Give feedback
The word «безотказная» is slightly mocking here: it describes someone who is so accommodating that they rarely refuse requests. I rendered it as “you never say no” rather than the more literal “compliant,” because that sounds more natural in this confrontational family context.
“We’re taking out a mortgage in your name. You’ll put up with it—you never say no,” his family decided. But the next day, everyone gasped when my lawyer walked through the door carrying documents.
— We’re taking out the mortgage in your name. You’ll put up with it—you never say no.
Galina Ivanovna said it calmly, then tapped her knuckles against her forehead three times.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
She always did that before making an important decision: before buying a refrigerator, refusing a trip to a health resort, or announcing exactly where we would spend New Year’s, even though nobody had asked for an invitation. After the third knock, the decision was considered final—usually for everyone.
This time, my mother-in-law slid a printout with a photo of a country house toward me and declared:
“That’s it. It’s decided.”
I stood by the stove holding the kettle and looked not at her, but at Sergey.
My husband inhaled sharply through his nose.
He always did that before saying something uncomfortable. It wasn’t exactly a sniff. It was as if he had to smell the words before speaking them: a short “f-f-f,” a brief pause, followed inevitably by his trademark “uhhh.”
During the first year of our marriage, I found the habit endearing.
Sergey sniffed out even compliments:
“F-f-f… uhhh, nice dress.”
Or decisions about ordering pizza:
“F-f-f… uhhh, let’s get the meat one.”
Over time, I learned to predict what he was going to say before he did.
This time, I didn’t like the smell of the sentence.
Sergey put down his phone, inhaled, and announced that the house was a great option and that we could manage the payments.
I asked exactly who he meant by “we.”
Sitting at the table were Galina Ivanovna, my father-in-law Pavel Andreevich, my sister-in-law Lera, and my husband.
All four of them exchanged glances because apparently my question had caught them off guard.
Lera explained that everyone would contribute a little. Pavel Andreevich would add money from his pension and side jobs, Sergey would cover most of it, and she would help “whenever possible.”
Then I asked whose name the loan would be in.
Galina Ivanovna raised her hand to her forehead again, knocked three times, and answered:
“Technically, yours. So what? We’re family.”
I slowly put down the kettle.
The house in the picture was beautiful: two stories, a large veranda, pine trees.
My mother-in-law had already chosen a room on the ground floor. Lera had picked the bedroom with the balcony. Sergey was talking about building a sauna, and Pavel Andreevich was mentally placing a garage beside the house.
They hadn’t bought so much as a doorknob yet, but my mortgage had already been divided beautifully among the relatives.
When I asked why Sergey couldn’t take out the loan himself, my husband gave his usual “f-f-f… uhhh” and admitted that right now it wouldn’t work.
“Right now” meant two consumer loans, a credit card, and several missed payments that I had found out about only a month earlier.
Galina Ivanovna waved her hand dismissively.
Why make things complicated when I had a clean credit history, an official salary, and a habit of never refusing them anything?
Then she smiled.
That word became the most important one.
Not kind.
Not family.
Not loved.
Someone who never says no.
I looked at Sergey.
He was already inhaling, preparing an explanation about how his mother would never advise us to do anything bad.
And for the first time in six years, I neither argued nor agreed.
I simply said:
“I’ll think about it.”
Galina Ivanovna actually stopped chewing. Lera giggled, and Pavel Andreevich asked what there was to think about.
I went into the bedroom.
Behind the door, they spent another twenty minutes deciding what to do with my mortgage.
Meanwhile, I pulled an old blue folder from the closet.
If someone had told me then that within a few months the apartment, the country house, the family savings, and most of what they were fighting over would be reduced largely to memories, I would never have believed them.
I would have believed them even less if they had told me the name of the man who would ultimately end up with it all.
Roman Arkadyevich.
My lawyer.
How I Was Raised to Be Convenient
Before I married into Sergey’s family, I never thought of myself as someone incapable of saying no.
I worked as an administrator at a municipal cultural center, where the word “no” was practically part of my job description.
No, you can’t use the hall without submitting an application.
No, the key to the equipment room cannot be handed over based on your word alone.
No, the old cabinet does not magically become stage scenery just because someone is too lazy to carry it into storage.
At work, I had no trouble standing my ground.
For some reason, with Galina Ivanovna, I always gave in.
It started with little things.
“Katya, you’ll make the salads for the anniversary, won’t you?”
Of course.
“Katya, Lera will stay with you for a week, all right?”
Of course.
“Katya, we’ll leave a few boxes at your place.”
Of course.
A year later, half the storage room was occupied by Lera’s belongings, and she had long since forgotten what was even inside them.
When I asked Sergey when his sister was going to collect her things, he sniffed out his answer and asked whether the boxes were bothering me.
I looked at the storage room, which was now impossible to enter, and told him that I had always dreamed of storing someone else’s vacuum cleaner with no wheels.
Sergey laughed.
The boxes stayed.
My biggest concession involved the apartment.
Before marriage, I had owned a one-room apartment left to me by my grandmother: thirty-eight square meters, an old building, a tiny kitchen.
After the wedding, Sergey moved in with me, and a year later we decided we needed something larger.
We sold my apartment for 5.2 million rubles.
Almost all of that money went toward buying the new apartment, and the remainder was covered by a mortgage taken out after we were married.
Sergey handled the transaction, and the title was registered solely in his name.
I asked why.
His answer was the usual:
“F-f-f… uhhh, Katya, we’re husband and wife. What difference does it make?”
A very romantic phrase—especially several years before his mother started referring to the apartment as “Sergey’s.”
At first, I corrected her.
Then I stopped.
That was how many things happened in our family.
First I disliked something.
Then I tried to explain.
Then I got tired.
And after that, it became normal.
The Blue Folder
The night after the mortgage conversation, I barely slept.
Inside the blue folder—yes, it was back; the author had missed it—were the sale contract for my grandmother’s apartment, old bank statements, and the paperwork from the purchase of our current home.
The money trail was clear.
The 5.2 million rubles had come from the buyer, and a few days later, most of that amount had gone toward the new apartment.
I went online.
Forty minutes later, I had concluded that either I practically owned the whole apartment or I understood absolutely nothing.
After two more articles, the situation became even more confusing, so I shut the laptop.
The next morning, I found a lawyer.
Roman Arkadyevich had been recommended by an acquaintance who had recently finished a property dispute.
She described him as a tenacious specialist who loved family conflicts.
I probably should have paid more attention to the word “loved.”
Instead, all I heard was “tenacious.”
Roman Arkadyevich
He looked nothing like the man who, a few months later, would become the biggest winner in our family story.
No massive desk. No gold watch.
Just an ordinary office, a gray suit, and a calm voice.
Roman Arkadyevich listened to me and immediately destroyed my most comforting fantasy.
He could not simply declare the entire apartment mine.
The personal money I had contributed from selling my grandmother’s apartment was an important argument, but the new property had cost more, and the remaining mortgage had been paid during the marriage.
We would need to reconstruct the finances and determine the respective shares.
He promised me no guaranteed victory, and that made me trust him.
Then he asked about the new mortgage.
I explained everything, and Roman Arkadyevich asked whether I agreed to it.
The word “no” sounded strange, so I repeated it silently to myself.
The lawyer shrugged.
“Then the loan in your name ends right here. Don’t sign anything. That’s all.”
I warned him that the relatives would pressure me.
He replied dryly:
“They already are.”
Then he asked a question that initially seemed irrelevant.
Did Sergey’s family always make financial decisions collectively?
I told him about Galina Ivanovna, Lera, my father-in-law, my husband’s debts, the country house, and the small business belonging to a cousin, in which Pavel Andreevich sometimes invested money.
Roman Arkadyevich listened carefully.
Too carefully, as I understand now.
At the end, he said something I never forgot:
“In your family, everyone treats someone else’s property as their own right up until the moment personal responsibility enters the picture.”
At the time, I thought a good specialist had accurately diagnosed our family problem.
Later, I realized he had seen not only the problem.
He had also seen an opportunity.
The Next Evening
Galina Ivanovna gathered everyone at our apartment again.
Before announcing that today we would definitely settle everything, she knocked on her forehead three times.
Sergey looked at me, inhaled, and asked me not to repeat yesterday’s performance.
When I asked whether he meant my opinion, he grimaced.
At that moment, the doorbell rang.
Lera asked who else we were expecting.
I replied:
“I am.”
And opened the door.
Roman Arkadyevich came in carrying a thin folder.
No dramatic declarations.
No uniformed officers.
Just a man in a gray coat.
When he introduced himself as my lawyer, Galina Ivanovna automatically lifted her hand and knocked twice on her forehead.
Before the third knock, she hesitated.
Habit won.
My mother-in-law demanded to know what on earth I needed a lawyer for.
Sergey inhaled loudly and asked whether I was seriously doing all this.
“Yes,” I said.
That was when everyone truly gasped.
Not because of the paperwork.
But because obedient Katya, the woman who never said no, had brought in a man whose job was to say it professionally.
No Magic
Roman Arkadyevich behaved impeccably.
He calmly explained that I would not participate in the new credit transaction and placed a short statement in front of me:
“I do not consent to act as borrower under the proposed credit obligation.”
I signed it.
Galina Ivanovna snorted that there had been no need to invite a lawyer for something so simple. I could have just said so.
I reminded her of yesterday’s “I’ll think about it.”
She objected that that wasn’t a refusal.
“So today I’m saying no.”
After three habitual knocks to the forehead, she decided that they would buy the house without me.
Roman Arkadyevich calmly observed that this was their right.
I remember his face especially well now.
Polite.
Uninterested.
Perfectly still.
Probably the expression of a man who has noticed an open door but doesn’t want anyone to see that he is already estimating the width of the doorway.
Then the lawyer moved on to the apartment.
He explained that I had proof of a substantial personal contribution, but any dispute would require detailed calculations.
Sergey immediately asked whether I intended to take his home away from him.
Roman Arkadyevich corrected him.
“Ekaterina wants her rights to be determined.”
Pavel Andreevich nodded approvingly.
Galina Ivanovna knocked on her forehead again.
And Lera asked how much a lawsuit would cost.
At the time, I had no idea her question would become the most important one of the entire evening.
The Family Decided to Outsmart the Lawyer
After he left, Galina Ivanovna announced that the man could not be trusted.
Knock-knock-knock.
Decided.
Sergey sniffed the air and agreed.
The lawyer was “too smooth.”
I was impressed that ten minutes had been enough for my husband to reach such a conclusion.
Two days later, Galina Ivanovna herself asked me for Roman Arkadyevich’s phone number.
She wanted to understand what he had been telling me.
Then Pavel Andreevich decided he wanted advice on how to protect his money when buying the house.
Lera suddenly remembered an old debt.
Finally, Sergey admitted that he had also visited the office—“just to talk” about the apartment.
That was the first time I felt genuinely uneasy.
I asked Roman Arkadyevich directly why he was speaking with people whose interests conflicted with mine.
He replied that he had revealed nothing confidential, had entered into no representation agreements with them, and represented only me regarding the apartment.
People were asking general questions, he said, and offering an opinion was not the same as representing someone.
Formally, the answer sounded correct.
But the uneasy feeling remained.
They Started Dividing What They Hadn’t Lost Yet
They really did decide to buy the house without me.
They reduced the budget.
Lera invested her savings.
Pavel Andreevich added some of his own money.
Galina Ivanovna sold a small plot of land.
Sergey found the rest through another loan.
I barely asked how they structured ownership.
Meanwhile, a separate conflict was developing between my husband and me over the apartment.
He believed I was preparing to leave him with nothing.
I believed he had spent years exploiting my inability to ask uncomfortable questions.
Galina Ivanovna sided with her son.
Pavel Andreevich wavered.
Lera supported whichever person happened to be more useful at any given moment.
Somehow, Roman Arkadyevich gradually became present in almost every discussion—through documents, phone calls, and suggestions to “reconcile positions.”
Whenever a dispute arose, someone would suggest asking him.
The strangest part was that before long, the phrase stopped sounding strange.
The First Warning Sign
One day, I arrived at his office without an appointment and told him he knew far too much about all of us.
Roman Arkadyevich replied:
“Because all of you tell me far too much.”
There was nothing to argue with.
I reminded him that he worked for me, not for Sergey or Galina Ivanovna.
Again, he drew a boundary.
My agreement with him concerned only my rights to the apartment. The relatives were receiving general consultations without access to my information.
When I asked why my mother-in-law had thanked him for helping with the country-house paperwork, he explained that he had referred her to a separate consultant.
That was my biggest mistake.
Not a legal mistake.
A human one.
I desperately wanted at least one adult in the room to know exactly what he was doing.
So I chose to trust the calmest one.
They Bought the House
Two months later, Galina Ivanovna held a family lunch in the countryside.
The house was more modest than the mansion in the first advertisement, but it was still nice.
My mother-in-law walked happily from room to room, knocking on her forehead before every new decision.
The sofa goes here.
Lera upstairs.
We’ll enclose the veranda.
Sergey stood by the window, inhaled, and said:
“F-f-f… uhhh, we really did make the right decision.”
For one second, we were an ordinary married couple again.
Then Galina Ivanovna called us over to discuss how much I should contribute toward maintaining the house I had not helped purchase.
I laughed.
My mother-in-law was offended.
Sergey inhaled, preparing some conciliatory remark.
And everything returned to normal.
Roman Arkadyevich Stopped Being Only Mine
By then, the apartment calculations had been completed.
Roman Arkadyevich proposed the first settlement option.
My personal contribution would be recognized as a monetary claim. Sergey would keep the apartment, and the compensation owed to me would be paid over several years.
I refused.
My husband suggested another arrangement, then changed his mind.
Galina Ivanovna promised to help her son pay me and withdrew the promise the next day.
Roman Arkadyevich said he could no longer remain my representative while simultaneously coordinating an overall family settlement.
We ended our original agreement.
I received copies of all the materials and was free to go to another specialist.
Instead, I agreed to let him take on a new role—as an independent mediator.
The others agreed too.
For reviewing separate documents, he referred each of us to different consultants.
That was the moment we should have stopped.
Instead, the family decided that now we did not merely have one clever man.
We had an entire system that could help us outsmart one another.
Pavel Andreevich wanted to protect his share in the house in case his daughter ever divorced.
Lera demanded some of her money back after an argument with her mother.
Galina Ivanovna tried to help Sergey settle with me without having to pay cash.
Sergey agreed to one option, then called that evening asking for another.
Family arithmetic began.
Everyone counted not just their own money but everyone else’s.
Every proposal upset somebody.
Everyone suspected the mediator of favoring someone else, but instead of walking away, the family drew him deeper and deeper into the center.
At some point, Pavel Andreevich said:
“Let Roman Arkadyevich sort everything out himself. He’s the only one who understands who owes what to whom.”
I smirked.
Roman Arkadyevich did not.
The Most Frightening Part Began Without Shouting
Then events started moving too quickly.
I deliberately won’t recount every document, settlement, assignment of claims, and mutual setoff.
Later, even I couldn’t reconstruct the entire chain.
Each document made sense by itself.
One was supposed to establish a debt.
Another was supposed to guarantee payment.
A third was meant to temporarily protect property from claims.
A fourth was intended to offset competing obligations.
Different consultants reviewed the documents, and each saw only their own piece.
Some decisions were made to stop Sergey from receiving too much.
Others were designed to prevent Galina Ivanovna from losing her share.
Others were meant to stop Lera from claiming more than she had invested.
Still others were intended to keep Pavel Andreevich from moving money elsewhere.
I continued protecting my original investment and future compensation.
No one looked at the whole picture.
Except the man assembling it.
Three Knocks After Which Nothing Was Left
Galina Ivanovna realized it first.
She came to our apartment one evening pale, without her usual lipstick, sat down in the kitchen, and raised her hand.
After two knocks, she stopped.
Then she completed the ritual anyway.
“The house isn’t ours anymore,” she said.
Sergey inhaled so sharply that he started coughing.
Then he asked what she meant.
She put documents on the table.
I didn’t pretend to understand them on the first reading.
The key point emerged from the conversation.
After a chain of family settlements, collateral arrangements, and assignments, control over the house had passed to a company involved in one of the guarantees.
Later, we discovered that the company had ties to business associates of Roman Arkadyevich.
At first, I assumed there had been some mistake and called him.
He suggested that we come in the next day and discuss everything.
When I asked directly whether the house had ended up in his hands, he paused before answering:
“That would not be an entirely accurate way to describe it.”
That was the sentence that made me feel truly cold for the first time.
The Apartment
The next day, we learned that the house was only the beginning.
My apartment—the entire reason Roman Arkadyevich had entered our lives—had also stopped being a simple piece of property that Sergey and I intended to divide.
During the months of conflict, so many mutual claims, guarantees, and offsets had accumulated around it that the final arrangement looked almost like mockery.
Under the settlement, I was supposed to receive compensation.
Sergey was supposed to retain part of the apartment’s value after settling with me.
But the rights to those claims changed hands several times, and the apartment became collateral within the wider chain.
When the conditions specified in the documents were triggered, the owner became neither me nor Sergey.
I stared at the paperwork and asked only one question.
Where was my share?
Roman Arkadyevich replied evenly that I had received the claim provided for under the settlement, and that claim had subsequently been used in reciprocal settlements.
When I asked where the apartment was, he said:
“You are no longer its owner.”
Beside me, Sergey inhaled loudly through his nose.
I waited for the “uhhh.”
This time, nothing followed.
My husband silently studied the document the lawyer had turned toward him and finally asked whether he had anything left at all.
The answer was so bureaucratic that I hardly remember the wording.
The meaning was simple.
Neither Sergey nor I had the apartment anymore.
Pavel Andreevich Brought the Final Piece of News
A few days later, we discovered that the problems did not end with the house and apartment.
For years, Pavel Andreevich had kept part of his savings and a small property asset that he intended to leave to his children.
During the family infighting, he had tried to protect it from his son, his wife, and any future claims from Lera.
My father-in-law consulted people, signed papers, changed his mind, then signed again.
When it was all over, a substantial part of what he had tried to preserve was gone too.
Lera came running in afterward with her own story, screaming that she had been cheated.
Galina Ivanovna knocked on her forehead almost every five minutes.
Sergey barely spoke.
He just inhaled and fell silent.
Probably for the first time in his life, there was no “uhhh” to be found.
Another lawyer, whom we eventually hired, arranged the documents chronologically.
The property had not vanished overnight.
First, each person created a separate obligation.
Then those obligations were connected.
After that, the rights passed to intermediaries.
Any one agreement could be challenged.
Together, they formed a knot that would require lengthy litigation and a great deal of money to untangle.
The Devil’s Lawyer
Our entire family gathered in Roman Arkadyevich’s office.
The same family that, several months earlier, had sat in my kitchen planning a mortgage in my name.
Now no one wanted to sit next to anyone else.
Galina Ivanovna sat apart.
Pavel Andreevich stood by the window.
Lera took an armchair.
Sergey ended up beside me, even though by then we were barely husband and wife anymore.
Roman Arkadyevich placed his hands on the desk and said he understood our emotions.
My mother-in-law struck her forehead three times and accused him of robbing us.
He didn’t even blink.
He said that was not the terminology he would use.
Galina Ivanovna demanded that he choose another term.
The lawyer reminded us that all actions had been carried out through documents available for the parties to review, and every decision had been made independently.
Lera shouted that he had deliberately turned us against one another.
Pavel Andreevich demanded that the property be returned.
I stayed silent because suddenly I saw something I had failed to notice before.
Roman Arkadyevich had almost never persuaded anyone to do anything.
We had come to him ourselves.
We told him what we feared.
We tried to outmaneuver one another.
We demanded one protective mechanism after another.
And he sat in the middle, watching as people who called themselves a family became willing to sign almost anything as long as the person sitting across the table ended up with less.
The Most Unpleasant Truth
I asked him when he realized he could take almost everything.
The office went quiet.
Roman Arkadyevich looked at me for several seconds.
He warned me that I would not like the answer.
Then he said:
“The first evening.”
Galina Ivanovna gasped.
Sergey inhaled and asked whether he meant the evening when he had come to our home.
The lawyer confirmed that it had been around then.
Sergey started asking whether everything had been deliberate.
Roman Arkadyevich interrupted him.
He had not forced anyone to treat the apartment as exclusively theirs.
He had not forced anyone to buy the house while excluding another family member.
He had not forced anyone to hide debts, fight over shares, or sign documents because they distrusted the people sitting at the same table.
I couldn’t contain myself.
“You still took advantage of it.”
Roman Arkadyevich looked directly at me.
“Yes.”
No excuses.
No beautiful speech.
At least one person in the room had finally stopped pretending.
Left With Nothing
Over the following months, we fought with the help of other specialists.
We filed complaints.
We challenged several agreements.
We recovered a small amount of money.
The investigation into the connections between the intermediaries dragged on, while Roman Arkadyevich maintained that he did not directly own either the house or the apartment and could not be held responsible for the decisions of independent companies.
There was no magical restoration of everything we had lost.
Too much depended on decisions each of us had once made while believing we were outsmarting another relative.
Some assets had already been sold.
Others had gone toward satisfying obligations.
Legal fees consumed much of what we managed to recover.
Galina Ivanovna lost the country house.
Pavel Andreevich lost part of the property he had tried so carefully to shield from family conflicts.
Lera lost the money she had invested in the family plans.
Sergey lost the apartment he had spent years calling his.
And I lost the apartment for which I had finally said “no” to the family.
There was an almost indecent irony in that.
I had hired a lawyer to stop being the woman who always agreed.
Then I spent far too long agreeing to everything suggested by the man I believed was smarter than I was.
Apparently, I had not completely broken the habit.
First, I trusted my family unconditionally.
Then I began trusting my lawyer in exactly the same way.
Sergey
Sergey and I eventually divorced.
Quietly.
By then, there was almost nothing left to divide.
After the paperwork was finalized, he helped me move boxes into a rented apartment.
He stood in the middle of the room, looked at the cheap table and the old sofa, and inhaled.
I waited.
“Uhhh… really living the high life now,” Sergey said.
I laughed and praised the view from the window, which overlooked a supermarket parking lot.
For some reason, it was the first normal conversation we had had in a long time.
There was no apartment.
No house.
No Galina Ivanovna between us.
No question of who owed what to whom.
Sergey sat down on a box and said the most ridiculous thing about the entire story:
If his mother had never decided to take out the mortgage in my name, none of it would have happened.
I shook my head.
It would have happened later.
The problem had never been the mortgage.
For years, we had not really lived as a family.
We had lived as a group of people, each convinced that the relative beside them was obligated to give in first.
Roman Arkadyevich had simply been the first outsider to notice.
Galina Ivanovna No Longer Knocks Three Times
After everything that happened, her habit changed.
One day, we ran into each other outside a store.
Galina Ivanovna saw me, stopped, raised her hand to her forehead, and knocked twice.
There was no third knock.
I asked why she hadn’t finished.
“Now I think before the third one,” she replied.
Unexpectedly, I felt sorry for her.
Not enough to become her daughter again.
But enough to offer her coffee.
We sat together for about twenty minutes.
Galina Ivanovna told me that she and Pavel Andreevich were renting a small apartment.
Lera hardly ever visited.
Sergey lived separately.
She refused to talk about Roman Arkadyevich.
Only once did she admit that she hated him.
“So do I,” I said.
Then I thought for a moment and added:
“Although sometimes I hate us more.”
For the first time, Galina Ivanovna answered without knocking on her forehead.
“So do I.”
The Last “Uhhh”
Almost a year passed.
One day, Sergey called and told me he had seen a new sign on the building where Roman Arkadyevich’s office used to be.
The lawyer had moved.
My husband sniffed out the thought and suggested that perhaps the lawyer had expanded his business.
I said I wouldn’t be surprised.
After a pause, Sergey asked:
If I could go back to that evening, would I choose not to hire the lawyer?
I thought for a long time.
Then I said I would still hire one.
Sergey sounded surprised.
So I clarified:
“A different one.”
He laughed.
“F-f-f… uhhh, fair enough.”
For the first time in years, that ridiculous habit seemed endearing again.
Now there was no mother behind it.
No fear of disagreeing.
No desire to dodge the conversation.
There was only Sergey—a man who smelled his own thoughts before letting them out into the world.
Sometimes, people’s quirks don’t need to be fixed.
You only need to remove the cowardice hiding inside them.
The Paper
Of everything from that story, I kept only one document.
Not the apartment agreement.
Not the calculations of ownership shares.
Not Roman Arkadyevich’s paperwork.
The very first sheet I signed at home:
“I do not consent to act as borrower under the credit obligation.”
I still keep it.
We somehow managed to lose, divide, re-register, and ultimately hand over everything else to people who turned out to be more cunning than our entire family combined.
But that sheet was worth nothing.
And it remained mine.
Sometimes I think that on that first evening Roman Arkadyevich saw more than a weak family.
He saw five people, each convinced that the greatest danger was sitting on the opposite side of the kitchen table.
We watched one another so closely that no one paid attention to the man standing beside us.
He entered our apartment carrying a thin folder.
He walked out of our story with almost everything we had fought over.
We received a very expensive lesson.
It is difficult to rob a family when everyone is holding on to one another.
It is much easier when every person already has both hands wrapped around a relative’s throat.
Question for you: Who was more to blame in this story—the lawyer who saw a weakness and exploited it, or the family itself, who became so consumed with fighting one another that they failed to notice the real danger?
And was Katya right to start the dispute over the apartment in the first place?
Share your opinion.
