“What on earth is this?!” The voice of Vera’s mother-in-law, Tamara Viktorovna, swept through the apartment before she had even managed to take off her shoes. “I worked myself to the bone for that son of mine all my life, and now you’re standing here asserting your rights?!”
Vera stood in the middle of the living room with a suitcase. It was small and neat—a thirty-two-liter suitcase she had bought specifically for this trip three months earlier and hidden under the bed in the storage room, behind the old skis.
Tamara Viktorovna had found it.
Of course she had.
Tamara Viktorovna was a sixty-two-year-old woman with a permanent wave and lips that always seemed tightly pursed. She surveyed the hallway as though she had arrived to conduct an inspection. A stranger’s jacket hung on the coat rack—Vera’s. A stranger’s sneakers stood on the floor—also Vera’s.
According to Tamara Viktorovna, everything in the apartment belonged to someone else, even though Vera and Denis had bought the place themselves with a mortgage three years earlier.
“Denis!” her mother-in-law shouted without even looking at Vera. “Come here and see what your wife is planning!”
Denis appeared from the kitchen with a sandwich in his hand. He was thirty-four, an IT specialist who worked remotely, a former candidate for master of sport in table tennis, and, in his current life, a mama’s boy.
He looked at the suitcase, then at Vera, then at his mother—and said nothing.
He simply kept chewing.
“I’m going on vacation,” Vera said calmly. “We talked about this.”
“Talked about it,” Tamara Viktorovna mimicked. There was enough venom in those words to supply a small snake. “Tell me this: who is going to cook for Denis? He has a sensitive stomach. He needs a special diet. I can’t come all the way over here every day.”
Vera took a deep breath.
Over the past three years, she had learned how to do that—to breathe. Simply breathe and not answer immediately, because the first answer that came to mind was always the wrong one.
“Denis is a grown man,” she finally said. “He can order food or cook some pasta.”
“Pasta!” Tamara Viktorovna threw up her hands so theatrically that it seemed she had rehearsed the gesture. “Do you hear that, Denis? Pasta! She wants to feed her own husband pasta!”
Denis placed his sandwich on the cabinet.
“Vera, maybe you really could go another time? Mom says her blood pressure has been unstable. She’s not in any condition to keep traveling over here right now.”
“Her blood pressure is unstable. But I’m the one going away.”
“So what does it matter whether it’s you or me? We’re a family.”
That word—family—was something Vera always heard from him whenever she was expected to give up something of her own.
A family did not go to yoga in the evenings, because a wife had to be at home.
A family did not visit a friend for the weekend without the husband.
A family did not take a vacation alone.
Family meant Tamara Viktorovna sitting on the sofa like the owner of an estate, scrolling through her phone while Vera washed her dishes, picked up the cookie wrappers she had dropped on the floor, and remained politely silent.
Vera had bought the vacation package four months earlier. She had paid for it herself, with her own money. She worked as a procurement manager for a small pharmaceutical company and earned a respectable salary.
She kept some money on a separate bank card that nobody knew about.
That had been her personal discovery during the third year of marriage: having something of your own was not betrayal.
It was survival.
Turkey. Five nights. A seaside hotel with an all-inclusive package and sun loungers right beside the water.
“You’ll go to the sea when we give you permission!” her mother-in-law declared.
Vera looked at her.
Then she looked at her husband.
Denis was studying his own socks.
The taxi driver was quiet, which suited Vera perfectly. She sat in the back seat, watching storefronts pass outside the window—a coffee shop, a pharmacy, a flower shop, another coffee shop—and felt something inside her slowly begin to unclench, millimeter by millimeter.
She had left.
She had simply picked up her suitcase, said goodbye, and walked out.
Tamara Viktorovna had shouted after her about ingratitude and how she had “never wanted a daughter-in-law like her.” Denis had stood in the doorway without saying a word.
He had not stopped her or called her back.
But he had not supported her either.
He had simply stood there like a decorative object in his own life.
At the airport, Vera bought a large coffee with extra milk and settled beside a window to watch the airplanes. Nearby sat a woman of about forty-five with a child who was carefully drawing in a sketchbook.
Ordinary life.
People flew somewhere. They took children and suitcases with them, ate croissants, and did not wonder whether their mothers-in-law had given them permission.
Her phone vibrated.
Denis.
Without reading the message, she put the phone in her bag.
Boarding was announced for her flight—Zone Thirty, Gate Seven. Vera stood, took hold of her suitcase, and started walking.
She passed cafés and duty-free shops filled with perfume and boxes of chocolates. She passed a man speaking Turkish on the phone and laughing at something only he understood.
She paused for a second on the boarding stairs.
Below her were the tarmac and luggage carts.
Ahead of her was the plane.
Her phone vibrated again.
This time it was Tamara Viktorovna.
Vera looked at the screen. Her mother-in-law’s profile picture showed her looking pompous in a sparkling jacket at someone else’s wedding.
Vera pressed “Decline” and stepped inside.
She had a window seat. She had reserved it in advance specifically so she could watch the earth fall away beneath her.
The plane began taxiing toward the runway. Vera leaned against the cool glass and closed her eyes.
Somewhere in Moscow, Tamara Viktorovna was probably already calling her friend Zinaida—a woman who was equally loud and equally convinced that her opinion was needed on every subject—and telling her about “that woman” who had “abandoned her family and run away.”
Denis was probably finishing his sandwich.
And Vera was flying toward the sea.
It was only the beginning.
The sea was exactly as she remembered it from childhood photographs—warm, salty, endless.
Vera lay on a sun lounger, watching the waves wash onto the shore and roll back again. For the first time in a very long while, she was not thinking about anything.
She simply lay there.
Simply breathed.
Simply existed.
The hotel was good—not five-star, but it had a clean pool, delicious breakfasts, and employees who smiled without appearing to make an effort.
The woman sitting beside her at dinner turned out to be a cheerful guest from Yekaterinburg who had also traveled alone.
“My husband doesn’t like hot weather, so he can stay home,” she said.
They drank a glass of white wine each and returned to their rooms, satisfied with themselves and with life.
Vera only switched on her phone in the mornings—to check her work email and tell her mother she had arrived safely.
She skimmed Denis’s messages. The first two asked where the headache tablets were. The third said, “Mom is extremely upset.”
Vera replied briefly:
“The tablets are in the medicine cabinet beneath the mirror.”
Then she put her phone away.
She had no idea that something unpleasant was already unfolding in Moscow.
Tamara Viktorovna wasted no time.
On the second day after Vera’s departure, she called Zinaida, her longtime friend, who was
