Daria carefully shifted her weight onto her right leg so that the old stool beneath her would not creak. A thick layer of sticky kitchen dust had collected on the top shelf of the bulky Soviet-era cabinet. Daria was looking for her old medical records—Tamara, her mother, insisted they were somewhere behind the boxes of Christmas decorations.
After moving aside a stack of yellowed magazines, Daria felt the hard plastic corner of a folder. She pulled it toward her. Several papers slipped out of the slick folder and fell onto the faded carpet.
Property and Inheritance Management
Daria climbed down from the stool, wiped her palms on her jeans, and crouched down. On top lay a thick sheet of paper stamped with a blue notary seal. Ordinary curiosity made her skim the text. By the third line, she felt as though all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the hallway.
The document had been drawn up only three months earlier. In the dry, clipped language of figures and legal clauses, it stated that after the parents’ deaths, their three-room apartment, a country house plot outside the city, and two bank deposits would pass into the sole ownership of Veronika Nikolaevna.
Their younger daughter.
There was not a single mention of Daria. The older daughter’s name did not appear anywhere in the papers.
Daria remained crouched on the floor, leaning her shoulder against the cabinet door. From the kitchen came the sizzling of a frying pan—her mother was cooking fish, and the apartment smelled of food and sunflower oil. The television droned in the background, and her father kept changing channels.
An ordinary Friday evening.
Throughout her entire adult life, Daria had been the family’s lifeline. She paid the electricity and water bills, covered her parents’ installment payments on household appliances, and bought expensive imported medicine for her father’s joints. Two years earlier, she had put herself on a strict budget so she could use her own savings to replace the leaking roof on that very country house.
Twenty-three-year-old Veronika, meanwhile, was busy “finding herself.” She had dropped out of university in her third year, trained as an eyebrow stylist, changed her mind, became interested in fashion design, and demanded that they buy her a professional sewing machine.
Naturally, it was paid for out of the parents’ budget—a budget generously supported by her older sister.
“Veronika is a sensitive girl,” Tamara often said while stirring her tea. “It’s hard for her to make her way in life. But you, Dashka, you’re tough. You can handle anything yourself. You’ve got an iron grip.”
Daria carefully folded the document along its old crease, making sure not to wrinkle it, slipped it back into the folder, and pushed it deep behind the Christmas decorations.
She stood up. Her legs barely obeyed her. A dull heaviness throbbed at the back of her head.
She walked into the kitchen. Tamara was placing pieces of fish onto a plate.
“Well? Did you find your medical card? Sit down. I opened that dry red wine you like. Oh, and the utility bills for this month are lying in the hallway. Put them in your bag and pay them over the weekend. Otherwise they’ll charge us penalties again.”
Daria looked at the back of her mother’s head, at the gray roots showing through her hair, at her worn slippers.
“I didn’t find it. Maybe I left it at home. I’m going, Mom. The warehouse was chaos today. I can barely stand.”
She did not stay to listen to her mother’s complaints about dinner getting cold. She simply took her jacket, ignored the stack of bills on the cabinet in the hallway, and stepped out into the damp November evening.
From that moment on, the familiar machinery of family life began to break down.
Daria deleted the automatic payment templates from her banking app. She answered only every other call from her mother, briefly explaining that she was overwhelmed with work and inspections.
For the first two weeks, no one in her parents’ apartment suspected anything.
Then new utility bills arrived in the mailbox.
And then another batch came—with red warnings about overdue payments.
Nikolai turned the papers over in his hands for a long time, pushing his glasses down to the tip of his nose.
“Toma, I don’t understand. They’ve charged some insane amount for heating. And there’s a debt here too. Did Dashka forget to pay?”
“She’s completely buried in reports,” Tamara dismissed it while slicing bread. “Try scanning that code with your phone yourself. It seems simple enough.”
Nikolai genuinely tried.
For half an hour, he poked at the smartphone screen with his knotted fingers until he locked the account. Then he lost his temper, threw the phone onto the sofa, and told his wife to call their younger daughter.
Veronika answered only late that evening. Music was playing in the background, and someone was laughing loudly.
“Mom, seriously, this is such a bad time!” the girl complained. “We’re at an epoxy resin workshop, and my hands are completely dirty.”
“Nika, sweetheart, the bills came, and your father and I don’t know how to deal with them. And we’re out of potatoes and cooking oil. Come by tomorrow and help your old parents.”
“Mom, what potatoes?” Veronika clicked her tongue irritably. “I’m going out of town tomorrow for three days. I already paid my share! Call Daria. She always deals with all your paperwork. I don’t have time, honestly!”
The call ended.
Tamara stared blankly at the dark screen.
In the refrigerator sat half a jar of sour cream and a piece of dried-out sausage.
The next day, Tamara finally decided to call her older daughter.
“Yes?” Daria’s calm voice came through the phone.
“Sweetheart, the utility bills came,” Tamara began rapidly, before Daria could claim she was busy. “And there’s a debt from last month too. Your father has run out of his medication—the imported one. We barely have any money left until our pension comes in. Transfer us ten thousand or so, and later we’ll… well, we’ll settle it somehow.”
Daria was sitting in her own kitchen, turning a cup of cooling coffee between her hands.
For the first time in many years, she did not feel the familiar stab of guilt.
“Hello, Mom,” she said calmly. “I’m not paying for anything anymore.”
“What do you mean?” Tamara gasped. “What do you mean you’re not paying? Then who will? Are your father and I supposed to starve?”
“You left all your property—including the country house I repaired with my own vacation money—to Veronika.”
Silence fell on the other end of the line.
For a moment, Daria thought the connection had been lost.
All she could hear was her mother’s rough breathing.
“I was looking for my medical card on top of the cabinet,” Daria continued without raising her voice. “I found your blue folder. You’ve already made your decision. Veronika is your sole heir. So let her take responsibility for maintaining the property and supporting you. My ATM is closed to you now. Forever.”
“Dasha, you… you misunderstood!” Tamara’s voice broke into tears. “We only wanted what was best! You’re strong, you have a good position, but Nika will be lost on her own! She needs a start in life!”
“With a three-room apartment and a country house, she definitely won’t be lost. Learn to live on your pension, Mom. Goodbye.”
Daria ended the call.
The next two months became a real ordeal for the elderly couple.
They had to walk to bank branches themselves, stand in lines at payment terminals, and endure the irritated sighs of cashiers. Tamara began buying cheap pasta by weight and chicken backs for soup.
Veronika visited a couple of times, but she never gave them any money. She complained about the economic crisis, her lack of inspiration, and the high cost of art supplies.
Then, in January, Nikolai suddenly became seriously ill.
Severe shortness of breath. Pallor. Cold sweat.
An ambulance rushed him to the hospital with flashing lights.
In the emergency department, an exhausted doctor told Tamara that his condition was critical and his body was completely worn down. He needed urgent surgery. There was no time to wait for a free procedure through the public system.
Private surgery cost a substantial amount—for pensioners, the figure seemed astronomical.
With trembling hands, Tamara called her younger daughter.
“Nika, Dad is in intensive observation! He needs a paid operation, otherwise… otherwise that’s it. Borrow from your friends, take out a loan, I’m begging you!”
“Mom, what loan?!” Veronika screamed hysterically. “No bank is going to lend me anything! I don’t even have an official job! And why should I bury myself in debt like that? My life is only just beginning! Call Daria—she’s always saving money!”
Tamara sat on a hard bench in the hospital corridor, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to her face.
Her illusions finally collapsed.
Their beloved, fragile girl had brushed them aside as though they were annoying flies.
When Daria saw the missed calls from her mother, she did not want to call back.
But then a short message arrived:
“Dad is in the hospital. It’s bad.”
That made her dial the number.
After listening to her mother’s disjointed explanation, Daria remained silent for a long time.
The resentment had not disappeared. It was still sitting inside her like a heavy stone.
But she could not abandon her father.
Daria transferred the necessary amount directly to the clinic through her banking app.
It was the money she had been saving for the down payment on her own apartment.
A few days later, she came to the hospital.
The room smelled of medicine and clean sheets. Nikolai lay under an IV drip. His face looked gaunt, but his breathing was steady.
Tamara sat beside him.
“How are you, Dad?”
Nikolai turned his head with difficulty. His eyes were shining.
“I pulled through, sweetheart. The doctor said… they got to me in time. Thank you. If it hadn’t been for you… Forgive us, Dasha. We’re old fools.”
Tamara burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.
“Dasha, tomorrow we’ll call the notary here! Right into the hospital room! We’ll rewrite everything in your name—everything, every last kopeck! Nika didn’t even call to ask how the surgery went. She said the stress gave her a rash on her face…”
Daria looked at them with complete calm.
There was no triumph in her. No desire for revenge.
Only a final understanding of what kind of people they were.
“I don’t need your apartment, Mom. And I don’t need the country house.”
“But how can you say that? We understand everything now! We were wrong!”
“I paid the hospital bill because Nikolai is my father,” Daria said, deliberately avoiding the word “Dad.” “But I’m not going back to the way things were. I won’t solve your everyday problems anymore, bring you groceries, or pay your debts. You made your choice when you decided I could simply be erased from the equation.”
Nikolai closed his eyes and gave a weak nod.
He understood that a notarized document could be rewritten in half an hour.
But they would never be able to restore their daughter’s trust.
“I’ll call on weekends,” Daria said as she buttoned her coat. “Get well.”
She stepped out into the echoing hospital corridor.
For the first time in a long while, the heavy stone in her chest no longer seemed to crush her.
Daria pushed open the clinic doors and walked outside, realizing that her personal ATM had finally shut down—and that ahead of her lay an entirely different road.
Her own.
