Galina accidentally discovered a recording on her husband’s dashcam. What she saw turned everything upside down: a discreet visit to a notary, someone else’s signature, and an apartment that was no longer half hers.
Galina found the recording by accident. She had been searching the dashcam’s memory card for the moment someone scratched her bumper outside the Pyaterochka grocery store, but instead she stumbled upon something entirely different.
The dashcam recorded everything. Parking lots, conversations, silence. And it had recorded that Tuesday too.
The morning had begun as usual. Galina stood at the stove, turning syrniki in the frying pan, while listening to Vadim get ready in the hallway. Keys jingled. The door slammed. She did not even turn around.
Seventeen years of marriage had accustomed her to that sound. The door slammed every morning at seven forty, and every morning Galina was left alone with a cooling breakfast and the feeling that the day had already been lived.
Their fourteen-year-old daughter, Liza, came out of her room wearing headphones, silently took a syrnik straight from the pan, and went back inside. Her fingers were long like her father’s, and just like her father, she never thanked anyone for food.
Galina wiped her hands on a towel. It was damp. She hung it on the hook and thought that she needed to buy a new one. Then she realized that she had been thinking the same thing every day for a month.
The story with the bumper was a ridiculous one. Someone had clipped it in a parking lot. The dent was shallow, but the paint had cracked. Vadim had told her to check the dashcam because the culprit might have been recorded. Then he gave her the memory card.
He had given it to her himself.
That was what would not leave her alone afterward. He had removed it himself, handed it to her himself, and had not even stopped to think.
Galina inserted the card into her laptop that evening, after Liza had shut herself in her room and Vadim had left for some kind of meeting. During the past six months, he had often gone out to meetings. She used to ask him who he was meeting and where he was going.
She had stopped.
There were many files on the card. The dashcam recorded in twenty-minute segments, and she scrolled through them while checking the dates. She needed Thursday. She skipped through Monday and Tuesday.
Then she stopped.
In the recording from Tuesday at eleven thirty in the morning, Vadim’s car was parked outside a building with a sign. The words were clearly visible through the windshield:
“Notary E. A. Krivtsova.”
Galina pressed pause. She looked again. Then she leaned back in her chair and felt the tips of her fingers turn cold.
She knew that address. The notary’s office was on Lenin Street, across the road from their bank. She and Vadim had been there once, eight years earlier, when they registered their respective shares in the apartment.
Half belonged to him. Half belonged to her.
That was how it had been registered. That was how they had lived.
Galina pressed play.
Vadim got out of the car. She could see it clearly: first the door opened, and then his dark-blue hooded jacket appeared. He walked toward the entrance. The camera was facing forward, so after that it showed only the pavement, pedestrians, and the sign.
Forty-three minutes later, he returned. He got into the car and placed a folder on the passenger seat. It was beige and tied with strings. Galina remembered folders like that. Notarial documents always came in folders like those.
He sat there for a minute without starting the engine. Then he took out his phone, called someone, and said:
“It’s done. I signed it. Call me back tomorrow and we’ll discuss the timing.”
His voice was calm. Businesslike. As though he were making a work call.
Galina listened to that sentence four times.
She did not fall asleep until three in the morning. She lay on her side of the bed, listening to Vadim breathing steadily and deeply beside her, trying to understand what he could possibly have signed at a notary’s office without her.
There were not many possibilities.
And all of them were bad.
The pillow smelled of his shampoo. Minty, with some kind of herbal note. The smell had once calmed her. Now it made her throat tighten.
The next morning, she got up earlier than usual. She made coffee and placed a cup in front of him.
“Where did you go yesterday afternoon? I’m just asking.”
Vadim looked up from his phone. His eyebrows were so fair that they were almost invisible, which always made his expression seem neutral and impossible to read.
“I stopped by the work site. Why?”
“No reason.”
She took a sip of coffee and burned her tongue. She did not show it.
He had lied.
Easily and habitually, like fastening the zipper of a jacket. Without even thinking.
That afternoon, Galina asked to leave work early. She worked at an insurance company, issuing policies, and her supervisor, Zoya Pavlovna—a woman with short hair and the voice of a railway dispatcher—asked:
“Has something happened?”
“Toothache.”
“Go. But three policies are still pending tomorrow. Don’t forget.”
Galina nodded and left.
Her tooth did not hurt. Something else did, but she could not determine exactly where.
She went to the Rosreestr property-registration office. She could have ordered an official extract for the apartment online, but she needed it immediately. Today. On paper.
She needed to hold it in her hands and see it.
The line was not long: four people. A man in a brown padded jacket stood in front of her, coughing into his fist every twenty seconds. Wet snow fell outside the window, and cold air crept around her legs whenever the entrance door opened.
When her turn came, she gave the address. The young woman behind the counter, who had a small mole above her lip, searched the database and printed the document.
Galina took the sheet.
The letters blurred. She blinked and read them again.
Owner: Vadim Gennadyevich Lapin.
Share: 1/1.
The entire apartment.
All of it.
His.
Her share no longer existed.
Galina folded the sheet in half. Then she folded it in half again. She put it into her bag, closed the zipper, and walked outside.
Wet snow slipped beneath her collar.
She did not brush it away.
She took the bus home, although she could have called a taxi. The bus jolted over every pothole, and for some reason the shaking helped her think. An elderly woman sat beside her holding a mesh bag containing three heads of cabbage, and Galina stared at them as though they were the only normal things left in the world.
Vadim had transferred the entire apartment into his own name.
Without her consent.
Without her signature.
But how?
She knew how.
Or rather, she was beginning to suspect. The thought left a sour feeling inside her, like biting into an unripe apple.
A power of attorney.
He had once asked her to sign a power of attorney. A year and a half earlier, when they were refinancing the mortgage. There had been a large stack of documents, and she had signed them without reading every page.
Apparently, he had slipped in one more.
The bus stopped. The old woman with the cabbages got off. A teenager wearing headphones sat down in her place. He reminded Galina of Liza. The same long fingers. The same absent expression.
Galina took out her phone and called Rita.
Rita was her cousin and a lawyer. She specialized in tax law, not family law, but she was good enough for the first conversation.
“Wait, wait. Let’s take this from the beginning.”
Rita’s voice was hoarse. She always sounded as though she had just woken up, even at three in the afternoon. She spoke in short, clipped phrases, like statements in an official report.
“Do you have the extract?”
“Yes.”
“What is the date of the transfer?”
“Tuesday. That same Tuesday.”
“What was the legal basis?”
“I didn’t look. One moment.”
Galina took the folded document from her bag and opened it. Her hands were not trembling, but her fingers would not obey her, and she struggled to flatten the creases.
“A deed of gift.”
“To whom?”
“To himself. I mean, according to the documents, I gave him my share as a gift.”
“Is your signature on it?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t at the notary’s office.”
The silence on the phone lasted five seconds. For Rita, that was a long time.
“Listen to me carefully. You need an attorney. A proper one, not someone you find randomly online. I’ll give you a contact. Do not tell your husband anything. Not a word. Not even a hint. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“And copy the dashcam recording. Put it on a flash drive, email it to yourself, save it wherever you can. Just make sure it exists in several places.”
“All right.”
“Galya.”
“What?”
“Hold on.”
Rita ended the call.
Galina sat in the kitchen and stared at the refrigerator. There was a magnet from Anapa that they had brought home two summers earlier. Liza had gotten sunburned on that trip, and Vadim had complained that the hotel did not have air-conditioning.
An ordinary vacation.
An ordinary family.
She stood up, opened the refrigerator, took out a pot of soup, and placed it on the stove to warm. Liza would be home from school soon.
For the next three days, Galina lived as though her life had two floors.
On the first, she prepared dinner, did the laundry, answered questions, and smiled whenever she was supposed to smile.
On the second, invisible floor, she spoke to an attorney, copied files, and learned a new way of remaining silent.
The attorney’s name was Tamara Ilyinichna. She was around sixty, short, with stiff gray hair and a manner of speaking as though every word cost money.
“You’re saying the deed gifting your share was executed without your personal presence at the notary’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sign a power of attorney?”
“Possibly. A year and a half ago, when we refinanced the mortgage.”
“‘Possibly’ is not good enough. We need to know for certain. We will request a copy of the power of attorney from the notary, assuming one existed.”
Tamara Ilyinichna wrote in a notebook. Not on a tablet or a phone, but in an ordinary notebook with yellow pages. Her handwriting was small and slanted to the left, like the handwriting of someone accustomed to saving paper.
“The dashcam recording is good. Very good.”
“It shows him entering the notary’s office and coming out with a folder.”
“And his voice? You said he called someone.”
“Yes. He said, ‘It’s done. I signed it. Call me tomorrow and we’ll discuss the timing.’”
“Who did he call?”
“I don’t know.”
The attorney looked up from the notebook. Her eyes were dark and attentive, surrounded by a fine web of wrinkles.
“We’ll find out.”
Vadim noticed nothing.
Or he pretended not to notice. Galina could not tell which.
He came home, ate dinner, looked at his phone, and went to bed. Sometimes he asked about Liza—how school was going and what her grades were like. Liza answered in single words. He did not press her.
On Saturday, they went grocery shopping, and Galina sat beside him in the car, staring at the dashcam beneath the rearview mirror.
Small. Black. A red light blinking.
It was recording.
It was always recording.
“Can we stop at the pharmacy?” she asked. “Liza needs vitamins.”
“All right.”
She turned toward the window and saw her reflection in the glass. Cheekbones. Dark circles beneath her eyes. The raised collar of her padded coat.
A woman who knew something she was never supposed to know.
The pharmacy smelled of chamomile and rubbing alcohol. Galina stood in front of the vitamins, reading the labels without understanding a single word. The letters formed names, but their meaning slipped away.
Vadim was waiting in the car.
She imagined him sitting there, scrolling through his phone while the dashcam recorded his face in the rearview mirror. The calm face of a man who had thought of everything.
Almost everything.
Tamara Ilyinichna called on Monday.
“We found the power of attorney. It was included in the package of refinancing documents. It was a general power of attorney with broad authority, including the right to dispose of real estate.”
“I didn’t read what I was signing.”
“That does not free you from the consequences. However…”
She paused.
“However?”
“The power of attorney was notarized at the office of V. K. Smirnov. The deed of gift was executed by E. A. Krivtsova. We requested Krivtsova’s copy. Your signature on the deed was placed by a representative acting under the power of attorney. In other words, you did not personally sign it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Notary Krivtsova was required to verify that the power of attorney was valid and had not been revoked. We checked. You had not revoked it, which is true. But there is one complication.”
Galina heard Tamara Ilyinichna turning a page in her notebook.
“A general power of attorney is valid for one year unless another term is specified. Yours did specify a term: until the refinancing process was completed. The refinancing was completed fourteen months ago. The power of attorney was invalid at the time the deed of gift was executed.”
Galina sat down.
She simply sat on the floor in the hallway before she could reach a chair.
“So the transaction…”
“Is legally void. The notary was required to check the expiration date. Either she failed to check it, or she was given incomplete information. In either case, it gives us grounds to have the transaction declared invalid.”
“And the apartment?”
“It will return to its previous legal status. Half yours and half his, exactly as it was before.”
Galina pressed the phone tightly to her ear.
The hallway was quiet. Muffled music was coming from behind Liza’s bedroom door, some kind of rap with a soft beat.
“What do I need to do?”
“We file a lawsuit. I’ll prepare everything. You only have to do one thing.”
“What?”
“Do not warn your husband. Under any circumstances. Not until the court proceedings begin.”
Remaining silent was the hardest part.
Not because she wanted to scream. In fact, she did not want to scream at all.
She wanted to ask why.
One quiet word over dinner, somewhere between the borscht and the main course.
Why did you do this?
But she remained silent.
She sliced bread. Served plates. Cleared the table.
Vadim ate quietly while looking at something on his phone. Occasionally, he raised his head and asked:
“Salt?”
She passed him the salt.
Liza ate in her room, carrying her plate away with her. Galina used to argue with her about it. Now she did not.
She had more important things to think about.
On Wednesday evening, Vadim came home late. It was ten o’clock, and he smelled of someone else’s cigarettes and the cold outside.
“The meeting ran late.”
“Dinner is in the refrigerator.”
He warmed it, ate, and washed his plate. He always did that. It was the only household habit of his that could be described as positive.
He washed the plate and placed it in the drying rack.
Galina stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at his back. Broad, slightly hunched, covered by a stretched-out T-shirt he wore at home.
She had looked at that back for seventeen years. She knew every vertebra and every mole.
She had not known what he was hiding behind it.
Rita called every day.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Galya, when you say ‘fine,’ it sounds like a diagnosis. Have you eaten?”
“Yes.”
“What did you eat?”
“I don’t remember.”
Rita sighed. Her sighs were distinctive: long, with a faint whistle, like the sighs of someone accustomed to breathing out on behalf of other people.
“When is Tamara filing the lawsuit?”
“Next week.”
“And did you copy the recording?”
“Three copies. One on a flash drive, one in cloud storage, and one in your email.”
“Good.”
Silence.
“Galya.”
“What?”
“You understand this isn’t only about the apartment, don’t you?”
“I understand.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Rita did not push her.
It was the best thing she could have done.
On Thursday, Galina was at work processing a comprehensive car-insurance policy when her phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number.
“Galina Sergeyevna?”
“Yes.”
“This is Notary Krivtsova. Elena Andreyevna. I need to speak with you.”
Galina stepped into the corridor. Behind her, Zoya Pavlovna was dictating something to a trainee, her voice sounding like a jackhammer.
“I’m listening.”
“I have learned that your attorney submitted an inquiry concerning the deed of gift. I would like to clarify the situation.”
“Clarify it.”
“Yes. Your husband presented a power of attorney. I verified his authority. At the time, I had no reason to doubt its validity.”
“The power of attorney had expired.”
The silence was brief but heavy.
“I will verify that again. If that is true, I am prepared to provide an explanation as part of the proceedings.”
“Good.”
“Galina Sergeyevna, I want you to understand that I acted in good faith.”
Galina did not answer. She simply ended the call and returned to the insurance policy.
Her hands were icy even though the office was heated to twenty-four degrees Celsius.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday. Tamara Ilyinichna emailed her scanned copies.
Galina opened the files and read:
“Plaintiff: Galina Sergeyevna Lapina. Defendant: Vadim Gennadyevich Lapin. Subject of claim: invalidation of the deed gifting a one-half share in the apartment.”
Everything was written in dry legal language, but their entire life stood behind every line.
The address of the apartment where they had lived for twelve years.
The cadastral number.
Floor area: sixty-three square metres.
Sixty-three square metres.
The hallway where Liza had once learned to walk while holding on to the wall. The kitchen where Galina stood every morning. The bedroom where she and Vadim had stopped talking about three years ago.
She closed the laptop.
Vadim received the court summons on Saturday. Galina was home when he opened the envelope.
She stood at the sink washing apples. The water was running, and the apples knocked gently against each other. That was the only sound in the kitchen until Vadim said:
“What is this?”
She did not turn around.
“What is this, Galina?”
He never called her by her full name. It was always Galya, Galka, or sometimes Gal.
But never Galina.
She turned off the water and faced him.
His face was as gray as the plaster in their apartment building’s stairwell. His pale eyebrows were raised, his lips pressed together, and the paper in his hand was trembling slightly.
“It’s a court summons.”
“I can see that. Where did it come from?”
“My attorney.”
“What attorney? What are you talking about?”
“The apartment. My share. What you did.”
He placed the envelope on the table slowly and carefully, as though it might explode.
“I don’t understand.”
“You do.”
Silence.
A television was playing in the neighboring apartment. Some kind of talk show. A voice shouted through the wall:
“You have no right!”
Galina thought it was almost funny.
“Please sit down,” Vadim said.
“I’ll stand.”
He rubbed his face with both hands. She had seen that habit a thousand times. Whenever he did not know what to say, he rubbed his face as though trying to erase its expression.
“Listen. I can explain everything.”
“Explain it.”
“It was advice. Someone advised me to do it. Just in case. As a precaution.”
“Who advised you?”
He fell silent.
“Who, Vadim?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He stood and paced across the kitchen, three steps one way and three steps back. The kitchen was small, and he looked like an animal in a cage—large and absurd.
“My mother,” he finally said.
“Zinaida Petrovna?”
“Yes.”
Galina nodded.
Something inside her clicked into place, like the final puzzle piece that had been missing beneath the sofa.
Zinaida Petrovna.
Her mother-in-law.
Seventy-one years old, five feet two inches tall, with a voice like an icebreaker docking in port.
She had always believed that Galina was not good enough for her son. She had never said it directly, but she had expressed it in a thousand other ways.
“Is that how you cook rice? Interesting.”
“Vadim could have had a better life if it weren’t for all these expenses.”
“The apartment was bought with his money, wasn’t it?”
It had not been.
Galina had saved the down payment for three years, putting aside money from every salary. But it had happened so long ago that no one remembered anymore.
No one except her.
Now it turned out that Zinaida Petrovna had not merely complained.
She had acted.
“Mother said that if we ever divorced, you would take half. She said it would be better to protect myself in advance.”
“And you listened to her.”
“I didn’t think it was a problem. We still live together.”
“You secretly transferred my share to yourself. Without my knowledge.”
“Technically…”
“Technically, you used an expired power of attorney that I signed for the mortgage refinancing. Technically, that is fraud.”
He turned pale. He had been gray before, but now he became as white as the sheet of paper in his hand.
“I didn’t mean to.”
“You did it.”
Galina took an apple from the sink, wiped it on the towel, and bit into it. It was sour.
She chewed while looking at him. He could not bear her gaze and turned toward the window.
Liza came out of her room after they had been silent for about ten minutes. She had probably heard them.
Her headphones hung around her neck, and her hair was pulled into a ponytail. She stood in the kitchen doorway, looking from her mother to her father and back again.
“Are you getting divorced?”
“No,” Vadim said.
“I don’t know,” Galina said.
Liza swallowed and looked at her father.
“Dad, what did you do?”
He did not answer.
And his silence said more than any words could have.
Liza took the bread from the shelf, returned to her room, and closed the door. Not loudly. She did not slam it.
She simply closed it.
Galina finished the apple and threw away the core.
The court hearing was scheduled for six weeks later. During those six weeks, Galina lived an entire lifetime.
Vadim tried to talk. Every evening, almost on schedule, he began with the same sentence:
“Can’t we settle this without going to court?”
“No.”
“I’ll return your share voluntarily. We can go to a notary.”
“Now it will be done through the court.”
“Why do you need to do this?”
“Because you’ve already shown me what ‘voluntarily’ means to you.”
He would fall silent, go into the other room, and turn on the television. She could hear him switching channels: one, then another, then a third.
He never stayed on any of them.
Zinaida Petrovna called once.
“Galina, I heard you’ve taken Vadim to court.”
“Yes, Zinaida Petrovna.”
“Do you understand that you’re destroying your family?”
“I’m destroying it?”
A pause.
“Vadim did it for your own good. It’s safer when the apartment belongs to one person.”
“To him.”
“He is the head of the family.”
“He is a fraud, Zinaida Petrovna.”
Her mother-in-law hung up.
Galina placed the phone on the table and realized that she was smiling.
For the first time in several weeks.
Tamara Ilyinichna prepared thoroughly. They met twice a week, for an hour each time.
“The dashcam recording confirms that your husband personally visited the notary on the day of the transaction. His voice on the recording confirms that his actions were deliberate. The power of attorney had expired. The notary failed to verify its term. We have a strong case.”
“What if he says I knew?”
“Did you know?”
“No.”
“Then let him prove that you did.”
Galina nodded.
Outside the office window was a parking lot covered with dirty snow. Someone’s hazard lights were flashing, and the orange light pulsed rhythmically across the ceiling.
“Tamara Ilyinichna?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think he genuinely believed that what he did was normal?”
The attorney set down her pen.
“In my experience, every second person believes they are acting ‘for the good of the family’—until they receive a court summons.”
The hearing was held on a Tuesday.
Galina wore a gray dress, the one she used to wear to job interviews. It was formal, knee-length, with buttons at the neck. She tied back her hair.
Vadim arrived in a suit. She had not seen him wear one since his father’s funeral, and it made her uncomfortable, as though both of them had come to the wrong place.
The courtroom was small. The judge, a woman of about fifty wearing heavy earrings, leafed through the case file. Tamara Ilyinichna sat beside Galina, upright and focused, her notebook open.
Vadim also had an attorney. A young man with a smooth face and a striped tie. He spoke confidently, but his words were like soap bubbles—attractive and empty.
“My client acted within the scope of the authority granted to him. The power of attorney was obtained legally and signed voluntarily.”
Tamara Ilyinichna stood.
“The power of attorney was issued for the purpose of refinancing a mortgage loan. Its period of validity was defined as lasting until the completion of the refinancing procedure. The refinancing was completed fourteen months before the disputed transaction took place. The power of attorney was therefore invalid at the time the deed of gift was executed.”
She placed a copy of the power of attorney, a bank certificate showing the refinancing completion date, and a transcript of the dashcam recording on the table.
“In addition, we are submitting footage from the defendant’s vehicle dashcam showing his visit to the notary on the day of the transaction, as well as an audio recording of a telephone conversation in which the defendant confirms that he completed the transaction.”
The judge looked up.
“Defendant, can you explain?”
Vadim looked at his lawyer. The lawyer nodded.
“I acted with the best of intentions. I wanted to protect the family’s property.”
“Protect it from whom?” the judge asked.
He did not answer.
The judgment was issued a week later. Galina learned about it from Tamara Ilyinichna.
“The transaction has been declared invalid. Your share has been restored to you. The judge also found that Notary Krivtsova committed a violation when certifying the transaction. A separate judicial ruling has been issued concerning her conduct.”
Galina stood by the window. Rain was falling outside, the first rain of the year, and the asphalt shone as though it had been coated with varnish.
“Thank you.”
“It’s my job.”
“No. Thank you, truly.”
Tamara Ilyinichna was silent for a moment.
“What are you going to do next?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it. Don’t rush. You have time.”
Galina ended the call and pressed her palms against the window. The glass was cold, and her fingers left marks on it.
Vadim came home from work at seven. He removed his shoes, hung up his jacket, and went into the kitchen. Galina was standing at the stove.
“Soup?”
“Borscht.”
“Good.”
He sat at the table. She placed a bowl in front of him.
“Galya.”
“What?”
“I know about the court’s decision.”
“I know that you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
She picked up the ladle and poured herself a bowl. Then she sat opposite him.
“What exactly are you sorry about?”
He stared into his bowl. Steam rose from the borscht. The beetroot turned the sour cream pink.
“That things turned out this way.”
“They didn’t ‘turn out’ this way, Vadim. You did it.”
“I understand.”
“No. You don’t.”
She raised her spoon, blew on it, and took a bite. The borscht had turned out well. Thick, with garlic, just as her grandmother had liked it.
Her grandmother, who had spent her entire life in a communal apartment and considered a home with its own private bathroom a miracle.
“I don’t know what will happen next,” Galina said. “I don’t know whether I’ll stay. I don’t know whether I’ll forgive you.”
“What do you know?”
She looked at him.
His pale eyebrows. His gray face. The crease across his forehead that had not been there before.
“I know that the share is mine. And I know that I will never sign anything again without reading it first.”
He nodded.
They ate in silence. Behind the wall, Liza turned on her music, and the muffled bass came through like a heartbeat.
That evening, Galina washed the dishes. Plates, spoons, the cooking pot. The water was hot, and it made her fingers red.
Her wedding ring lay on the edge of the sink. She always removed it while washing dishes. It was a habit. Every time, she placed it in the same spot—on the right-hand corner, beside the soap dispenser.
She washed the final plate. Dried her hands. Looked at the ring.
It lay there, shining beneath the kitchen light.
A simple gold ring, fourteen-karat, size sixteen and a half.
Seventeen years on her ring finger.
Galina stood there for a moment.
Then she reached out her hand.
The dashcam in the car blinked red.
It was recording.
As always.
An empty parking lot, a streetlamp, and the dark kitchen window.
No one ever watched that recording. Not that evening and not afterward.
But it existed.
Just like everything that remains invisible until someone begins to look.
