“Without asking, my sister-in-law changed the password to my paid service. I blocked the card, and she surrendered in humiliating defeat.”
“Card declined,” the cashier said matter-of-factly, looking somewhere around my collarbone.
I tapped the plastic card against the terminal again. Once more, that nasty beep sounded — like the noise from a machine in intensive care when the patient has decided they’ve had enough. Someone in the line behind me let out a pointed sigh. A man in a camouflage jacket began unloading two bottles of kefir from his basket onto the conveyor belt, as if hinting that my bag of frozen broccoli and pack of cottage cheese were critically delaying his all-important dinner.
I grabbed my phone. In the banking app, red numbers glowed on the screen. Minus three hundred rubles. How? That morning there had been exactly twenty-five thousand in the account, set aside for repairing the dishwasher and everyday expenses. I scrolled through the transaction history and felt my fingers start to go cold.
A charge. “Glossa-Professional. Annual subscription.” Twenty-four thousand nine hundred rubles.
It was my work tool — a platform for interpreters with huge databases of technical terminology. I had been using it for five years, but I always paid month by month; that way it was easier to keep the budget under control. I had not signed up for an annual subscription. And I certainly wasn’t planning to do it today, when the appliance repairman had promised to come by at seven in the evening.
I shifted my headphones from my right hand to my left. The avocado-shaped case was a little sticky from the juice I’d spilled that morning.
“Albina Pavlovna, will you be paying in cash?” the cashier finally looked up at me.
“No, sorry. Leave the bag here, I’ll be right back.”
I stepped out of the store into the dry Orenburg wind, which immediately threw a handful of fine sand into my face. My hand was already dialing Inna’s number. Inna was my husband Pavel’s sister. Six months earlier she had “temporarily” moved in with us because she was “trying to find herself after a difficult breakup with her past.” Judging by her appetite and the number of takeout boxes, her past was letting go of her very reluctantly.
Three months ago, she asked for my password to Glossa. She said she wanted to improve her German so she could get a job in the international logistics department. I gave it to her. I didn’t mind — the license allowed two simultaneous logins anyway. But I had never imagined she would go poking around in the payment settings.
“Hello, Innochka? Hi. Do you happen to know why I was charged for an annual subscription to the service?”
On the other end, I heard crunching. Inna was eating something. Probably those salted crackers I had asked her not to touch.
“Oh, Alya! I was actually just about to text you! Can you imagine, they had a promotion — buy a year and pay for only ten months. I thought, what a great saving for the family! So I just clicked ‘confirm.’ Great, right?”
I stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. A rattling old bus roared past, covering me in bluish exhaust smoke.
“Your card has been declined,” the cashier said matter-of-factly, looking somewhere around my collarbone.
I tapped the plastic card against the terminal again. Once more, that nasty beep rang out, like the sound of a machine in intensive care when the patient has decided they’ve had enough. Someone in the line behind me sighed pointedly. A man in a camouflage jacket began unloading two bottles of kefir from his basket onto the belt, as if hinting that my bag of frozen broccoli and pack of cottage cheese were critically delaying his all-important dinner.
I pulled out my phone. In the banking app, red numbers were glowing. Minus three hundred rubles. How? This morning there had been exactly twenty-five thousand there, set aside for repairing the dishwasher and everyday expenses. I scrolled through the transaction history and felt my fingers start to go cold. A charge. “Glossa-Professional. Annual subscription.” Twenty-four thousand nine hundred rubles.
It was my work tool. A platform for simultaneous interpreters with enormous databases of technical terms. I had been using it for five years, but I always paid monthly—it was easier that way to keep track of the budget. I had not signed up for an annual subscription. And I definitely had not planned to do it today, when the appliance repairman had promised to come by at seven in the evening.
I shifted my headphones from my right hand to my left. The avocado-shaped case was slightly sticky from the juice I had spilled that morning.
“Albina Pavlovna, will you be paying cash?” the cashier finally asked, looking up at me.
“No, sorry. Leave the bag here, I’ll be right back.”
I stepped out of the store into the dry Orenburg wind, which at once flung a handful of fine sand into my face. My hand was already dialing Inna. Inna was my husband Pavel’s sister. Six months earlier, she had moved in with us “temporarily” because she was “finding herself after a difficult breakup with the past.” Judging by her appetite and the number of food delivery boxes, the past was letting go of her with great reluctance.
Three months ago, she had asked for my Glossa password. She said she wanted to improve her German so she could get a job in the international logistics department. I gave it to her. I didn’t mind—the license allowed two simultaneous logins anyway. But I had never imagined she would go into the payment settings.
“Hello, Innochka? Hi. Do you have any idea why I was charged for an annual subscription to the service?”
On the other end, I heard crunching. Inna was eating something. Probably those salted crackers I had asked her not to touch.
“Oh, Alya! I was just about to text you! Can you imagine, there was a promotion—you buy a year and only pay for ten months. I thought, what a great saving for the family! So I clicked ‘confirm.’ Isn’t that awesome?”
I stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. A city bus roared past, covering me in bluish exhaust.
“Inna, that was the money for repairing the dishwasher. The same dishwasher whose dishes you’re washing by hand in the sink right now because it’s broken. And that’s my card. Why didn’t you ask me?”
“Oh, Alya, why are you starting this again?” my sister-in-law’s voice turned whiny. “I did it for a reason. I already signed up for courses, and I need the database. Pavel said you’re the breadwinner in your family, these pennies are nothing to you.”
“These ‘pennies’ are my weekly quota for translating instructions for diesel generators,” I said more slowly, which was always a sure sign that molten lead was beginning to boil inside me. “Give me back the password. I’ll try to cancel the transaction through support.”
“Oh, I changed the password,” Inna giggled. “There was a notice saying ‘account security at risk.’ So I set my own. Don’t worry, I’ll tell it to you tonight. Or tomorrow. I have to run now—my manicure isn’t going to do itself.”
She hung up. I stared at the phone screen. It was covered in fingerprints. I wiped it on my jeans. Pavel’s phrase spun through my head: “Alya, she’s family, flesh and blood, just a little scatterbrained.” Inna’s scatterbrained nature had cost me twenty-five thousand and blocked my work—I couldn’t log into the account to submit an urgent order.
I went back into the store.
“Sorry, I won’t be taking the groceries,” I told the cashier.
“It happens,” she replied, and started scanning the kefir for the man in camouflage.
I walked home. The wind blew at my back, pushing me along as if mocking me. Inna knew I hated scandals. She knew Pavel would take her side, would say, “We can’t just throw her out on the street.” She knew a lot of things, actually. For example, my PIN code—I had entered it in front of her at cafés a thousand times. And the card data, apparently, had been saved in the browser on the laptop I sometimes left on the kitchen table.
The apartment was quiet. It smelled of fried potatoes—Inna knew how to create coziness at someone else’s expense. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, feet up on the coffee table. My work laptop was on her lap. She had headphones in. The very same ones I had spent all morning looking for yesterday.
“Oh, Alyka, you’re back! Where’s the food? I found such an amazing thing in your program, you won’t believe it!” She didn’t even remove the earbud, just slid it up to her temple.
“Inna, give me the laptop. And tell me the password. Right now.”
“Why are you so angry? Blood sugar low?” my sister-in-law stretched lazily. “I won’t. I’m taking a practice test right now. If I interrupt it, all the results get wiped. You can wait an hour. And anyway, Alya, it’s ugly to yell at your loved ones the second you walk through the door.”
She pulled the earbud back in and stared at the screen again. I could see my reflection in the polished wardrobe door. A pale woman with wind-tousled hair and an avocado phone case clenched in her fist.
I walked over to her. Slowly.
“Inna.”
She didn’t react. Only her fingers kept rattling rapidly over the keys. My keys, the ones where I had worn the letters A and S completely off after translating three volumes of documentation for a metal structures plant in one month.
I stood there for a second. Looked at the router blinking green eyes from the shelf. Then at my phone.
(All right, darling. Let’s see how your tests work offline.)
I went into the kitchen. Sat down on a stool. My hands were trembling a little, but I forced myself to focus. I opened the banking app. My fingers entered the digits by themselves, as if they had a life of their own.
“Block card.”
Reason: “Data theft by third parties.”
Pressing the “Confirm” button was easier than I thought. The smartphone vibrated in my hand, confirming the operation. Now the card was a useless piece of plastic.
A minute later, a shriek came from the living room.
“Albina! What the hell is this?! Everything froze on me!” Inna burst into the hallway, waving my laptop. “It says: ‘Authorization error. Payment not confirmed, account suspended pending investigation.’ What did you do?”
I slowly poured myself a glass of water from the filter. The rim of the glass had a crack in it; I kept forgetting to throw it away.
“I blocked the card, Inna. I informed the bank that there had been an unauthorized transaction for twenty-five thousand.”
“Are you insane?” Inna turned crimson. Her face looked like an overripe plum. “My tests are in there! My progress! The system says that because of suspected fraud my IP has been permanently banned! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I saved my money. Or at least I’ll try to get it back. And the account… well, it’s my account. My card. I have every right.”
“How dare you… I’ll tell Pavel everything! You’re selfish! You’d throw your own relative to the wolves over some money?” she practically squealed.
“Under what law exactly, Innochka?” I took a sip. The water was too cold. “Article 159.3 of the Russian Criminal Code? Fraud involving payment cards? Or just petty family theft? Don’t worry, I told the bank the card data had been leaked. I didn’t mention you. Yet.”
Inna choked on indignation. She threw the laptop onto the dining table. The screen flickered dangerously.
“You’re going to break it,” I said calmly. “And that also costs money. A lot of money.”
Just then the front door opened. Pavel was home. He sensed the tension immediately—it hung in the air, thick and sticky as jelly.
“All right, what kind of rally is going on here?” Pavel put his bag down on the floor. “Inna, why are you crying? Alya?”
“Your wife… she… she called me a thief!” Inna threw herself against her brother’s chest. “I only wanted to save money! I wanted what was best! And she blocked the card! Now everything is gone! My courses! My future!”
Pavel looked at me. His expression carried that familiar reproachful look. The look people give a strict teacher who gave a failing grade to the class favorite.
“Alya, why so harsh? We could have just talked. So they charged it—fine, you’ll earn more. Why call the bank? Now Inka has problems, she spent half the day taking that test.”
I looked at my husband and thought: he remembers that I drink tea without sugar. He always puts in two spoons anyway, “to cheer me up.” He did not want to hear the truth, because the truth would force him to make a decision. And a decision meant responsibility.
“Pasha, she changed the password to my work account. She stole access to the tool that feeds all of us. Including her. She spent my earmarked money without asking. This is not ‘a little scatterbrained.’ This is sheer nerve.”
“I wanted to surprise you!” Inna piped up from behind Pavel’s shoulder. “Like, ‘Look, Alya, how выгодно I arranged everything!’”
“The surprise was a success,” I said flatly. “Now listen, both of you. The card is blocked. There is no money on it, and there won’t be until the bank finishes its investigation. That will take thirty to sixty days.”
“How long?!” Inna peeled herself off her brother. “Then how am I supposed to go to the café with the girls tomorrow? My own card is empty, I thought you’d spot me till the end of the week…”
“You’re not going to any café,” I said, walking over to the table and taking back the laptop. “And you’re not getting any courses. Because Glossa blocks an account when a payment is reversed. If I don’t confirm the purchase within twenty-four hours, access will be permanently closed with no right of restoration. And I am not going to confirm it.”
“Albina, this is too much,” Pavel frowned. “Inna needs to study. Let’s unblock it, I’ll pay you back out of my salary. Why are you acting like she’s not family?”
“Out of what salary, Pasha? The one you already budgeted for new tires for the car? Or the one we were supposed to use for the mortgage payment?”
I saw him look away. He stared out the window where a branch of the old poplar tree was swaying.
“I’m going to Mom’s!” Inna announced, wiping away tears that didn’t exist. “I can’t live in an atmosphere of total distrust and surveillance! You shake over every ruble, Alya. It’s a sickness. Psychologists say that comes from poverty in the head.”
“Go,” I nodded toward the door. “Right now. Leave the keys on the hall table.”
Silence fell. Even the wind outside seemed to quiet down. Inna opened her mouth but found no words. She was used to me beginning to justify myself after that line, offering compromises, making tea.
“You’re throwing her out?” Pavel asked quietly. “Over a website subscription?”
“I’m throwing out a person who doesn’t respect my boundaries or my work. And if you think that’s wrong—you can go with her. I’m tired of washing dishes by hand while two grown adults sit on my neck and discuss my ‘poverty mindset.’”
I turned around and went into the bedroom. Closed the door. Sat down on the bed.
Rustling started in the living room. Muffled voices. Inna was angrily trying to prove something to Pavel, while he answered in monosyllables. Then one door slammed. Then, five minutes later, another.
I sat in the dark. My phone beeped. A text from the bank: “Your claim disputing the transaction has been accepted. Please await a call from a specialist.”
I knew what would happen now. Pavel would come back. He had gone to see her to a taxi or the bus stop. He would come back and say nothing. He would rattle dishes in the sink to show how hard things were for him. And tomorrow morning he would ask, “So, are you over it?”
But something inside me had changed. Like an old spring in a couch that had been stabbing my side for years and had finally snapped and popped out.
I opened the laptop. The screen lit up warmly.
(“Your access is restricted. Please contact customer support.”)
I started writing an email to support. In German. It soothed me. Clear grammatical rules, no ambiguity. “I request cancellation of transaction no. … due to erroneous actions of a third party who had temporary access to the device.”
Pavel came back about half an hour later. He didn’t switch on the hallway light. He went into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator open. Then close.
“She went to Mom’s,” he said from the bedroom doorway. In the dusk, his silhouette looked angular and unfamiliar. “She said she’ll never set foot here again. Happy now?”
“The dishwasher is still broken, Pasha,” I replied without turning around. “The repairman will be here in fifteen minutes. Do you have cash to pay him?”
“No. You know all my money’s on the card, and payday is in three days.”
“That’s exactly my point.”
I kept typing. Inna had forgotten to log out of her personal account in the browser. One of the tabs was open to “design courses.” I glanced at it—her cart was stuffed with some insanely expensive brushes and filters totaling another forty thousand. She had simply been waiting for the first purchase to go through before clicking the second button.
I closed the tab. Deleted all the saved card data from the browser.
“Alya, she’s calling Mom. She’s in tears. Says we’re monsters.”
“Tell Mom that the monsters paid for Inna’s manicure and a yearly subscription to a knowledge database. Let Mom pay for her design courses now, if she wants.”
Pavel stood there another minute and went back into the living room. Turned on the TV. The volume was slightly louder than usual—his way of protesting.
I finished the email and hit “Send.”
(Now all that was left was to wait. Two months without a normal card would not be easy. I’d have to pull out the stash of euros I kept hidden in a volume of Goethe. The irony of fate: a German classic was going to save me from the consequences of my love for the German language.)
The intercom buzzed. The repairman.
I went out into the hallway. Pavel was sitting in an armchair, staring at the screen where someone was running somewhere and shooting at something. He didn’t move.
I opened the door. A short man with a toolbox was standing there.
“Rostova? Dishwasher?”
“Yes, come in.”
I led him into the kitchen. He immediately crouched under the sink, rattling tools.
“Well,” he said after five minutes, “your filter is so clogged it’s as if someone’s been pouring handfuls of sand into it. And the control unit glitched. Haven’t you overloaded it?”
“We overloaded it,” I replied, looking at the mountain of dishes Inna had not washed before leaving. “Tried to stuff too much unnecessary stuff into it.”
The next two days passed in a strange, muffled silence. Pavel left for work earlier than I did and came back late. We spoke in short, technical phrases: “Bought bread,” “Dishwasher works,” “Mom called.” He delivered the last one as if reading out a sentence.
On the third day, Thursday, while I was sitting over an extremely complicated drawing of a turbine cooling system, my phone exploded with notifications.
Inna. Fifteen missed messages in the messenger. And a whole pack of texts that practically made the screen burn.
“Albina, you monster! You really did it!”
“I’ve been banned from all partner services!”
“The administration wrote that my name has been added to the list of unreliable users!”
“Unlock it immediately! I need to get my portfolio back!”
I didn’t answer. I stared at the drawing. “The gap between the turbine blades must not exceed 0.5 mm.” My gap with Inna had long ago exceeded every acceptable norm.
That evening, when Pavel came home, he looked unusually energized.
“Alya, listen. Inka is in complete hysterics. Mom says her heart is bad. Apparently this service of yours is really important. Inna violated something there, and now they won’t give her a certificate for her design courses.”
I leaned back in my chair. My neck ached.
“Pasha, she wasn’t taking design courses. She was trying to resell access to my database through a group buy. I checked the browsing history. She was posting screenshots of my dictionaries on some forum for money.”
Pavel froze. He was standing there with the kettle in his hand.
“What?” he asked quietly.
“That’s what. The service blocked her not because I canceled the card. It was because the security system tracked mass downloading of data from one IP. They sent me a report. Inna was trying to make money off my intellectual property. The twenty-five thousand from my card—that was only the entrance fee for her little ‘business.’”
I turned the laptop toward him with the email from customer support. Everything was laid out there. With pictures. With activity logs. With the page addresses where the data had leaked.
Pavel set the kettle down on the table. Not on the trivet.
“She said… she said she wanted to study.”
“She wanted quick money, Pasha. At my expense. And at yours too, because if I’d lost my license, I wouldn’t have been able to work for six months. That would mean goodbye mortgage.”
My husband sat down on a chair. Still wearing his jacket. He stared at the screen, where the German words formed a very unpleasant picture for Inna.
“I’ll call her,” he said. His voice was dry as an autumn leaf.
“No need. She’s already here.”
The doorbell rang. Long, demanding, followed by rhythmic pounding of a fist.
I went to open it. Inna stood on the threshold. No makeup, some stretched-out sweater, eyes red from crying. Behind her loomed my mother-in-law, Margarita Sergeyevna.
“Albina!” my mother-in-law came in first, brushing past me with her shoulder. “What is all this you’ve set up? The child has been crying for three days! What are these bills you’re sending her? What courts?”
“Mom, wait,” Pavel stepped into the hallway. His face was pale, but his gaze… for the first time in a very long while, it was not aimed at the floor.
“What do you mean, wait?” Inna slipped in behind her mother. “She framed me! Pasha, tell her! She arranged all this on purpose just to throw me out! Alya, give me back access, I just need to get my data, and I swear I’ll never again…”
“Inna,” Pavel said quietly. “Show me your phone. Right now. Open that forum, ‘Design-Master.’”
Inna froze. Her eyes darted around the hallway, looking for a way out.
“What forum? Pasha, what are you talking about? I don’t know any forum…”
“Show me,” Pavel took a step forward.
I watched Inna start shifting the phone from hand to hand. Exactly the way I had done in the store two days earlier. Only on her it looked pathetic.
“Pasha, well, it was just… a side job. We need money! Mom needs surgery…”
“What surgery, Inna?” Margarita Sergeyevna raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Only my wisdom teeth ache, and even then just sometimes.”
The pause dragged on. In the bathroom, a faucet could be heard dripping—the repairman had fixed the dishwasher, but left the faucet for dessert.
Suddenly, Inna deflated. As if the air had been let out of her. She dropped onto the shoe bench and covered her face with her hands.
“So what!” she shouted into her palms. “Yes, I wanted to make money! What am I supposed to do if all of you are so proper? Alya works like a horse, and you, Pasha, count pennies. I want to live! Now!”
“At my expense?” I asked calmly.
“You wouldn’t even have minded! You have mountains of orders! You wouldn’t even have noticed if I hadn’t changed the password.”
“I would have noticed, Inna. Because theft always leaves traces. Even family theft.”
Margarita Sergeyevna looked from her daughter to her son, then to me. Her authority seemed to evaporate. Suddenly she looked like a very old woman in a ridiculous beret.
“Inna, is this true?” she asked. “Did you steal Alya’s money?”
“I didn’t steal it! I invested it!” Inna jumped to her feet. “But now this… this ‘investment’ is costing me my career! Alya, write to them and say it was a mistake! Say you did it yourself! Nothing will happen to you, you’re a professional!”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” my mother-in-law snapped back into full mother mode. “Albina, she’s your husband’s sister. Are you trying to ruin her life?”
“Mom, leave,” Pavel took his mother by the elbow. “Please. Go home. And take Inna with you.”
“Pasha!” Inna grabbed his sleeve. “Help me! She’ll destroy me!”
“You destroyed yourself the moment you reached into someone else’s wallet,” Pavel carefully unclasped her fingers. “Keys on the hall table. And don’t come here again without an invitation. Ever.”
Inna looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. Then she turned to me. There was no remorse in her eyes—only the fierce, cold resentment of a person who had been denied the chance to commit a meanness without consequences.
She threw the keys onto the floor. They clanged against the tile and skidded under the coat rack.
“Choke on your German,” she hissed. “Office rat.”
They left. The door shut heavily, with a thud.
Pavel stood in the hallway staring at the abandoned keys. I walked over and picked them up. Metal. Cold.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at me.
“For what?”
“For making you put up with this. I thought… I thought family meant everyone forgives. Turns out family means everyone respects.”
He looked at me. There was something new in his eyes. The tiredness was still there, but that constant readiness to excuse other people’s arrogance was gone.
“Shall we have some tea?” he asked. “Without sugar. I remembered.”
“Let’s.”
I went into the kitchen. The laptop was lying on the table. A new notification had come from Glossa. The transaction had been canceled; the funds would be returned to the account within three business days. Access had been restored in read-only mode pending completion of the review.
I closed the laptop lid.
Pavel set out two cups. The water in the kettle began to hum, promising a boil soon.
I sat by the window. At last, the wind in Orenburg had died down. My headphones in the avocado case were lying on the windowsill. I picked them up and put them into the desk drawer.
Pavel switched off the TV in the living room. Real, clean silence settled over the apartment.
I looked at my hands. They were no longer trembling.
Albina Pavlovna Rostova moved the sugar bowl to the center of the table. Sat down. “
