Oleg froze with the spoon halfway to his mouth, as though someone had suddenly switched off his sound. Marina calmly placed the coffee pot on its stand and pushed the sugar bowl toward him. She did everything as casually as if she were commenting on the weather or mentioning that they had run out of bread.
“Sugar? You like two spoonfuls, remember?” she added. “Although lately, you’ve already been getting far too much sweetness in your life.”
“Wait, wait.” He finally lowered the spoon. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“Coffee. You. And Alina. Three topics in one morning—I’d say that’s pretty productive.”
Oleg smirked, but the expression came out crooked, as though someone had nailed it to his face. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest—no, not quite. He simply placed his palms on the table because he suddenly felt that he needed somewhere to put his hands. Marina watched him calmly, the way you look at a man whose cards have long since been laid faceup on the table.
“Listen, you’re exhausted,” he began gently. “You need a break. Go stay with Zhanna at her country house for a while. Get some fresh air.”
“Those who want something look for opportunities; those who don’t look for excuses,” she replied. “You’re looking for excuses, Oleg. And you’re doing it out loud.”
“What excuses? You’ve imagined something and now you’re making me look like an idiot?”
“I’m not making you look like anything. You’re doing an excellent job all by yourself. No director required.”
He swallowed. The muscles in his jaw tightened, but Marina didn’t even raise her voice. She took a sip of coffee and placed the cup precisely in the center of the saucer, as though checking whether the world was still sitting straight.
“I put up with it for six months,” she said quietly. “I thought you were tired, overworked, that everyone loses their head sometimes. I hoped you’d stop on your own. I even made borscht every Wednesday, remember?”
“What does borscht have to do with anything?”
“It means that I was a good wife for longer than you were a decent man.”
Oleg jumped to his feet, then immediately sat back down—abruptly and awkwardly. The chair creaked.
“You don’t understand what you’re saying. You’re upset, that’s all. Alina is just an assistant. We work together. So what if we had dinner a couple of times?”
“A couple of times?” Marina tilted her head slightly. “Oleg, you have more photographs of her on your phone than you have of me from the past ten years. I wasn’t deliberately counting. I just noticed when you handed me your phone and asked me to see who was calling.”
“You went through my phone?!”
“I answered a call on the phone you put in my hand. Don’t confuse the guilty party with the prosecutor.”
The studio where fragrances were created was bright and spacious, with shelves of small bottles, paper scent strips in glasses, and neat handwritten labels. Marina had built this place herself—bottle by bottle, formula by formula, sleepless night by sleepless night.
Oleg arrived three hours after breakfast, bursting through the door and barely acknowledging the young woman behind the counter.
“Where’s Alina?” he demanded.
“She left,” the girl said with a shrug. “Someone called her this morning and told her she doesn’t work here anymore.”
“Who called her?!”
“The owner. Marina Andreevna.”
Oleg spun around and nearly collided with Marina herself. She had just emerged from the back room carrying a stack of papers, composed and dressed in a simple gray dress.
“What the hell have you done?” he hissed. “You fired her without even warning me?”
“And why should I warn you about dismissing your subordinate?” Marina asked with apparent surprise. “Or did the two of you have some special arrangement written into her employment contract?”
“That’s my team! We handled clients together!”
“Timur handles the clients now. Unlike Alina, the only things he holds in his hands are test tubes, not my husband.”
Oleg seemed to choke on his breath. He was accustomed to Marina giving way, smoothing things over, turning everything into a joke and serving him dinner afterward. But the woman standing in front of him now seemed like a complete stranger, even though he had slept beside her for so many years.
“Everything will fall apart without me. The clients will leave,” he managed to say.
“Oleg, my dear man,” Marina said with a faint smile, “during the past year, you’ve shown up at this studio less often than the lunch delivery guy. Don’t flatter yourself. There are no irreplaceable people—only badly organized processes.”
“I found half our clients!”
“What you found was half your working day free. And you didn’t spend it on the clients.”
Timur emerged from the storeroom, completely unruffled, a notebook tucked under his arm. He gave Oleg a brief nod, as though greeting a piece of furniture, and placed a sheet of paper in front of Marina.
“Marina Andreevna, I rewrote the formulas Alina ‘accidentally’ deleted before she left,” he said. “I restored them from the drafts. Nothing was lost.”
“See, Oleg?” Marina said gently. “You thought you’d taken the keys to the house with you. Turns out all you had was a copy—and even that one was fake.”
“She deleted them?” Oleg went pale. “Alina wouldn’t…”
“She would. Greed always leaves a trail, like a snail. Slippery and obvious.”
He said nothing. Timur calmly returned to the back room, and that quiet professionalism hit Oleg harder than any scandal could have. He was accustomed to shouting, tears, pleading. Here, however, he was being treated like a problem that had already been solved.
“You have no right…” he began, then stopped when he caught Marina’s gaze.
“Finish the sentence,” Marina suggested. “‘No right’ to what? The studio is registered in my name. You worked here as an employee. A subordinate who overstayed his welcome and eventually started being rude to the owner.”
The restaurant was half-empty during the quiet lunch hour. Oleg had called Marina and asked her to “talk like two adults,” and she came because she preferred putting periods at the end of things rather than leaving ellipses.
He was already sitting at a table. He had ordered wine, even though Marina didn’t drink it.
“Sit down.” He pulled out a chair for her. “Let’s talk like normal people.”
“Fine.” She sat. “What does ‘like normal people’ mean? Apologies or bargaining?”
“No scenes. I understand that you’re hurt. I was wrong. But making drastic decisions in the heat of the moment is stupid.”
“Oleg, I didn’t hack anything apart. I made a clean cut. Think surgeon, not lumberjack.”
He grimaced, poured himself some wine, and began speaking rapidly and forcefully, like a man accustomed to pushing until people gave in.
“Listen, the business is basically ours together. I put a huge amount of effort into it. If we split up, I’m entitled to a share. Half the studio is mine. That’s only fair.”
“Ah, so we’ve finally reached the main course.” Marina leaned back in her chair. “I thought you invited me here to repent. Turns out you invited me here to divide the property.”
“Don’t twist my words! I just want what’s fair.”
“Fairness means not confusing greed with entitlement,” she said. “The studio was opened with my money, in my name, and built on my sleepless nights while you were ‘handling clients’ in restaurants. Your share of this business is zero point zero. And I’ll generously let you keep the decimal places.”
Oleg’s face turned crimson. He leaned toward her, his voice dropping into a threatening growl.
“You’re getting too full of yourself, sweetheart. I can ruin everything for you. All I have to do is say a few words to the right people and your orders will dry up.”
“Oh, how terrifying.” Marina didn’t even blink. “Oleg, you convinced yourself that you were the center of the universe. In reality, you’re just a former tenant whose registration has expired.”
“You think you’re so smart?” he practically hissed. “Alina told me everything about you. How cold you are. How boring. You’re impossible to live with!”
“How delightful.” Marina calmly picked up her glass of water. “And somehow that boring wife you couldn’t possibly live with was the person keeping everything you were so proud of afloat. Strange, isn’t it? The butterfly laughs at the roots until somebody digs them up.”
“Enough with your clever little sayings!”
“Then don’t come to argue with someone who reads more than the menu.”
He struck the table with his fist. The sound was dull and powerless. Several people turned their heads.
Marina didn’t flinch. She took a thin folder from her handbag and placed it in front of him.
“Copies of the documents. Everything is clean, everything is in my name. Feel free to show them to your ‘right people.’ They’ll explain exactly what I just explained to you, except they’ll charge you for it.”
“You prepared all this beforehand,” he said slowly. “You knew.”
“I don’t betray people behind their backs, Oleg. I give them warning. That’s one of the differences between you and me.”
The country house stood right at the edge of the forest—old, warm, with a broad porch. Oleg had gone there to see his brother Kostya, hoping for support.
Kostya met him on the porch with a mug of tea and the expression of a man who had already heard the entire story over the phone.
“Well, go on, Romeo,” Kostya snorted. “Finally pushed your luck too far?”
“You too?” Oleg dropped heavily onto a porch step. “I thought at least you’d be on my side.”
“I’m on the side of common sense, little brother. And common sense clearly isn’t visiting you today.”
“Kostya, she threw me out! Out of my job, out of the house, out of everything! Over some stupid little thing!”
“If it had been some ‘stupid little thing,’ someone would’ve patted you on the head,” Kostya said, taking a sip of tea. “You were thrown out for cheating, arrogance, and trying to grab property that wasn’t yours. Feel the difference in weight class?”
“I gave her my whole life!”
“You gave her ten years of loneliness, and during the last year, mostly your back. Don’t confuse the two.”
Oleg jumped up and began pacing across the porch, waving his arms.
“Everyone’s against me! Alina disappeared. She won’t answer her phone. I call her and get nothing. Silence. I risked everything for her!”
“Now that is interesting.” Kostya put down his mug. “So you were leaving your wife for a girl who vanished the second things got difficult? And now you came here to cry to me about it?”
“I’m not crying!”
“Not loudly, no. You’re just whining like a grown man.”
“Kostya, come on, at least you can help me! Talk to Marina. She’s always liked you. Tell her I’ve realized everything, that I’ve changed…”
“Changed?” his brother snorted. “In two days you’ve managed to whine about love and then demand half the business. Even a chameleon changes more slowly than you.”
Oleg stopped. His face twisted with anger.
“So you’re a traitor too. We’re blood, and you’re defending her!”
“I’m not defending her, you idiot,” Kostya said calmly. “I just don’t want to lie to your face the way you’re used to doing. Want the truth? Marina was the best thing that ever happened to you. And you traded the best thing in your life for a perfume bottle with ‘Alina’ written on it.”
“She crushed me! Humiliated me! Fired me in front of everyone like I was some schoolboy!”
“She fired you quietly by signing an order,” Kostya pointed out. “You humiliated yourself when you went to a restaurant and tried to divide someone else’s property. That performance, brother, deserves applause from you alone.”
Oleg sat down on the step and wrapped his arms around his knees. For a second, something almost human and frightened appeared in him.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” he asked hoarsely.
“For starters, stop looking for someone to blame,” Kostya said. “A person who’s always searching for the guilty party usually has his back to the mirror. Turn around. Your main opponent is standing right there.”
The airport hummed with its steady, ordinary noise.
Marina stood near the check-in counter holding a small suitcase and a ticket for a short vacation—somewhere no one would call her “sweetheart.”
Her friend Zhanna adjusted Marina’s scarf like an older sister.
“Are you sure you want to fly alone?” Zhanna asked. “Maybe I should come with you?”
“I’m sure. Spending some time in my own company will be good for me,” Marina said with a smile. “Turns out I’m quite a nice person. I haven’t spoken to myself properly in a long time.”
“You’re an iron lady.” Zhanna shook her head. “I would’ve spent a month crying.”
“I did my crying six months ago, on Wednesdays, somewhere between making borscht and doing the laundry. Tears are in the past. Now it’s paperwork.”
And then, as luck would have it, Oleg appeared.
He was almost running through the terminal, his hair disheveled, wearing the expression of a man who had not come to apologize but to make one final attempt to win everything back.
“Marina!” he called. “Stop! What are you doing, running away? You’re just abandoning everything and flying off?”
“I’m not running. I’m flying,” she replied calmly. “And I’m not abandoning anything. I’m simply putting the final period on this story from a different angle.”
“I’ve been thinking…” He stopped to catch his breath. “I think we both overreacted. Let’s start again. I’ll walk away from everything. I’ll forget Alina, forget the share of the business, forget all of it. Just don’t divorce me.”
“Ah, so now you’re willing to accept zero point zero,” she said with a faint smile. “Amazing how quickly demands lose their value once the audience disappears.”
“I mean it! I love you!”
“Oleg,” Marina said gently, “you don’t love me. You love convenience. A warm home, dinner waiting for you, a studio you might be able to divide up someday. I haven’t been on that list for a very long time.”
“This is all because of her—Zhanna! She filled your head with this!” He shot an angry look at her friend. “She interfered and turned you against me!”
“Zhanna has nothing to do with it.” Marina shook her head. “You wound this mess up all by yourself. I merely untangled it.”
Zhanna opened her mouth to say something, but Marina gave the slightest shake of her head. Her friend stepped back, allowing Marina to finish this herself.
“You don’t understand.” Oleg lowered his voice, and a threatening edge crept into it. “I’m not going to let you go that easily. I’ll find a way. You’ll remember my name.”
“I already remember it,” Marina said calmly. “It’s written under ‘ex.’ Very convenient category. Clean and tidy.”
“You’re cold!”
“I’m composed. Those are different temperatures, so don’t confuse them. Cold is what you were when you spent six months living with two women while pretending you were simply working late.”
The boarding announcement sounded.
Marina picked up her suitcase. Oleg took a step forward as though he wanted to grab her by the elbow, but he didn’t dare.
“You know,” she said, turning back one final time, “you’ve spent this entire month looking for someone to blame. Alina because she ran away. Zhanna because she supposedly ‘turned me against you.’ Your brother because he wouldn’t cover for you. Me because I refused to tolerate it. But the guilty man has been standing in exactly the same place as you this whole time. Inside your shoes.”
“Marina…” he breathed.
“Don’t drag out the goodbye, Oleg. A finale that goes on too long is worse than a bad beginning. I’ve finished my business. The studio is running, the documents are in order, and my heart is at peace. Now you can finish yours. Just do it without me.”
She walked toward the departure gate at an even pace and never looked back again.
Oleg remained standing in the middle of the terminal, surrounded by other people’s suitcases and other people’s peace of mind, and now there was no one left for him to present his bill to. Everyone he had tried to blame had already walked away.
And Marina continued toward her plane, thinking about the new fragrance she would create during the journey.
Something fresh, perhaps.
With a note of freedom.
Without a single trace of what had faded away long ago.
