“My Mother-in-Law Changed the Locks on My Apartment and Was Already Enjoying the Move While Settling In, Until My Brother Knocked on the Door
Yulia inserted the key into the lock—it hit resistance and would not turn even a millimeter. She pulled the key ring back out, examined the grooves, and tried again.
The lock would not budge, as if, during the week of her business trip, someone else had moved into the apartment and slid the bolt from the inside.
‘What on earth…’ she muttered, stepping back and studying the door.
Everything looked the same except for one thing: the keyhole looked different. Brand-new, without a single scratch, it stood out sharply against the worn handle.
Yulia took her phone out of her bag and called her husband.
‘Maxim, I’ve been standing at our door for five minutes. My key doesn’t fit—someone changed the lock.
Can you explain what’s going on?’
Silence hung on the other end of the line—not the kind that comes when someone is gathering their thoughts, but a different kind, when a person is frantically searching for words and cannot find the right ones.
‘Come down to the yard. To the parking lot.
I’ll come out now, and we’ll talk.’
He hung up without waiting for a reply.
They had bought that apartment on Komendantsky Prospekt five years earlier, right after the wedding. A newly built place, bare concrete walls, construction dust in every crack—but Yulia, who worked as a decorator at an interior design bureau, looked at those square meters and saw what they would become.
Continued in the comments.”
Yulia inserted her key into the lock—it hit resistance and would not turn even a millimeter. She pulled the key ring back out, examined the grooves, and tried again.
The lock would not budge, as if during the week she had been away on a business trip, someone else had moved into the apartment and slid the bolt from the inside.
“What on earth…” she muttered, stepping back and staring at the door.
Everything looked the same except for one thing: the keyhole looked different. Brand-new, without a single scratch, it stood out sharply against the worn handle.
Yulia took her phone out of her bag and called her husband.
“Maxim, I’ve been standing at our door for five minutes. The key doesn’t fit—someone changed the lock. Can you explain what’s going on?”
Silence hung on the line—not the kind when someone is gathering their thoughts, but the kind when they are frantically searching for words and cannot find the right ones.
“Come down to the yard. To the parking lot.
I’ll come out now and we’ll talk.”
He hung up without waiting for an answer.
They had bought this apartment on Komendantsky Prospekt five years earlier, right after the wedding. It was a new building, with bare concrete walls and construction dust in every crack—but Yulia, who worked as a decorator at an interior design bureau, looked at those square meters and saw what they could become.
She spent eight months on the renovation, choosing every door handle and every curtain rod herself, hunting for the exact shade of pistachio wallpaper for the bedroom, ordering curtains made of Italian silk, arranging handmade ceramics from Umbria on the open shelves.
Meanwhile, Maxim worked in an office, came home in the evenings, nodded at the latest fabric samples, and said, “Do whatever you think best—you’re our interior artist.”
Yulia took that detachment for trust.
For recognition of her taste and her right to run the home. Back then she did not understand that her husband was simply shifting responsibility so that later he would not have to answer for the result.
Antonina Petrovna, her mother-in-law, lived in Krasnoye Selo—forty minutes by minibus to the nearest metro station, three transfers to reach the clinic, loneliness and silence in a tiny one-room apartment. She had spent twenty-two years working as the superintendent of a student dormitory at the Polytechnic Institute, and graduates still passed around stories about her iron grip.
In retirement, all that energy remained unused, searching for an outlet and finding none.
Yulia noticed how her mother-in-law looked around their home during her rare visits. Her gaze was sharp, appraising: “Why so many decorative pillows?
Nothing but dust collectors.” “Those scented candles will start a fire one day, mark my words.”
“These light curtains will turn yellow in a year, you’ll see.” Maxim always responded to such remarks with a guilty smile, a shrug, and a change of subject. Not once in five years had he told his mother, “This is Yulia’s home. She is the mistress here.” His silence spoke louder than any words, but Yulia chose not to see the obvious.
Until today.
Maxim was standing in the parking lot, his fists shoved into his jacket pockets. The April wind from the gulf ruffled his hair, and everything about him—his hunched shoulders, lowered gaze, tense jaw—gave away a man bracing himself for an unpleasant conversation.
“Please explain to me why I can’t get into my own apartment,” Yulia said, stopping three steps away from him, not intending to close the distance.
Maxim looked up, then immediately glanced somewhere over her shoulder and said in an even, rehearsed tone:
“Mom moved in with us last week. She changed the lock, said it was for safety.
She’s lonely there, you understand? Here the clinic is nearby, the shops are close, and we’re right here.”
Yulia said nothing, processing what she had just heard. She could feel a wave rising inside her—not anger yet, more astonishment at the scale of what had happened.
“You let your mother move into our apartment while I was out of town,” she said, pronouncing each word slowly and clearly. “And you didn’t even bother to warn me. Not one call, not one message for an entire week.”
“I was going to, honestly. But you were busy with that conference, and Mom kept saying there was no need to bother you over something small—you’d come back and see everything yourself…”
“Your mother moving into my home is something small?”
“Yulia, why are you raising your voice right away? Go upstairs, look around—nothing terrible has happened.
Mom only brought her things over, that’s all.”
He pulled a shiny new key out of his pocket and held it out to her.
Yulia took the key ring between two fingers, turned around, and walked toward the entrance. Maxim trailed after her, muttering something conciliatory, but she was no longer listening.
The door opened easily, and Yulia stepped across the threshold of her own apartment.
The hallway looked almost normal—the same ivory wallpaper, the same light oak dresser. Only now there was a felt pocket for combs hanging on the mirror, and a pair of someone else’s slippers with pink pom-poms stood by the door.
She went into the living room. A knitted acid-yellow blanket lay on the sofa over her linen throw.
On the coffee table sat a stack of Argumenty i Fakty newspapers and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.
The bedroom made her stop in the doorway.
On the pistachio wallpaper, directly in the center of the wall above the bed, someone had taped three paper icons in cheap cardboard frames. Beside them hung a tear-off calendar with pictures of ginger kittens—April had already been torn off, and May stuck out at the corner.
On her bedside table, where a milky-white ceramic vase had once stood, there was now a plastic jewelry box with faded roses.
“Yulechka, you’re back!”
Antonina Petrovna floated out of the kitchen, wiping her palms on an apron that read “Best Grandma in the World.” She was smiling—broadly, confidently, like the lady of the house welcoming a guest into her own home.
“Welcome back, dear! I just put some cabbage soup on. Maximushka has been craving home cooking.
You’re always running around—you never have time to cook.”
Yulia walked past her mother-in-law into the kitchen and froze.
The open shelves, where her collection ceramics had stood just a week earlier—hand-painted plates, sea-green bowls, gravy boats with raised ornamentation—were now crammed with aluminum pots with scorched bottoms. Next to them stood glass jars of grains with plastic lids and a mismatched chipped tea set.
“Where did you put my dishes?” Yulia asked, turning to her mother-in-law.
“Oh, those painted little shards? I put them away in the pantry out of harm’s way.
There wasn’t a proper soup tureen among them, no cast-iron frying pan, no decent pot—just flat little plates like jam saucers. You can’t feed a man with things like that. That’s not food, that’s just frivolity.”
“These are handmade ceramics. I brought them from Italy, from a workshop in Umbria.”
Antonina Petrovna waved a hand dismissively.
“Italy, Shmitaly—what difference does it make where they’re from? What matters is functionality.
Those frills are no use in a household—they just gather dust and take up space. I brought my own things, tried and tested, forty years of service without a single complaint.”
Yulia turned to look at her husband, who was hovering in the kitchen doorway.
“Maxim, do you see this?”
He spread his hands.
“Yul, Mom is just helping around the house. It’ll make things easier for you—you won’t have to stand over the stove after work.
She cooks, cleans, keeps things in order…”
“What order? She turned our apartment into an extension of her one-room flat!”
“Oh, stop, don’t dramatize it. It’s only temporary.”
“Temporary?” Yulia laughed bitterly. “She changed the locks. That’s what you call temporary?”
Antonina Petrovna pursed her lips.
“I changed the lock for your own safety, by the way. The old one was loose—any thief could have opened it.
You’ll thank me later.”
Without a word, Yulia left the kitchen, picked up her bag from the hallway, and locked herself in the bathroom. She needed time to think.
The next four days turned into a drawn-out siege.
On Tuesday morning, Yulia discovered that her scented candles—seven of them in different sizes, in glass holders, arranged around the living room—had disappeared.
“Antonina Petrovna, have you seen my candles? They were on the mantel and the dresser.”
“Oh, those stinky things? I put them away in the pantry behind the boxes.
That chemical nonsense gives me migraines. My head was splitting all night.”
“It’s natural soy wax with essential oils. There are no chemicals in it.”
“I don’t care what kind of wax it is—soy, beeswax, Martian wax. My head hurts, and that’s the end of it.
You don’t want me suffering here, do you?”
Yulia looked at Maxim, who was eating dinner at the table. He chewed his cutlet with intense concentration, studying the contents of his plate with exaggerated attention.
On Wednesday evening, Yulia could not find her orthopedic chair in her office. She had ordered it from Finland, waited three months for it, assembled it herself following instructions in an unfamiliar language, adjusted it to fit her height and weight.
“Mom,” she said to her mother-in-law, “do you know where my office chair went? The lilac one with armrests?”
“Oh, that ugly green monstrosity? I gave it to our neighbor Viktor Palych. Poor man’s back has been tormenting him.
Why do you need such a huge thing? You’re young—you can sit on a stool and you won’t break.”
“You gave my chair to a stranger without my permission?”
“What stranger? Viktor Palych is our neighbor across the landing—we’ve been greeting each other for twenty years.
A decent man, a widower, a pensioner. He needs it more.”
“That chair cost eighty thousand rubles.”
Antonina Petrovna threw up her hands and clutched her heart.
“Eighty thousand for a stool?! Maxim, son, do you hear what’s going on?
Your wife spent eighty thousand on some chair! You’ve completely lost your minds, throwing money to the wind!
In our day you could buy a car for that kind of money!”
“Yulia, what can you do,” Maxim said with a shrug, without looking up. “Viktor Palych is a good man, and he really has it hard. Be patient for the sake of family peace—we’ll buy you another chair.”
“Be patient for the sake of family peace,” Yulia repeated, and remembered that phrase.
On Thursday she came home from work around eight in the evening. A large trash bag was standing by the apartment door.
A corner of familiar fabric stuck out of it—pistachio silk with emerald embroidery along the edge.
Yulia crouched down and untied the bag. Inside were her Italian curtains—the ones she had flown to Milan for last year, chosen in a workshop on Via Torino, explaining herself to an elderly seamstress in a mixture of English and gestures.
She went into the apartment and headed for the bedroom.
Oilcloth curtains hung over the windows—semi-transparent, with a lace-print pattern.
“Antonina Petrovna!”
Her mother-in-law materialized behind her instantly, as if she had been standing guard by the door.
“Why are you shouting for the whole house to hear? The neighbors will hear and think who knows what.”
“You threw away my curtains.”
“Those rags? They were collecting dust!
Curtains like that only cause allergies—your eyes water, your nose gets stuffed up. I hung up some proper oilcloth for you, practical stuff—you wipe it with a rag and it’s clean.”
“That was handmade Italian silk. I paid a hundred and twenty thousand for them.”
“A hundred and twenty thousand for window rags?!” Antonina Petrovna pressed her palms to her cheeks. “Dear Lord, for that kind of money you could furnish half an apartment! Are you out of your mind, child?”
“This is my home. My bedroom.
My curtains. You have no right to dispose of my things.”
Antonina Petrovna narrowed her eyes, folded her arms over her chest, and said slowly, emphasizing every word:
“The apartment is in Maxim’s name, so it’s not yours, sweetheart. That’s one.
I live here by my son’s invitation, so I have every right to arrange my living space. That’s two.
And you’re here on borrowed rights, so watch your tongue.”
Yulia turned away and walked out of the apartment. She went down into the courtyard, sat on a bench by the playground, and stayed there for an hour, staring at one point.
Then she took out her phone and dialed her older brother.
“Lyoshka, hi. Listen, remember how you said you owed me for that roof repair situation?
I figured out how you can pay me back.”
On Friday around seven in the evening, Antonina Petrovna was presiding over a pot of pickle soup. She stirred it with a wooden spoon, humming under her breath, and the whole apartment smelled of boiled pickles and pearl barley.
The doorbell rang unexpectedly—three long rings, two short.
“Maxim!” her mother-in-law shouted. “Open the door, my hands are busy!”
Maxim came out of the living room, turned the lock—and jumped back.
Alexei, Yulia’s older brother, barreled into the hallway. Nearly two meters tall, with shoulders like a giant and hands like shovels.
He worked shifts on northern oil rigs and looked the part: weathered face, three-day stubble, the confidence of a man used to commanding a crew of twenty men.
His wife Natasha squeezed in behind him—short, wiry, with a sharp, observant gaze. Then three identical fair-haired girls about seven years old burst in, chattering over one another.
Bringing up the rear were a huge plaid duffel bag and a shaggy mutt of indeterminate breed.
“Yulka!” Alexei yelled, spreading his arms. “Little sister, help us out!”
He swept Yulia into a hug, lifted her off the floor, kissed both her cheeks, and set her back down.
“Our pipe burst, can you believe it? Water shooting to the ceiling like a fountain!
Emergency services came, turned everything off, said repairs would take at least a month! We flooded the neighbors downstairs, and now experts are walking around assessing the damage!
Natasha, show them the photos!”
Natasha shoved her phone under Maxim’s nose—the screen showed shots of a flooded kitchen.
“The whole apartment’s wrecked!” Alexei went on. “We’ve got nowhere to go, might as well stand on the street with the kids! I called Yulia, and she said, ‘Come over, there’s plenty of room!’
We’re family, right?”
Yulia stood in the doorway of the living room, smiling radiantly and serenely.
“Of course, Lyoshenka, stay as long as you need. There is always room for family.
We’re the same blood.”
Maxim’s stunned gaze darted from his wife to her brother, from the brother to the shrieking nieces, from the nieces to the dog sniffing the slippers in the hallway.
“Yulia…” he began.
“What, Maxim?” she turned to him with an innocent expression. “You explained it to me yourself: the apartment is for family, and family should help each other in times of trouble. I can’t exactly throw my brother, his wife, and three children out into the street, can I?
How would that look?”
Antonina Petrovna floated out of the kitchen, clutching a ladle to her chest.
“What kind of invasion is this? Maxim, do you see what’s happening?
Are you really going to allow this in your own house?”
Alexei gave his mother-in-law an appraising look and broke into a huge grin.
“Ohhh, well hello there! So you must be the famous Mama of Maxim?
Yulka has told me a lot about you—very interesting things! Well then, nice to meet you. Now we’ll live together for a while, chat, and get to know each other better!”
He squeezed past the stunned Antonina Petrovna into the kitchen, looked into the pot, and grimaced.
“What kind of slop is this—pickle soup? I’ve hated that sour stuff since the army. My stomach growls for a whole day afterward.
Natasha, cook some proper borscht, rich and hearty, with marrow bone! You can give this stuff to the dog—Kuzya eats anything.”
Natasha acted quickly and mercilessly.
She surveyed the kitchen with a proprietor’s eye, opened the cabinets, inspected the shelves, and delivered her verdict:
“I’m not cooking for children in this unsanitary junk. Aluminum oxidizes when heated, releases toxins, and causes Alzheimer’s.
Scientific fact. All this rubbish is going into the hallway, and I’m unpacking my own cookware.”
“What Alzheimer’s?!” Antonina Petrovna exploded. “I’ve cooked in these pots for forty years, and nothing has happened to me!”
“Well, maybe it already has and you just haven’t noticed,” Natasha said with a shrug, and began setting the aluminum pots out in the hallway.
“Maxim! Maxim, tell her!
Stop this… this…”
Maxim stood in the middle of the hall looking like a man caught in a rockslide.
“Mom…” he began.
“Natasha’s right,” Alexei interrupted, clapping his brother-in-law on the shoulder so hard Maxim nearly buckled. “Aluminum is poison. I’ve seen it on the job—men eat out of those pots, and then their memory goes, they start mixing up names.
Better safe than sorry, as they say.”
Meanwhile, the three twin girls—Anya, Manya, and Tanya—had taken over the apartment with lightning speed. They had already raced through all the rooms, opened every cabinet, pulled out a box of Antonina Petrovna’s crocheted doilies from the pantry, and launched into full-scale activity.
“We’re playing hospital!” one of them announced, wrapping a doll’s arm in a lace doily. “This is a bandage!”
“That is not a bandage!” the mother-in-law shrieked. “That is my handmade lace! I spent twenty years crocheting it!”
“But it’s white and long,” the girl replied reasonably. “So it’s a bandage.”
Kuzya, the mongrel of uncertain breed, had already found the slippers with pom-poms and was blissfully chewing off the left pom-pom, growling with delight.
“Take the dog away!” Antonina Petrovna cried, trying to save her shoes.
“Kuzya is part of the family,” Alexei replied calmly, switching the television from a detective show to a mixed martial arts channel. “What are we supposed to do, throw him out in the street?
That would be inhumane. So get used to it, Grandma.”
“What do you mean, Grandma?!”
“Well, what else? How old are you—seventy?”
“Sixty-four!”
“Well then, Grandma it is. Sit down and watch the fights—Khabib and Conor are on, a historic replay.
The guys say it’s unforgettable.”
Yulia watched everything from the corner of the living room without saying a word. Calm satisfaction was frozen on her face.
By the third day, the apartment had turned into a battlefield.
Natasha had completely occupied the kitchen. She cooked for the whole crowd—borscht, cutlets, pies—and there was physically no room left for Antonina Petrovna at the stove.
“Move aside, I need to make omelets for three portions,” Natasha ordered, nudging her aside with her hip.
“I got up first!”
“You’re a guest here, Grandma. Yulka said you only moved in recently, so don’t get too comfortable.”
“What do you mean, guest? This is my son’s apartment!”
“Well then, let your son cook for you. Maxim!
Your mom wants something to eat!”
Maxim, trapped on the sofa between Alexei and a television blaring cage fights, pretended not to hear.
The twin girls used all the crocheted doilies to play hospital, turning an antique dresser into an operating table. Kuzya chewed off both pom-poms from Antonina Petrovna’s slippers on the first day, the soles on the second, and by the third day all that remained of her house shoes were memories.
“My slippers!” the mother-in-law wailed. “I kept them for twenty years!”
“Oh, come on, Grandma,” Alexei waved it off. “Are those even slippers? More like some kind of misunderstanding.
Now my slippers—those are slippers. Leather, fur-lined, impossible to chew through.”
On the fifth day, Alexei lit a cigarette on the balcony. Openly, unapologetically, with pleasure—one cigarette after another, stubbing them into a tin can while the smoke drifted back into the apartment through the cracked door.
Antonina Petrovna stormed onto the balcony, pinching her nose with a handkerchief.
“Stop that right now! I can’t breathe—I have asthma!”
“Aunt Tonya, it’s the balcony,” Alexei said calmly, taking another drag. “Basically outside. Fresh air.
Private smoker’s territory, so to speak.”
“What fresh air? The smoke is going into the room!”
“Then close the door and don’t suffer. I didn’t go into your bedroom to smoke, did I?
The balcony is a shared space.”
“Maxim!” the mother-in-law shrieked. “Tell him!”
Maxim appeared in the doorway looking exhausted.
“Mom, what am I supposed to say? He’s not smoking in the apartment, he’s on the balcony.”
“But the smoke is going into the room!”
“Close the door tighter.”
“What if he falls asleep with a cigarette and starts a fire?!”
Alexei chuckled.
“I’ve been smoking for thirty years, Aunt Tonya, and I’ve never caught fire yet. Don’t worry, everything’s under control.”
Antonina Petrovna turned and left, slamming the balcony door so hard the glass shook in its frame.
Yulia drank tea in the kitchen and silently smiled into her cup.
On the seventh day, her mother-in-law made an attempt at negotiations.
At dinner—Natasha’s borscht, not Antonina Petrovna’s pickle soup—she cleared her throat and announced:
“I demand rules for living together. The dog must be kept on a leash and muzzled.
The television must be switched to my programs after nine in the evening. The children must be forbidden to touch my things.
And no smoking on the balcony!”
Alexei put down his spoon and looked at her with genuine surprise.
“Aunt Tonya, why are you giving orders? You’re as much a guest here as we are.
Yulka let us in, and Yulka will throw us out when the time comes. You can make rules in your own home, back in Krasnoye Selo.”
“I live here!”
“Temporarily, just like us. Hold on,” he narrowed his eyes, “what exactly are you even doing here?
Did Yulka invite you?”
Antonina Petrovna flushed red.
“My son invited me!”
“And did he consult his wife? Judging by Yulka’s face—no.
So you and I are in exactly the same position, Aunt Tonya. The only difference is, at least I warned people before arriving.”
“Maxim!”
Maxim stared into his bowl and said nothing.
“You see?” Alexei spread his hands. “Even your dear son won’t say a word. Because he knows he messed up.
So let’s all live peacefully, like Leopold the Cat said. You don’t bother us, we don’t bother you.”
Antonina Petrovna looked at Yulia—she was calmly stirring her tea.
“You arranged all this on purpose,” she hissed. “I know you did. I can feel it.”
“Me?” Yulia raised an eyebrow. “Arranged for my brother’s pipe to burst? Interesting theory.
Maybe I also ordered the rain for tomorrow?”
“I don’t believe a single word you say!”
“That’s your right, Antonina Petrovna. In the meantime—would you like some more borscht?”
On the ninth day, the breaking point came.
The morning began with Kuzya finding Antonina Petrovna’s glasses on the coffee table and thoroughly chewing them. The arms were bent, and one lens was cracked.
“My glasses!” the mother-in-law howled. “My only pair!”
“Oh, come on, Grandma,” Natasha waved it off. “Any optical shop will make you a new pair in half an hour. They’re just glasses.”
Then the girls staged a concert on plastic toy whistles Natasha had bought in an underground passage near the metro. Three instruments, three performers, three melodies at once—the cacophony was so loud that even Yulia, sitting in the far room, had her ears blocked.
Alexei turned the football match on full volume—St. Petersburg’s Zenit was playing Moscow’s Spartak, and the fans’ yelling drowned out even the whistles.
Natasha fried fish in a cast-iron pan, and the kitchen filled with blue smoke.
One of the children knocked over a glass of fruit compote onto Antonina Petrovna’s yellow knitted blanket—the very one she had spread over the sofa on the first day.
“That’s enough!” her mother-in-law burst out of the room shouting. “I will not tolerate this chaos any longer!”
She rushed around the apartment, snatching up her belongings: bundles of clothes, boxes of doilies, the surviving pots.
“Maxim!” she screamed. “Get ready! Take me home!
Immediately!”
Maxim peeked out of the living room looking haggard.
“Mom, where to? You said it was lonely there, hard to get to your doctors…”
“Better loneliness and silence than this madhouse full of savages!” Antonina Petrovna hurled another bundle toward the door. “Take me away from here, do you hear me? Right this minute!
I’m not staying here another moment!”
Yulia stood by the window with her arms crossed over her chest. Silent.
“You’ll regret this yet,” her mother-in-law spat as she pushed past her toward the exit. “You snake in the grass. Do you think I don’t understand what happened here?
I understand everything. Everything!”
“Safe travels, Antonina Petrovna,” Yulia replied in an even voice. “Take care of yourself.”
Her mother-in-law nearly choked with outrage, but Maxim had already picked up her bundles and dragged them toward the elevator.
As soon as her husband’s car disappeared around the corner, Alexei got up from the sofa and stretched with a crack of his joints.
“Well then, little sister? Operation accomplished successfully?”
“It’s done,” Yulia nodded. “Thank you, Lyoshka. I owe you.”
“Oh, stop. You already gave me so much for that roof repair that I still haven’t paid you back.
Call it even. Natasha, pack it up!”
Natasha was already stuffing their things back into the plaid duffel bag. The girls, as if on command, stopped screeching, lined up in the hallway, fixed their hair, and turned into perfectly well-behaved children.
Kuzya sat obediently by the door, wagging his tail.
“Natasha, thank you so much,” Yulia said, hugging her sister-in-law. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Oh, come on,” Natasha waved her off. “We had some fun too. Your mother-in-law’s a real fighter, sure enough, but our girls can outshout anyone if necessary.
Versatile professionals.”
They left—cheerfully, noisily, with the dog and the duffel bag. Yulia remained alone in the apartment, which smelled of cigarette smoke and fried fish. She threw all the windows wide open, let in the April wind, and began methodically restoring order.
She tore the paper icons and kitten calendars off the walls. Took the lace doilies off the dresser.
Threw the oilcloth off the windows. Retrieved the curtains—she had pulled them out of the garbage bag that same evening and hidden them—and hung them back up, smoothing every fold.
The ceramics returned to the open shelves in the kitchen. The candles went back to their places on the mantel and dresser.
The aromatic diffuser lit again in the hallway, spreading the scent of lavender.
By evening, the apartment looked as if the last week and a half had never happened.
Yulia called a locksmith and changed the lock.
Maxim returned around eleven. He stood in the doorway, looking over the restored apartment, and his face showed a strange expression—a mixture of relief, astonishment, and something close to respect.
Yulia sat at the dining table. In front of her lay a new key and a sheet of paper covered in her neat handwriting.
“What is this?” Maxim asked.
“Sit down and read.”
He sat across from her, picked up the sheet, and began reading aloud:
“House rules. Point one: any guests, including relatives of any degree, may be invited only with the mutual consent of both spouses.
An invitation extended by one spouse without the knowledge of the other is considered invalid. Point two: any changes to the interior, furniture rearrangements, or disposal of belongings may be made only with the written consent of the owner of those belongings…”
“You don’t need to read the rest,” Yulia interrupted. “You’ve got the idea.”
Maxim lowered the paper onto the table.
“Are you serious? Written consent, rules…
What is this, work?”
“We are married, Maxim. And in this marriage, your mother changed the lock on my home, threw away my things, and disposed of my property without asking.
And you stood beside her and told me to be patient for the sake of family peace.”
“But Mom… she didn’t mean anything bad, she just…”
“She wanted to become the mistress of this home. And you let her.
Behind my back, while I was away on a business trip.”
Maxim lowered his eyes.
“I didn’t know what else to do. She pressured me, cried, said she was miserable and lonely there…
I couldn’t refuse her.”
“But you could refuse me. You didn’t even ask me.”
He said nothing, twisting the sheet of paper in his hands.
“Sign it,” Yulia said.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then go back to your mother in Krasnoye Selo. You can eat her pickle soup every day and listen to her advice for the rest of your life.
The choice is yours.”
Maxim lifted his eyes to her—a long, searching look, as if he were seeing his wife for the first time.
“You planned all this,” he said slowly. “Your brother, the children, the dog… from the very beginning.”
“Not from the very beginning. From the moment I saw my curtains in the trash bag.”
He smiled crookedly and bitterly—but he smiled.
“Give me a pen.”
Yulia handed him a blue ballpoint pen. Maxim signed the list of rules in a broad, sharp hand.
“That’s in case you forget,” Yulia said, taking a photo of the paper with her phone. “One copy for me, one copy for you, one copy for Lyoshka.”
“What does Alexei have to do with this?”
“He’s a witness. And the guarantor of compliance.
If necessary, he’ll come visit again with the whole family.”
Maxim shook his head.
“You… you’ve changed.”
“No,” Yulia replied. “I just stopped putting up with it.”
She slid the new key toward him.
“Welcome home.”
Antonina Petrovna returned to her one-room apartment in Krasnoye Selo and never again spoke of moving in. She called Maxim on Sundays, complained about her health and her loneliness.
Maxim listened, nodded, promised to come visit—and never once offered to let her move back in.
Yulia ordered a new orthopedic chair—exactly the same one from Finland, lilac-colored.
Their neighbor Viktor Palych tried to return the old one, but she refused and advised him to keep it or donate it to charity.
The pistachio curtains went to the dry cleaners and came back flawless.
At the beginning of May, Yulia threw the windows wide open, lit lavender candles, settled into her new chair with a book, and lifted her face to the warm wind from the gulf.
On the windowsill stood the ceramic vase from Umbria, and in it swayed the first tulips of the season—scarlet with yellow edges.
It was her home again.
And no one would ever dare to question that again.
