The smell of cheap Turkish lavender air freshener had sunk permanently into the walls of their two-room apartment on the outskirts of the city.
Yadviga Antonovna, who had turned thirty-nine a couple of days earlier, sat in the kitchen, thoughtfully looking at her hands. On the index finger of her left hand were barely visible tiny needle marks—the professional brand of a seamstress with fifteen years of experience.
She sighed heavily. Fifteen years ago, her life had taken a completely different path than she had expected.
Her husband had left a note and half a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table and gone off to a woman who owned a chain of pharmacies all over the city. Six months later, they were already posting photos from Montenegro. Meanwhile, Yadviga was left alone with four-year-old Maya, a leaking faucet, and a miserable salary at the Silhouette tailoring studio. That was where she remained stuck for many years, shortening trousers and replacing zippers on old down jackets.
Maya grew up beautiful. Too beautiful for their shabby neighborhood. And too angry about their poverty.
“Mom, why does everyone else have normal fathers, while ours is a real jerk, even though he has money? He’s enjoying life, and we’re counting pennies!” her daughter often said these things as if casually while looking at her cheap foundation in the mirror. But the words hit straight at Yadviga’s heart. “You could have come up with something at least. Aunt Lyuda from the third entrance imports clothes from China and even bought a car. And you’re still fussing around with your threads!”
Yadviga stayed silent. She swallowed the hurt, blaming it all on teenage rebellion. She was terribly ashamed that she could not buy her daughter original sneakers or pay for English courses.
After school, Maya flatly refused to even apply to the local college.
“So I can end up like you, breaking my back for twenty-five thousand a month? No, thanks!” she waved it off. “I’d rather get a job at Panorama. It’s the most prestigious restaurant in the city. People dine there, Mom, the kind you’ve never even dreamed of.”
Maya was now nineteen, and she really did work there as a waitress. She constantly brought home tips and looked down on her mother more and more with each passing day.
And that was a very big mistake.
The girl did not know that exactly a year earlier, after crying half the night because of another one of her daughter’s cruel remarks, Yadviga had typed into her old laptop’s search bar: “how to start your own clothing brand from scratch.” The pictures of beautiful women in elegant lace lingerie mesmerized her.
After all, she knew how to sew. She sewed perfectly.
And she took the risk.
The first three months were hell. Yadviga secretly spent almost half her salary on expensive Italian lace and accessories. She created a social media page. She named the brand simply and mysteriously: Yadva. She photographed the sets herself on a mannequin under the light of a ring lamp she had bought on installment.
She said nothing to her daughter yet, terrified of failure. Yadviga imagined Maya pursing her lips and saying sarcastically:
“I told you that you were good for nothing.”
The first orders came slowly: one or two a week from acquaintances at the tailoring studio. But then word of mouth began to work. Women passed her contacts to one another: lingerie from Yadva fit as if it had been sewn exactly for their bodies.
For the last six months, Yadviga had been drowning in the flood of clients. Turnover had grown to 350–500 thousand a month. And before March 8, there was a real explosion. Her net profit exceeded one million rubles.
The woman stared at the screen of her phone, where a seven-digit number glowed in her banking app. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to scream, to hug Maya, to share her success with her. But inside her lived the sticky, deeply rooted fear of a lonely woman:
“What if this is temporary? What if tomorrow everything ends and I’m poor again? I need to wait. I need to establish myself.”
She had already quit Silhouette, lying to her daughter that she had been laid off, and now she simply took orders from home. Maya had only snorted contemptuously then.
That evening, her daughter burst into the apartment like a whirlwind. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining with a feverish, almost frightening light.
“Mom!” she exhaled, kicking off her shoes right onto the doormat. “That’s it! You can congratulate me. I’m going to quit that snake pit. I’m going to pull us out of this poverty!”
Yadviga slowly put down her phone.
“What happened, Maya?”
“My relationship with Marat has reached a new level! He’s… he’s incredible. His father owns a construction company. They have a house on New Riga and an apartment near Patriarch’s Ponds. We’ve been together for six months, and he’s crazy about me!”
Her mother frowned. She had heard about Marat in passing, but had thought he was just another fleeting romance.
“Six months? And you kept quiet? Maya, rich boys often just play with—”
“Oh, don’t start with your poor-person moral lectures!” Maya interrupted angrily, her face instantly twisting. “He’s not like that. He looks at me like I’m a queen. To him, I’m a girl from a good family. By the way…”
Maya hesitated, glancing around the shabby kitchen.
“By the way, I borrowed Katya’s French bag again. Remember, her aunt brought it for her? And the branded coat. I have a reason for it! I can’t look like a beggar.”
Yadviga sighed quietly, feeling bitter pity mixed with hurt boiling inside her.
“Maya, lies always come out eventually. Why pretend to be someone you’re not?”
“Because people judge you by your clothes!” her daughter snapped. “And we have a meeting coming up. A very important one. This Friday, Marat invited me to dinner with his parents. He said… he insisted that you come too. To meet them.”
The woman froze. The thought of meeting unfamiliar, clearly arrogant people in their family estate filled her chest with dull anxiety.
“No, Maya, I’m not going,” Yadviga Antonovna objected calmly but firmly, carefully folding a kitchen towel. “You and Marat have only been dating for six months. You’re both very young. Why this inspection? And what is the point of putting on a parade when we’re from different worlds?”
Her daughter threw up her hands, nearly hitting the chandelier, which was missing a couple of shades.
“Are you insane? Mom, do you even understand how important this is to me? If you don’t come, his parents will think I come from a dysfunctional family! Or that you’re an alcoholic hiding from normal people! Marat is very attached to his family. That’s how they do things!”
“How do they do things?” the woman looked up at her daughter. “Hold auditions for girls from Khrushchev-era apartment blocks?”
“What auditions?” Maya was almost shouting, angry, childish tears filling her eyes. “It’s a family dinner, and we’re going! Whether you want to or not! Got it? And please, dress normally. Not like some woman from the housing office. Put on makeup, do your hair. Katya has a nice Italian suit. It should fit you. I’ll ask her… And at dinner, I beg you, don’t talk about the tailoring studio, about torn trousers, or about how you prick your fingers with needles. Play along with me!”
Yadviga Antonovna felt a bitter lump rise in her throat.
Her daughter was ashamed of her. Ashamed of her honest work, her hands, her face. There were several million sitting in her account, and around two more million circulating in her small but fast-growing business. She could go right now and buy herself any Italian suit in the shopping center on Kutuzovsky, instead of borrowing one from Katya. But the hurt had hardened inside her like a heavy stone.
“I will not wear anyone else’s suit,” the woman answered quietly, looking past her daughter out the window, where dusk blurred the outlines of the gray apartment buildings. “And I am not going to lie. I will come as I am. I am a seamstress. I raised you alone. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Maya turned sharply pale, her lips trembling with rage.
“You idiot!” she shouted, slamming the door of her room so hard that the dishes in the cupboard rattled. “Selfish woman! You just want to ruin my life out of envy because you wasted your own!”
On Friday evening, the business-class taxi Marat had called carried them to an elite settlement outside the city.
Maya was silent the entire way, pointedly turning toward the window. She wore someone else’s coat and Katya’s bag, which she clutched nervously in her hands like a shield.
Yadviga Antonovna sat beside her. She wore a simple but perfectly cut dark-blue dress made of thick silk, sewn by her own hands, and classic shoes. No cheap costume jewelry, her hair arranged in a neat bun at the back of her head. The woman looked strict, elegant, and very calm, though inside everything tightened with a bad premonition.
Marat’s parents’ house was stunning in size: a huge mansion of glass and dark stone, a manicured lawn, and a maid in an immaculate uniform who opened the door for them.
Marat’s parents were waiting in a spacious dining room with panoramic windows. When the young man saw the guests, he rushed toward them, kissed Maya, and politely greeted Yadviga Antonovna.
Eleonora Eduardovna, Marat’s mother, looked the guests over with an icy, assessing gaze. Under that look, Maya immediately seemed to shrink and smiled ingratiatingly.
“Well, sit down,” the hostess said carelessly, waving her hand toward a massive oak table covered with refined appetizers. “Marat has told us so much about you, Maya. Though, admittedly, rather vaguely.”
Dinner began in an atmosphere of intense tension. Valery Pavlovich, a heavyset man wearing a watch that cost as much as a good apartment, lazily picked at his salad with a fork and asked questions that sounded more like a tax interrogation.
“So, Yadviga Antonovna,” Eleonora Eduardovna said, taking an elegant sip of wine. “Maya said you work in the field of… fashion design? What is your direction? Haute couture? Ready-to-wear?”
Under the table, Maya squeezed her mother’s knee hard. Primitive terror froze in the girl’s eyes.
The woman gently but firmly removed her daughter’s hand from her knee. She looked straight into the hostess’s cold eyes.
“No, Eleonora Eduardovna,” she answered calmly. “My daughter embellished things a little. I am not a haute couture designer. For fifteen years, I worked as an ordinary seamstress in a neighborhood tailoring studio. I repaired clothes and hemmed trousers.”
A dead, deafening silence hung in the dining room. The wind could be heard rustling through the pine trees outside the window. Maya froze, red blotches spreading across her face, while Marat exchanged a confused glance with his father.
Eleonora Eduardovna froze for a second with her glass raised, but then polite arrogance returned to her face. She gave her husband a brief but expressive look, and he smirked almost imperceptibly.
“How… sweet,” the hostess drawled, carefully dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Noble manual labor… Such a rarity these days. Everyone wants to be a blogger or an expert. But here… buttons, zippers. Valery, remember, your mother in the village also had a sewing machine. What was it called… Singer?”
“I don’t remember,” Valery Pavlovich muttered, not even looking at Yadviga Antonovna. “Well, to each their own. The main thing is that work should bring income, not merely take up time. Although in a tailoring studio, I assume, the income is purely symbolic.”
Maya sat there more dead than alive. She gripped her fork so tightly it seemed she might break it. The girl tried to save the situation by forcing out an unnatural, too-loud laugh.
“My mom is just very modest! She actually takes private orders… for very important people. She just doesn’t like to brag about it. Right, Mommy?”
Yadviga Antonovna looked at her daughter.
In the nineteen-year-old girl’s eyes, there was such desperate, almost servile pleading mixed with shame that, for a moment, the woman sincerely felt sorry for her. But she had no desire to rescue this ridiculous lie into which Maya had driven herself for the right to sit at this oak table.
“No, Maya,” Yadviga Antonovna objected quietly but clearly. “My clients are ordinary people. Pensioners, students, neighbors from the district. There have never been any ministers among my clients.”
Marat coughed awkwardly and reached for the mineral water.
“The important thing is that Maya is ambitious,” the young man tried to smooth things over, smiling at the girl. “She works at Panorama and plans to become an administrator…”
“Plans are not reality. She works as a waitress, son. Let’s call things by their proper names,” Eleonora Eduardovna interrupted her son softly but categorically. “We, of course, value hard work. But you must agree, restaurant service is a specific environment for a young attractive girl. So many temptations. Valery, remember the manager from your old project? How his girl from the hostess stand… well, it turned into an ugly story.”
The barbs continued for another twenty minutes. They were thin as razor blades, wrapped in impeccable manners and refined wording. Marat’s parents methodically, step by step, showed their guests their place in the social hierarchy.
Maya stayed silent, swallowing humiliation, and only nodded ingratiatingly at every remark from Eleonora Eduardovna. She was ready to endure any filth as long as she could remain in this rich house.
Yadviga Antonovna realized her patience was ending. She carefully placed her cutlery on the plate, rose from her chair, and adjusted her dark-blue silk dress.
“Thank you very much for dinner,” she said calmly, looking straight at the hosts. “Everything was very refined. But I should probably go. I have a lot of work tomorrow.”
“Mom, where are you going?” Maya hissed, jumping up after her. Her face had gone blotchy and crimson.
“Home, Maya. Don’t see me out. I’ll call a taxi myself.”
Already outside, breathing in the cool evening air, Yadviga Antonovna felt incredible relief.
She did not care about those people’s snobbery. What hurt was her daughter, who, for the illusion of wealth, had voluntarily turned herself into a doormat.
Exactly one hour later, the door to their apartment flew open so hard that it hit the wall. Maya stormed into the hallway. Katya’s coat was unbuttoned, mascara was smeared under her eyes from tears, and real, furious hatred burned in her gaze.
“You poor loser!” Maya shrieked from the doorway, throwing someone else’s bag onto the floor. “You ruined everything! You did it on purpose! Why did you open your mouth about the tailoring studio? Why did you disgrace me in front of normal people?”
Yadviga, who had been standing by the kitchen table, turned around. Her face was pale, but absolutely calm.
“Normal people, Maya? They wiped their feet on you like a rag, and you smiled.”
“They have the right! They have everything! And we have nothing because of your uselessness!” her daughter broke into a hysterical scream, choking with rage. “I was so ashamed of you! Of your miserable dress, of your old-woman lectures! You ruined my only chance to escape this swamp! I hate you!”
Yadviga Antonovna silently walked to the coat rack, picked up the bag her daughter had thrown down, and held it out to Maya. Her voice sounded surprisingly quiet, but there was a strength in it that the girl had never heard before.
“If that is the case, Maya… pack your things. Right now. If I am such a terrible mother and I’m dragging you to the bottom, live on your own. You’re an adult. Go find your ‘normal’ people. I want you out of this apartment in twenty minutes.”
Maya stopped short, staring at her mother with wild eyes. She was used to her mother always crying, apologizing, and tolerating her whims. But now standing before her was a completely different, unfamiliar woman with an icy gaze.
Her daughter packed her things in a rage. She threw jeans, cheap makeup, and sweaters into a suitcase, slamming the closet doors so hard it could be heard throughout the apartment.
She wanted her mother to rush over and beg her to stay. But Yadviga Antonovna simply stood by the kitchen window, looking at the dark, empty courtyard, and did not move.
When the front door slammed loudly behind her daughter, the apartment became quiet and… frightening.
The woman exhaled, opened her banking app, and looked at the numbers in her business account.
Well then… if that was how it was… she decided it was time to begin a new life.
On Monday morning, Yadviga Antonovna contacted a realtor. She felt no regret about selling the old Khrushchev-era apartment that had brought her so much pain and loss.
The deal closed surprisingly quickly.
The woman added two million to the sum she received and bought herself a cozy two-room apartment in a new modern residential complex. It had panoramic windows, a closed green courtyard, and underground parking.
And she also finally dared to do what she had been putting off for an entire year.
In a prestigious district in the city center, Yadviga Antonovna rented a large bright space: it would become the official office and showroom of her brand. She hired an SMM manager, two experienced seamstresses for production, and a cutter.
That was how Yadva stopped being a hidden, unknown brand. Now it was a real, stylish business with a beautiful sign and an ever-growing number of clients.
The woman threw herself completely into work: approving sketches, choosing silk and lace, and searching for models for the new collection.
She heard nothing from her daughter for three months. Maya blocked her everywhere: on messengers and on social media.
But one day, the girl finally appeared on her doorstep. She came straight to the new showroom.
Yadviga Antonovna was sitting at her desk, looking through sales reports, when the bell on the entrance door rang.
Maya entered the room. Nothing remained of her former arrogance and shine. She wore simple, washed-out jeans, a cheap T-shirt, and instead of her friends’ expensive bags, an ordinary cloth shopper hung from her shoulder.
The girl looked around the expensive interior of the showroom in confusion, at the racks of delicate silk lingerie, the mirrors in golden frames, and finally looked at her mother.
“Mom?” Maya asked quietly, almost in a whisper, taking a step forward. Her voice trembled. “I… I barely found you through acquaintances. They told me you were here now. Is all this… yours?”
The woman calmly rose from her seat. She wore a perfect linen suit in a deep emerald color, and her hair was neatly styled. There was neither anger nor triumph in her gaze, only calm, serious compassion.
“It’s mine, Maya,” Yadviga Antonovna answered. “Sit down. Tell me why you came.”
Her daughter sat down on a soft velvet pouf and suddenly burst into loud sobs like a child, covering her face with her hands. All the lies she had lived by had finally collapsed.
“Marat dumped me,” she said through sobs. “A month ago. His parents… caused a horrible scandal after that dinner. They said I was a poor waitress, a liar, and a cheap girl pretending to be rich by carrying other people’s things. That Eleonora… she hired someone, and they checked where I lived and whose things I wore. She was so angry that she helped get me fired. Now no decent place will hire me! At first Marat defended me, and then he just stopped answering my calls. He blocked me everywhere. I was kicked out of the apartment I was renting, I have no money, and all my friends turned away as soon as they found out that things with Marat were over…”
Maya raised tear-filled eyes to her mother, and now there was desperate hope in them.
“Mommy, forgive me. I was such a fool. I didn’t know you had a business like this, that you were doing so well… Forgive me for what I said the last time we saw each other. Take me in! Please, have pity on me. I can work in your office. As an administrator, as a model, anything! Please, I’ll disappear if I’m alone!”
Yadviga Antonovna silently listened to her daughter. She did not want to hug her, pity her, or return everything to the way it had been. She remembered too well the blind hatred in her daughter’s eyes and the way Maya had trampled her good name with pleasure so that rich snobs would praise her.
Justice seemed to have triumphed, but it did not taste sweet.
“No, Maya,” the woman said quietly but very firmly. “I will not hire you. And we will not live together again.”
The girl froze, and her tears seemed to vanish instantly.
“But why? You’re my mother! You’re supposed to help me! You’re rich now!”
“I owe you nothing, Maya,” Yadviga Antonovna walked to the window, beyond which the big city roared, full of opportunities. “You reproached me for not arranging my life. But I did arrange it. Myself. Without anyone’s help. And you wanted to get everything at once, trading away your pride and pretending other people’s things were yours. Your fiancé left you not because you were poor, but because you were fake. I will not hire you because professionals work in my business, not girls offended by fate who are looking for easy money. Each of us has our own path, Maya. You destroyed your life yourself, and you will restore it yourself. Go work. Go study. Become a person.”
The girl opened her mouth, wanting to shout something, but then she saw her mother’s icy, unshakable gaze. She understood that the old submissive mother, whom she could blame for everything without consequence, no longer existed.
Her daughter slowly stood up, took her bag, and left the showroom without looking back.
Yadviga Antonovna watched her go. Her heart tightened a little, but her soul felt surprisingly light and peaceful. She turned back to her desk, opened the sketches for the new autumn collection, and smiled at her reflection in the panoramic window.
Ahead of her was an entire life: her own, honest, and truly independent.
