adjusting the collar of his new shirt. My mother-in-law nodded in agreement, pressing her plump hand to her chest.
I calmly set aside my glass of apple juice. My leather folder was lying on my lap. From it, I took out two A4 sheets and carefully placed them on the table, right on top of the plate of sliced cheese.
“Let’s balance the accounts, Tamara Borisovna,” I said.
“Ksyusha, what are you doing?” Ilya tensed.
“Your son did not buy that car with his own money. He stole it from me and from our daughter,” I said, looking around at the relatives. “He forged my signature on a guarantee agreement and submitted a fake certificate of my income to the bank. His friend Pashka helped him through his fly-by-night company.”
My mother-in-law dropped her fork. It struck the edge of the plate with a sharp clang.
“Ilya’s real salary in logistics is forty-five thousand rubles,” I said clearly, looking my husband straight in the eyes. “He couldn’t even buy the wheels of that car. Every month, he secretly withdrew eighty-five thousand from our family account. From the money I was saving for Polina’s treatment and rehabilitation. Your son is an ordinary thief.”
“Ksyusha, stop it…” Ilya jumped up, knocking over his chair. “We’re family, so the money is shared! Why are you putting on this circus in front of people?”
“I’ve said everything, Ilya.”
I zipped up my bag, rose from my chair, and walked toward the exit. Behind me, my mother-in-law started wailing, but I was no longer listening.
On Monday morning, I took the original documents to an independent forensic examination bureau. Three days later, a thick blue booklet lay on my desk: an official pre-trial handwriting analysis. The expert’s verdict was unequivocal: the signature on the guarantee agreement had not been made by me.
With that conclusion, I went to the district police department. The officer on duty silently accepted my statement regarding fraud under the articles for loan fraud and document forgery. An hour later, I stepped out onto the street, clutching a small gray slip in my hand: a notification confirming the registration of my report.
The next step was a visit to the bank’s head office. The head of security, a grim man with a scar across the bridge of his nose, studied my papers in five minutes. His face turned to stone. A forged guarantee agreement threatened the bank with serious legal costs.
The security department reacted immediately. The bank removed me from the list of guarantors at once, annulled the loan agreement with Ilya due to the submission of falsified documents, and demanded that he repay the entire amount ahead of schedule: three million eight hundred thousand rubles. The Geely Monjaro was declared wanted for seizure and towing to an impound lot.
But the bank’s security department did not stop there. The bank’s security officers contacted the security department at Ilya’s workplace. The management of the large logistics company, after learning about the criminal case against their senior manager, did not want any unnecessary trouble with the police.
Ilya was called into the general director’s office. He was offered two options: dismissal under an article for loss of trust, or a quiet mutual separation agreement with his belongings out the door that same day. My former husband chose the second.
Black 120-liter construction bags turned out to be perfect for Ilya’s things. Into them went his designer shirts, shoes, expensive cologne, and game console.
Ilya and Tamara Borisovna rushed over half an hour later. My husband pounded on the door, hysterically yanking the handle. I opened it slightly, leaving the chain on.
“Ksyusha!” Ilya pleaded. “Withdraw the complaint! They’ll put me in prison! I lost my job, the bank is demanding the full amount right now, and they’re loading the car onto a tow truck! Ksyusha, we’re family!”
“Family does not steal from a child who cannot speak, Ilya. You stole the money that was supposed to help our daughter find her voice. Take your bags and your mother.”
I shut the door in his face and locked it.
A month passed.
Ilya was still unemployed and was now under a written undertaking not to leave town. The criminal case was moving forward at full speed. The bank had successfully taken back the car for the debt. My husband moved in with Tamara Borisovna in her Khrushchev-era apartment on the edge of the city.
My apartment smelled of lavender and cleanliness. In the bright children’s room, Polina was diligently working with her new specialist.
“Dog,” my daughter pronounced slowly, but very clearly.
I took a sip of hot coffee, smiled, and opened my laptop. A new audit contract from a large holding company had just landed in my inbox.
