Maryana’s email arrived at 4:47 p.m. I remembered the exact minute because I had been looking at the corner of my screen, calculating whether I could catch the trolleybus before the wet snow turned the sidewalks into one continuous sheet of ice.
“Vika, save me. They moved the kindergarten celebration to tomorrow, and I still haven’t finished sewing the bear costume. I’m sending you the raw quarterly data—you’re our spreadsheet guru, it’ll take you fifteen minutes at most. Coffee and cake are on me tomorrow. You’re the best!”
Fifteen minutes.
Over the past year and a half, I had learned that unit of measurement by heart. Maryana’s fifteen minutes usually contained about three hours. Quarterly sales summary tables don’t assemble themselves. Every row has to be checked, because one misplaced value and suddenly the numbers stop matching across the entire department.
I sat there staring at the email.
Outside the window, the streetlights were already on even though it wasn’t five yet. November in Vinnytsia is like that: it gets dark around half past four, and it feels as though the day never really began.
Maryana joined our team the spring before last.
Neat, smiling, and on her very first day she brought homemade honey cake to the office in a plastic container and gave everyone a slice. She placed a photograph of her two children, Mark and Sofiyka, on her desk. She rented a two-bedroom apartment in Zamostia, and half her salary went toward the rent. She talked about it lightly, without complaining, simply as if she were commenting on the weather.
Her first requests were completely innocent.
“Vika, can you take my call? I’m sitting in line with my little girl waiting to see a specialist.”
“Vik, upload my report into the system, please. It’s only two buttons. I’m already on the minibus heading home.”
Our department was small, only five people, and we genuinely were used to helping one another out.
So I helped.
I even liked it. It felt good to be the person everyone could rely on.
Then one day I sat down and did the math.
Those “two buttons” had quietly turned into entire blocks of work. Messages started arriving at exactly five in the evening, when refusing somehow already felt awkward because the person was supposedly rushing somewhere.
“You’re staying until six anyway.”
“My younger one is sick.”
“You’ll do it faster. You understand this stuff.”
Our salaries were the same.
The only difference was whose evenings belonged to whom.
One evening in August stayed with me more than any other.
It was my anniversary with Andriy—eight years.
He had booked a table at a café on Soborna Street, the place where we had once had our first date, and he had taken half a day off work so he could stop by and buy flowers.
At six, I texted him:
“Just one more hour.”
At seven:
“Sorry, the figures aren’t matching.”
I got home at half past eight—with someone else’s completed report and the feeling that I had robbed someone.
Andriy was sitting in the kitchen.
Yellow roses stood on the table in a three-liter jar because we had never gotten around to buying a proper vase. Two plates were covered with a kitchen towel.
“Eat,” he said. “It’s already cold.”
“Andriy, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not embarrassed for you,” he said after a pause. “I’m upset for you. Vik, have you even noticed that she doesn’t thank you anymore?”
I had noticed.
“Thank you” had disappeared sometime in the spring.
All that remained was, “You’re the best.”
And that is a completely different phrase.
It isn’t gratitude.
It means you’re expected to keep being the best.
The first time I refused was in September.
Gently. Almost apologetically—the way women refuse when they have been taught since childhood that saying no is impolite.
“Maryana, I won’t have time today. I haven’t finished my own tables yet.”
She was silent for a moment.
Then she said quietly, almost tenderly—and somehow that tenderness made it worse.
“Vika, you understand… You don’t have children. You simply don’t know what it’s like when everyone is pulling you apart.”
I didn’t answer.
I packed my bag, walked out, reached the bus stop, and for some reason let my trolleybus pass without getting on.
Andriy and I had been waiting for a child for four years.
At the end of the hallway in our apartment was a small room.
For three years, rolls of wallpaper we had bought on sale had been leaning against the wall inside it, because we kept postponing the renovation.
“We’ll do it when there’s someone to do it for.”
That was the carefree life Maryana apparently knew everything about.
After that evening, the requests didn’t stop.
They became more persistent.
That is what happens when manipulation works once and the person realizes they have found a lever.
I stopped sleeping properly.
I would lie awake replaying conversations in my head, imagining myself finally saying everything I thought—beautifully, point by point, with dignity.
Then morning would come, I would arrive at the office, and silently open her file.
And then came that email at 4:47.
The bear costume.
The raw data.
“You’re our spreadsheet guru.”
I sat there for about ten minutes, and suddenly everything became incredibly clear, the way the world sometimes does when you plunge into cold water.
If I completed those tables now, I would be completing them in March.
And in June.
And next November.
Maryana wasn’t a bad person.
She simply took what people allowed her to take.
That is normal. Most people do, until somebody stops them.
I decided not to write an angry email.
An angry email would already be a quarrel, and in a quarrel the person who raises their voice is always the one who somehow ends up looking guilty.
I called Andriy.
“Should I forward this to Ihor Leonidovych?” I asked. “It feels like snitching.”
“Snitching is when you want something bad to happen to another person,” he said. “You just want things to become normal for you. Those are different things, Vika.”
I forwarded the email to our department head.
Not a single angry word.
I reread it three times.
“Good evening, Ihor Leonidovych. I’m forwarding Maryana’s email to you. For the past several months, because of family circumstances, she has been unable to complete her workload during working hours and has been passing some of her tasks on to colleagues. Please help her—perhaps it would make sense to review her workload or give her a flexible schedule so that she can take care of her children without having to depend on whether someone else happens to have a free hour. I am fully occupied with my own tasks today and cannot take on her block of work without compromising quality.”
My finger genuinely trembled above the Send button.
Thoughts spun through my head.
“They’ll hate me.”
“They’ll call me a snitch.”
“The whole department will turn against me.”
Then I thought about that little room with the rolls of wallpaper.
And I clicked Send.
The next morning, Maryana was called into the manager’s office.
It turned out Ihor Leonidovych had absolutely no idea that I had been doing part of her work.
From his perspective, everything looked perfect.
Reports were submitted on time.
The numbers matched.
The department was doing great.
Maryana came out of his office red-faced and very quiet.
She didn’t come over to me.
Not that day.
Not the next.
For two weeks, we greeted each other the way neighbors do in an elevator.
“Good morning.”
“Morning.”
I ate lunch by myself and felt so awful that I almost wished I had simply stayed late and finished those tables after all.
At the end of December, we accidentally found ourselves alone together at the bus stop.
Wet snow was falling. The wind kept turning umbrellas inside out, and no trolleybus had appeared for nearly twenty minutes.
Maryana spoke first.
She didn’t look at me. She stared somewhere down the road.
“You probably think I’m angry with you.”
“I do.”
“I was. For a week.” She adjusted her hat. “Then I stopped. Do you know what the worst part is? I was too afraid to go to Ihor Leonidovych myself. I was scared he would say, ‘If you can’t handle it, find another job.’ Taras and I have been living separately for a year. The apartment is on me. The children are on me. It was easier to ask you. You never said no.”
“Maryana, I…”
“Wait. There’s one more thing I need to say, because afterward I won’t be able to. What I blurted out about you not having children… Vika, forgive me. I thought about it for a month afterward. I don’t even know why you don’t have children. I just went and struck somewhere I assumed wouldn’t hurt.”
I was silent for a long time.
Snow slipped down the back of my collar.
“Andriy and I have been waiting for four years,” I finally said.
Maryana turned toward me.
Then she covered her mouth with her gloved hand—the way people do when the words have already been spoken and there is nowhere to take them back.
The trolleybus finally arrived.
We both let it pass.
Ihor Leonidovych didn’t fire her or cut her bonus.
He did what he should have done back in the summer.
He gave her a flexible schedule.
Maryana now comes in at eight and leaves at four. She finishes part of her work from home in the evening after the children are asleep.
And then we discovered something that still makes me feel a little embarrassed for both of us.
She manages perfectly well.
On her own.
Nobody drowned.
The department didn’t collapse.
The reports still get submitted on time.
Apparently, she never needed my evenings.
What she needed was one conversation with her boss—a conversation she had been unable to bring herself to have for a year and a half.
People still tell me that you have to be kinder, that children are sacred.
Children truly are sacred.
But kindness paid for with someone else’s time is no longer kindness. It is one person’s habit and another person’s silence.
And that silence is not nearly as innocent as it seems.
That email wasn’t revenge.
It was simply the only door I managed to open without slamming it.
And in March, Andriy and I finally started renovating that little room.
Not “when there’s someone to do it for.”
Simply because a room should be alive, not a storage space for rolls of wallpaper and a life indefinitely postponed.
Maryana gave me the contractor’s phone number.
“Tell him I sent you,” she said. “He won’t overcharge you.”
And she brought me honey cake—the same kind as before, in a plastic container.
We never became friends.
But now, when she sends me a message at five in the evening, it is simply:
“Vik, there’s a missing digit in the third row. Can you take a look?”
And I do.
Gladly.
