“Are you out of your mind, Olesya?!” Vera Stepanovna’s voice rang out so sharply that the lone cup on the drying rack rattled. “This is my son’s apartment! His square meters! And you’re laying down the law in here like some general barking orders on a parade ground!”
Olesya did not even turn around. She slowly finished washing the apple, shook the droplets into the sink, and only then looked at her mother-in-law. Her expression was calm, almost bored, which infuriated Vera Stepanovna far more than any hysterical outburst could have.
“This is my apartment, Vera Stepanovna. My personal property. The documents are in my name. And until you learn to knock on the door instead of barging in here with your keys as though this were your own storage room, I’ll speak to you exactly this way.”
Anton stood frozen in the kitchen doorway. He looked like a schoolboy who had been called to the blackboard without having learned his lesson. Shoulders raised, hands in his pockets, eyes fixed on the floor. A pathetic, colorless sight.
Olesya shifted her gaze to her husband, and something resembling disgust flickered in her eyes.
“Anton, perhaps you’d like to say something? Or did you invite me to breakfast and then bring your parents along to entertain us with a discussion about property rights?”
“Oh, Les… why do you have to get worked up right away?” he mumbled, picking at the doorframe with his fingernail. “Mom just stopped by to see how things were going. They don’t have any orders at the garage again, and they need some advice…”
“Oh, stop making excuses to her!” Vera Stepanovna snapped, yanking the light scarf from around her neck and crumpling it in her hands. “You think that because you earn a Moscow salary and poke at a keyboard all day, you’re some kind of queen now, Olesya? And we’re just garage trash who know nothing about making websites? We fix things for people! Real cars, not imaginary pictures! You people with your precious internet couldn’t even change your own oil!”
Olesya snorted, picked up the apple, and took a loud, crisp bite.
The crunch sounded like a slap across the face.
“I know how to make money. The money that, incidentally, paid for this apartment. And I don’t own a car, but if I did, I could afford to take it to a decent repair shop where the employees don’t swear about their customers behind their backs. So are we back to money again? Is that why you came? To borrow money for the garage rent one more time?”
Nikolai Matveyevich, Anton’s father, appeared from the hallway. He was still wearing his shoes, making it clear with his entire posture that he had no intention of lingering in this “snake pit,” but necessity demanded sacrifice.
He coughed into his fist, and his voice came out muffled, as though speaking from inside a barrel.
“We didn’t come here begging for charity, Olesya. We came to remind you about family obligations. A month ago, you promised to help us with promotion. You said, ‘Let me build you a proper website and bring in customers.’ And now you’re sitting here turning up your nose while everything goes straight to hell.”
“I didn’t promise anything. I proposed a plan.” Olesya set down the apple core and folded her arms across her chest. “I drafted a strategy for you, calculated an advertising budget, and asked for access to your photos and pricing. What did you do? Exactly. Nothing. You said that ‘some woman sitting at a computer’ knew nothing about real men’s work. You said my ‘pretty little buttons’ would only scare away the tough guys driving SUVs. The outcome is entirely predictable.”
“You’re a stranger to us, Olesya,” Vera Stepanovna said without her usual shouting.
That sounded far worse, like a sentence being read aloud with no right of appeal.
“You always have been a stranger in our family. You have no soul. You measure everything in numbers and paperwork. You took my son away and locked him in here like a chained dog.”
Anton flinched and opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Only a faint rasp of air somewhere in his throat.
“You know, Vera Stepanovna,” Olesya lowered her voice to a whisper, making the atmosphere even more tense, “that is the best news I’ve heard in the last five years. If I’m a stranger, then you have absolutely nothing to do with me. Not as family and certainly not financially. Go solve your problems with the men you surround yourself with. Maybe they’ll suddenly manage to fix everything without a woman’s help.”
Anton finally peeled himself away from the doorframe and managed to produce the most pathetic thing he could possibly have said in that situation.
“Les… can you lend us fifty thousand? Right now. We really need it. Just for a week. We’ll pay you back.”
Olesya stepped right up to him.
He was a head taller than she was, but at that moment it seemed as though she were looking down at him like a crushed insect.
“Tosh, you’re standing in my kitchen. Your parents have just called me a soulless outsider. You said nothing. You always say nothing when your mother pecks away at me. And now you’re asking me for money? For what? So I can pay for the privilege of being humiliated?”
Silence fell.
It was so dense that it seemed the extractor fan had stopped humming and even the sunlight outside had dimmed.
Vera Stepanovna silently pulled her scarf back over her shoulders. Her nostrils flared.
Nikolai Matveyevich reached for the door handle.
“I lived for fifteen years without you, Tosh. Without your mother, without dirt all over my entryway, and without the endless whining,” Olesya said through barely parted lips. “I know how to stand on my own two feet. But you never climbed down from your mother’s lap. That’s the whole problem.”
She turned, walked into the bedroom, and slammed the door.
From the other side came a heavy thud. It sounded as though something had been thrown against the wall. A boot, perhaps. Or a chair.
Outside, tires hissed unpleasantly over wet asphalt. Rain began pouring over the city with dreary, monotonous persistence.
Anton entered the bedroom an hour later.
He crept in like a thief, even though he still had his own set of keys.
Olesya sat on the bed, directly on top of the bedspread, carefully packing clothes into a Nike sports bag. Inside were socks, a couple of sweaters, a laptop, and a folder of documents.
No makeup. No trinkets.
Pure practicality.
“You filed again, didn’t you?” His voice was hoarse, as though he had been drinking nonstop for a week, although he smelled only of cigarettes and instant coffee.
“Filed, Tosh,” she corrected him with a smirk. “Not ‘wrote something.’ I filed a lawsuit. The paperwork is with my lawyer. Divorce and division of property. Like you always say: ‘the good old working-class way.’”
“Have you completely lost your mind? Over one argument? We could’ve just cooled down and talked. Why make some huge decision in the heat of the moment?”
Olesya pulled the zipper shut so violently that its teeth gave a pitiful screech.
She straightened sharply.
Her hair, normally tied in a bun, had fallen loose, and she suddenly resembled a witch from a good thriller—beautiful, furious, and completely justified.
“Talk? Fine. Let’s talk. Two weeks ago, in front of everyone at the café, your mother said I ‘slept my way up the career ladder.’ Yesterday, your father asked whether I ‘wasn’t eating a bit too much.’ You heard every word. You stood there smiling that idiotic smile of yours because God forbid you ever offend them. You have never defended me. Not once. You just hid behind my back while they threw stones at me.”
“You know what they’re like… They’re simple people. They don’t have all that corporate etiquette you people have. They love you. They just show love differently. It’s… rough around the edges. Working-class.”
“Rough around the edges?”
Olesya burst out laughing, and the laughter sounded like metal grinding against metal.
“That isn’t love, Tosh. It’s terrorism. And do you know what the worst part is? You sold me out completely when your precious brother Semyon said that I was ‘living off you.’ You know perfectly well that I’ve been carrying our entire household financially for the last three years. Your garage brought in pennies, and you immediately handed those pennies over to your mother so she could ‘keep things afloat.’”
He clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.
“I love you, Olesya. I love you so much it makes me shake. But you have to understand: Mom is sacred. She’s a given. I can’t just delete her like a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s nature.”
“And I’m not nature? I’m just a function, is that it?”
She threw the car keys at him.
He caught them reflexively, inches from his face.
“Your nature, Tosh, is immaturity. You found yourself a very comfortable position between two sides. While your mother screamed, I made the money. While I worked myself to death, your mother fed you borscht. You slept through everything, darling. I don’t want to be your barricade anymore. I want to be a free person who wakes up in the morning without hearing shrieking in the hallway.”
“You’re really throwing me out? Right now?”
He started breathing through his mouth, gulping for air like a fish caught on a hook.
“No, Anton. I’m leaving myself. It’s a matter of principle. I’m leaving you this apartment for one week so you can remove your old tires from the storage room and take your sports equipment. After that, the real estate agents are coming. You’re not staying here. You’re simply no longer going to be part of my life.”
He looked at the bag, at her straight back, at the ease and speed with which she tied the laces on her sneakers, and suddenly understood with complete clarity that this was not a performance.
This was the end.
A lump formed in his throat, but there were not even any tears. Only dryness and burning, as though he had swallowed a glass of vinegar in one gulp.
The doorbell suddenly began ringing insistently.
Without looking through the peephole, Olesya opened the door.
Standing on the landing as though nothing had happened was Masha, Semyon’s wife. She was fully dressed up in a beige coat, with three-year-old Pasha in her arms.
The boy was enthusiastically chewing on a bagel, scattering crumbs all over the stairwell.
“Olesya, hi!” Masha chirped, adjusting the strap on her shoulder. “Listen, Semyon and I are absolutely swamped. We urgently need to go to the tax office. Could you watch Pasha for three or four hours? You work remotely anyway. What difference does it make to you? Come on, we’re family. We’re supposed to help each other.”
Olesya froze for a moment.
She remembered how only three days earlier this exact same Masha, polished to perfection and speaking in the same sugary voice, had announced during a family dinner that “Olesya thinks far too highly of herself,” and that “they never should’ve let him marry that stuck-up college-educated princess.”
Olesya leaned one shoulder against the doorframe and folded her arms across her chest.
A smile touched her lips.
Almost tender.
Almost affectionate.
“Masha, sweetheart, you seem to have gotten something mixed up. I’m not your relative. I’m nobody to you. I’m a stranger. You all decided that yourselves at your little family council. And I’m a terrible babysitter, you know. I only like children in theory. In practice, I prefer deadlines.”
“What are you talking about?!” Masha threw up her hands, nearly dropping Pasha. “What do adult grudges have to do with anything? The child hasn’t done anything wrong! We’re family!”
“I feel sorry for the child,” Olesya nodded seriously. “But his mother should have thought about that before dragging someone through the mud and then asking that same person for a favor. Go to Grandma Vera. She’s sacred in your family, after all. Let her watch her grandson. She has plenty of free time now anyway, considering your father’s business has ground to a halt. She can enjoy herself.”
Olesya gently but inexorably guided Masha back over the threshold and closed the door in front of her stunned, elongated expression.
The lock clicked like a burst of automatic gunfire.
A sharp sound came from the kitchen.
Anton was standing over the sink, staring blankly at his palm.
He had been holding his favorite mug, the one that said “Best Husband,” and it had cracked right in his hand.
A shard scratched his skin, and a tiny drop of blood appeared.
Anton stared at it as though it were an ink blot spreading across a page.
He did not move.
He did not even feel the pain.
Olesya walked past him without turning her head.
In the entryway, she stopped in front of the mirror and took out her phone.
“Good afternoon, Svetlana. This is Olesya Romanova. You called me yesterday about the loft in Moscow City. Yes. Is the offer still available? Excellent. I’ll take it. Send me the contract right now. I’m moving tomorrow morning. Starting with a clean concrete floor. No one else’s junk.”
She stepped out onto the landing and slammed the heavy metal door so hard that the echo traveled down the stairwell all the way to the ground floor.
Something inside her chest began turning heavily, like an enormous rusted mechanism finally breaking loose after years of being stuck.
It hurt.
But it was movement.
And it was forward.
