Masha hurled the keys onto the windowsill so hard that they bounced off the frame and fell behind the radiator. She did not even bother picking them up. She stood in the middle of the kitchen in her coat, her bag still hanging from her shoulder, close to the doorway because she no longer had the strength to go any farther.
Ilya was sitting at the table with a mug of tea and his laptop. Some television series was playing on the screen.
“Are you watching shows again?”
He turned around with the same smile she had once loved but could no longer stand to look at—slightly guilty, slightly boyish, as though he had been caught doing something trivial and harmless.
“I was just resting for a while. I’ve been sending out résumés since this morning. I’m tired.”
Masha slowly placed her bag on a chair and unbuttoned her coat. Every movement took effort, as though something inside her had been stretched to its limit and was about to snap.
“Ilya,” she said evenly. “I’ve just spent eight hours on my feet. Then another hour on a minibus. I have to go back there first thing tomorrow morning. And you were resting.”
“Masha, I’m trying to explain…”
“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Are you going to have dinner?”
He nodded with relief, evidently deciding that the storm had passed him by. Masha opened the refrigerator, stared at its white shelves, and stood there for a long time while the cold air blew against her face.
The refrigerator was empty.
It had all begun eight months earlier, at the end of November, when Ilya called her in the middle of a work meeting. She stepped out into the corridor, pressed the phone to her ear, and the first thing she heard was his quiet, almost childlike voice.
“I’ve been fired.”
Masha immediately dropped everything and went home. She found him sitting on the sofa, his shoulders slumped, looking so lost that her heart tightened. She hugged him and said that everything would be all right, that they would manage, that the important thing was not to panic. He buried his face in her shoulder, and she felt his entire body go limp, as though he had finally exhaled something unbearably heavy.
“You’ll find something better in a month or two,” she told him. “Maybe it’s even for the best. They didn’t pay you much there anyway.”
He nodded. She made him coffee and took over all their expenses without discussion, because she loved him and because temporary difficulties were supposed to be temporary.
During the first few weeks, he genuinely searched. Masha saw job listings open in his browser, heard him making phone calls, and noticed him getting dressed in the mornings and leaving for “interviews.” She believed him. In the evenings she would ask, “How did it go?” and he would reply, “Nothing suitable yet, but there’s one possibility. We’ll have to wait.”
She waited.
Then the waiting began to drag on. After three months, the “one possibility” had led nowhere, but other possibilities appeared—vague, undefined, always somewhere just ahead, like the horizon. Masha began to notice that there were fewer and fewer interviews and more and more television series playing on his screen. She noticed that she prepared breakfast herself because she left early while Ilya was still asleep. That she bought the groceries because she had “stopped at the store on the way home.” That she paid the rent, naturally. That she still had not bought herself a new winter coat because the money ran out halfway through every month.
One evening, she finally decided to confront him.
“Ilya, tell me honestly. Are you looking for work?”
He looked at her with mild offense.
“Of course I am. There just aren’t many interesting offers at the moment. They almost hired me last week, but at the last minute they chose another candidate.”
“How do you know they chose someone else?”
“They wrote to me.”
“Show me the email.”
There was a pause. A brief one, but very revealing.
“Masha, don’t you trust me?”
She did not answer. She cleared away the dishes and went to bed early because she had to get up at six again the next morning.
Their next conversation took place in February, when Masha came home on her friend’s birthday. She had barely managed to congratulate her properly because she had no money for a decent gift. She sat in the entryway removing her boots, while anger accumulated inside her like water behind a dam.
“Ilya, I want to talk.”
He came out of the room carrying the same laptop.
“What happened?”
“You know what happened. I’ve been the only one working for almost six months. I’m not complaining. I understand that difficult situations happen, but I need to know what is really going on. Where is the job?”
He sat down across from her and put the laptop aside. Masha prepared herself for an honest, adult conversation, but then she suddenly noticed something in his eyes—something almost relaxed. He looked like a person who had made a decision long ago and was now simply announcing it aloud.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about it. Working for someone else isn’t for me. I want to start my own business.”
Masha blinked.
“Your own business.”
“Yeah. I’m looking for an idea. There are a lot of opportunities now. You just have to calculate everything properly.”
“You’re looking for an idea,” she repeated slowly. “You’ve spent six months looking for a business idea while I pay for our lives.”
“It’s temporary.”
“Ilya.” She paused so that her voice would not break. “Do you even understand what you’re telling me? It’s February, and after six months of lies about résumés and interviews, you’re sitting here telling me that you’re looking for an idea?”
He raised his chin.
“I wasn’t lying.”
“Then what was it?”
“I was looking. I just realized that wasn’t the direction I wanted to take.”
Masha stood up. She needed to get up and walk around, or she would say something she would later regret.
“All right,” she finally said. “All right. Look for an idea. But I want to see results within a month. A business plan, at least a rough outline. Something specific. Agreed?”
He nodded like a man who had just been given complete freedom.
A month later, there was no business plan.
Instead, there was a long, impassioned speech about how good ideas could not be rushed, how great entrepreneurs had spent years developing their concepts, and how Masha’s pressure was interfering with his creative process. She listened in silence. She looked at him and thought about how her mother had invited them to the country house for the weekend, but she had declined because the train tickets cost money, and there was almost nothing left by the end of the month.
She thought about how she had been wearing the same boots for three winters and the right one leaked.
She thought about how they would not be able to go on vacation again that year.
And Ilya kept talking about the creative process.
That was the moment something inside her switched off. It did not explode or tear apart. An internal switch simply clicked quietly, and the place where her sympathy had once lived went dark.
She endured it for a long time. Masha had always been good at enduring things. That was how her mother had raised her, and it was part of her nature. But patience was not a bottomless well, and every well, even the deepest one, had a bottom.
She reached hers in April, when her friend Sveta suggested that they take a vacation together. It was an inexpensive tour, nothing luxurious—just the sea and a few days away from work. Masha opened her banking app, looked at her balance, and closed her phone.
“I can’t,” she told Sveta. “I don’t have the money.”
“Masha, it’s really inexpensive…”
“I know. I don’t have the money, Sveta.”
She said it calmly, but afterward she sat in the restroom at work for a long time, staring at the white wall. She was thirty-one years old. She had a husband. She worked enough to support two people and still could not afford a trip to the sea.
That evening, she came home and found Ilya in an excellent mood. He was enthusiastically telling her about a new podcast on start-ups that he had listened to all day. He said he had come up with a possible business idea but needed to research the subject more deeply.
Masha took off her coat.
She hung it on the rack.
Then she said:
“Ilya, I need to tell you something.”
Something in her voice made him fall silent.
“I’m not supporting you anymore. And if your mother supports you, go live with her.”
The silence in the entryway became so dense that it felt almost tangible.
“What?” he finally said.
“I need an adult man beside me. A partner. Someone who takes responsibility. But you…” She exhaled. “You haven’t grown up yet, Ilya. You’re still looking for a mother who will solve everything and pay for everything. At first, I was suitable for that role. But I don’t want to be your mother anymore. I want to be your wife.”
He stared at her in growing astonishment, which gradually turned into resentment.
“Are you serious? I worked for years before I was fired! I have the right to take a break!”
“Eight months isn’t a break. It’s a way of life.”
“So that’s how it is. The moment something goes wrong, you throw me out.”
“I’m not throwing you out. I’m telling you the truth—something I should have told you a long time ago.”
“No, you are throwing me out! What else does ‘go live with your mother’ mean?”
Masha looked at him. At his handsome, bewildered face. At the hands that had grown accustomed to holding nothing but a mug of tea. At his eyes, which were now filled with so much hurt and so much… expectation. The expectation that she would soften, retreat, and say, “All right, all right, that isn’t what I meant.”
“It means,” she said calmly, “that you need to make a decision. Either you pull yourself together and begin living like an adult, or you go somewhere you’ll be comforted and pitied. I’m tired of comforting you.”
He left that same evening.
He packed a bag quickly, making sharp movements and maintaining a pointed silence. At the door, he turned around. She expected him to say something—a final remark, an accusation, or a plea. But he only looked at her for a long moment, his expression combining resentment with something else that resembled confusion, and then he walked out.
The door closed.
Masha stood in the entryway for a while. Then she went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and stared out of the dark window. It was quiet. Unusually quiet, like the silence that comes when a sound you have grown so accustomed to that you no longer notice it is suddenly switched off.
She expected herself to cry.
But there were no tears. There was only exhaustion and something resembling fresh air, which she could finally breathe deeply into her lungs.
Galina Petrovna, Ilya’s mother, opened the door at eleven that evening and immediately understood everything from the expression on her son’s face.
“Did Masha throw you out?”
“Mom, can I stay with you for a while?”
She stepped aside and let him into the entryway. She helped him remove his jacket and put the kettle on. She listened to everything he said while they sat in the kitchen. She listened silently, occasionally nodding or pressing her lips together.
Ilya expected his mother to take his side. She had always taken his side.
“Masha is wrong,” he said at last. “Finding a job takes time. She doesn’t understand how it works. I can’t accept the first thing that comes along.”
“And what have you accepted in the last eight months?”
He hesitated.
“I was looking for something suitable.”
“Eight months,” Galina Petrovna repeated. “In eight months, you couldn’t find a single suitable job.”
“Mom, you don’t understand the specifics…”
“Ilyusha.” She folded her hands on the table and looked at him the way she had when he was a child and tried to wriggle out of something obvious. “I’m your mother. I love you. And that is exactly why I’m going to tell you that Masha is right.”
There was a pause.
“What?”
“Masha is right,” she repeated, her voice even and free of anger. “You settled onto the sofa and decided that since your wife was earning money, you could afford to wait. Waiting is always comfortable, especially when someone else is feeding you.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Maybe it is. But it’s the truth.”
Ilya leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. There was something in his expression that reminded her of his childhood, when he received a failing grade and refused to admit that he simply had not studied.
“Do you think I’m going to support you here?” Galina Petrovna asked.
“Mom…”
“No.” She stood and carried the mugs to the sink. “You can stay tonight. I’m not a monster. But on Monday, you start looking for work. Real work. Not a business idea, not inspiration, and not the perfect position at your dream company. Any job that pays money. Agreed?”
He stared at her.
“You too?”
“Me too,” his mother confirmed calmly. “Because I love you. And loving you doesn’t mean allowing you to remain a child forever.”
The week at his mother’s apartment turned out to be unexpectedly unpleasant.
Galina Petrovna got up at half past six and made it impossible for him to sleep. She made noise in the kitchen, turned on the radio, and came into his room to remind him about breakfast. On the very first day, she asked whether he had sent out any résumés. On the second, she asked whether he had called about the two vacancies she had found online and printed for him. On the third, she announced that since he was at home, he could go grocery shopping and repair the bathroom faucet.
By the end of the first week, Ilya understood that his mother’s apartment was not a refuge.
It was a second front.
He lay on the narrow sofa in his former childhood bedroom, staring at the faded wallpaper patterned with sailboats and thinking about Masha. About how she used to make coffee in the mornings. How she laughed at his stupid jokes. How they used to stay in bed until noon on Sundays with nowhere to hurry.
Then he thought about what she had said.
“I need an adult man beside me.”
The words were simple. But the longer he repeated them in his head, the heavier they became. Like a stone that seemed small at first, only for him to realize that it was resting on his chest.
On the ninth day, he sent her a message.
“Masha, can we talk?”
She did not reply immediately. He stared at his phone for a full two hours before the screen lit up.
“About what?”
He thought for a moment. He wrote and deleted several answers. Finally, he sent:
“About us. I want to come home.”
This time, her response came more quickly.
“Have you found a job?”
He stared at the screen again. His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
He could have written that he almost had. That something was about to happen. That there was one possibility. All those phrases were familiar. They came to him automatically, comfortable and well-worn like an old pair of slippers.
But he remembered Masha’s face in the entryway. Tired, closed off, and unfamiliar. He remembered his mother holding the printed job listings. He remembered the sofa beneath the sailboat wallpaper and how cramped and lonely he had felt there.
He closed his phone and opened his laptop. He found a job listing he had looked at three days earlier but had never brought himself to answer because the position was “not right” and the salary was “too low.”
The position was for a sales manager. The salary was modest, but it came with commission and opportunities for advancement.
He opened a new email.
Then he began to type.
At that moment, Masha was sitting alone at home, reading a book she had wanted to read for a long time but had never found the time for. Or rather, she was pretending to read. Her eyes moved over the lines, but her thoughts were somewhere else entirely.
She wondered whether she had done the right thing.
Then she thought about the leak in her right boot.
Then she wondered again whether she had done the right thing.
Her phone lay beside her. She reread his message—“I want to come home”—and caught herself smiling. Briefly and against her will.
He had written “home.”
Not “back to you.”
Home.
She put the phone aside and returned to her book.
Let him first write that he had found a job.
Then they would see.
Outside the window, an April rain was washing the remnants of the long winter from the sidewalks. Masha listened to it and thought that spring had arrived late that year.
But it had arrived all the same.
As it always did—without warning, and all at once.
