“And what if she figures it out?” my mother-in-law asked doubtfully. “Women have intuition, you know. What if she realizes you’ve been transferring the money from your bonuses into my account?”
My familiar loneliness behind the monitor had become my comfort zone, the one place where I could control the plot, grant happiness to my characters, or lead them through trials. But in real life, beyond the screen, I desperately longed for stability. A popular job-search website was always open in the next browser tab: methodically, day after day, I looked for reliable work so that my husband’s and my family budget could finally stand on solid ground.
I thought Igor and I were a team. Together we made plans, together we took out a mortgage on a spacious apartment, together we dreamed of the day when the financial pressure would ease and we could simply enjoy life. I sincerely believed that my work, my sleepless nights over the keyboard, and my eyes tired from the monitor were my contribution to our shared bright future.
How cruelly, how deafeningly painfully, I was mistaken.
That Friday, the weather seemed to foreshadow trouble. From early morning, the sky was covered with heavy leaden clouds, and by evening a fine, damp autumn rain began drumming against the windowpanes. I was sitting in our bedroom, which had been converted into my home office, trying to finish the third and final text of the day.
My head buzzed with exhaustion, and my fingers mechanically tapped the keys. Meanwhile, Igor was hosting his mother, Tamara Vasilyevna, in the kitchen. My mother-in-law did not visit us often, but every visit of hers came with a barely perceptible tension. She belonged to that category of women who never say nasty things to your face, but know how to look or sigh in such a way that you instantly feel like a failure and a complete disappointment.
She never took my profession seriously, considering working with texts online some ridiculous hobby that normal people could not possibly earn money from.
“You’re always sitting at that computer, typing little letters. You’d be better off going to work at a factory or in accounting,” she loved to say while sipping tea.
Igor always laughed it off, and I thought he was on my side.
I prepared dinner for them, set the table, brewed fresh thyme tea, and, after apologizing, went back to the room under the pretext of urgent edits from a client. I simply wanted a little silence.
After an hour of uninterrupted work, I felt extremely thirsty. Leaving my laptop open, I silently rose from my chair. My soft-soled slippers muffled my steps, and the long corridor of our apartment was sunk in semi-darkness.
I walked to the kitchen for a glass of water, suspecting nothing, lost in thoughts about the plot of my new story. The kitchen door was slightly ajar, and a narrow beam of yellow light fell through it. I had already raised my hand to push the door open when I suddenly heard my name. The tone in which it was spoken made me freeze on the spot.
“…and how much longer are you planning to put up with this circus with that writer of yours?” Tamara Vasilyevna’s voice sounded irritated and somehow businesslike. “Igor, I’m ashamed in front of the relatives. Everyone keeps asking when there will be grandchildren, when there will be a normal family, and you’re living with a woman who sees nothing beyond her monitor. No proper career, no status.”
I braced myself to hear my loving husband put his mother in her place, to say that he loved me, that my work brought in real money, that I was actively looking for a stable full-time remote job so things would be easier for us. I was waiting for him to defend me.
But instead, I heard Igor give a short, cynical laugh. The same laugh I usually heard when he watched stupid comedies.
“Mom, just be patient a little longer,” my husband’s voice was calm, reasonable, and icy cold. “You know our plan. What’s the point of breaking things off now? She works like a machine. She keeps writing and writing her new book, and she’s even going to interviews. She pours all her earnings into the mortgage, tries so hard, pays it off early. I’m not an idiot to leave now and split the debts.”
“And what if she figures it out?” my mother-in-law asked doubtfully. “Women have intuition, you know. What if she realizes you’ve been transferring the money from your bonuses into my account?”
“She won’t figure it out,” replied the man with whom I had shared a bed for the past four years, confidently, almost contemptuously. “She’s too absorbed in her made-up stories and job hunting. She doesn’t notice anything around her at all. I tell her they cut our bonuses at the company because of the crisis, and she believes it. Then she sits down at the keyboard even more. The lawyer explained it to me clearly: as soon as she pays off the principal of the loan — and at her pace, that will happen by March — I file for divorce. We sell the apartment, split the money in half. Only all her savings will go toward paying off our shared debts, while my savings will be perfectly safe in your account. Then you and I will buy a great two-room apartment, just like we planned. The main thing now is not to scare her off. Let her believe in bright love and the family hearth.”
The corridor was silent. Only the rain murmured monotonously outside the window, and my heart pounded hollowly, painfully loudly. It felt as though the air in the apartment had suddenly run out. There were no tears, no desire to burst into the kitchen and make a scene. There was only the feeling that the ground beneath my feet had collapsed with a roar into an abyss.
My entire life, my exhaustion, my hopes, my desire to make our life better — all of it had been nothing more than a convenient tool in the hands of a calculating manipulator. To him, I was not a beloved woman, but simply an uninterrupted source of income, a draft horse that could be fed illusions while it pulled the heavy cart of someone else’s prosperity.
I do not remember how I turned around and, on stiff legs, returned to the room. I closed the door as silently as I had opened it. I sank into the chair in front of the glowing screen. On the monitor, the cursor blinked, waiting for the continuation of the story I had invented.
But now I had to write my own.
My brain, accustomed to constructing plots and finding ways out of the most difficult situations for my characters, suddenly switched into a mode of cold, emotionless work. Hysteria, tears, confrontations — all of that would give him an advantage. He would understand that his plan had been exposed and would take countermeasures. I could not allow that.
I sat at the computer all night. After seeing his mother out, Igor looked in on me, tenderly kissed the top of my head, and said, “Working hard, my little bee? Don’t stay up too late,” then went to bed.
His touch almost made me nauseous, but I forced myself to smile and nod without taking my eyes off the screen. As soon as his steady breathing came from the bedroom, I began to act.
I opened my banking apps. All my fees from the past months, which I had planned to proudly put toward an early mortgage payment the following week, were sitting in my personal account. With one movement of my hand, I transferred the entire amount, down to the last kopeck, into a secure deposit account that Igor had no access to and did not know existed.
Then I gathered all my documents into a separate folder: passport, diploma, contracts, account statements. I carefully packed the most essential things into a small sports bag and hid it deep inside my wardrobe.
I greeted the dawn as an entirely different person. From the bathroom mirror, a woman with a confident gaze looked back at me — a gaze I had never seen in myself before. The naive, trusting girl who believed in partnership and love had died that night in the dark corridor. In her place, a woman was born who would never again allow anyone to use her.
The morning followed the usual routine. I made coffee and prepared sandwiches for Igor. He joked, talked about weekend plans, and played the perfect husband. I looked at him and wondered how I could have failed to notice this falseness for so many years, this hidden smirk at the corners of his lips…
Continuation just below in the first comment.
