“She asked you nicely, and you agreed to help her,” Gena said, a hint of reproach entering his voice. “You can’t simply back out now. She’s my mother, and she’s turning sixty. If you made a promise, you have to help.”
That was more or less the end of the conversation. Gena went to take his shower, leaving Galya standing alone in the middle of the kitchen. Somehow, the husband she had always considered to be on her side was now standing on the other side.
The days before the celebration passed faster and faster.
The project demanded attention. The client had submitted revisions, and some of the designs needed to be recreated almost from scratch. Her mother-in-law’s list required shopping, chopping, baking, testing, and redoing anything that failed on the first attempt.
Galya barely slept, ate on the run, and lost her temper over trivial things.
Her mother-in-law now visited almost every other day—sometimes with a new idea for the table, sometimes to check on the cooking, and sometimes simply “for a cup of tea.” But tea inevitably turned into yet another conversation about another dish that needed to be added to the list because “everyone would definitely appreciate it.”
One evening, Galya honestly tried to explain what was happening.
They were sitting in the kitchen. Her mother-in-law was inspecting the glasses to ensure none were damaged. Galya put down her knife and said:
“Nina Petrovna, please understand that I’m having an extremely difficult week at work. Perhaps we could order some of the dishes ready-made. Nobody would even notice the difference, and I would feel much calmer.”
“Ready-made?” Her mother-in-law raised her eyebrows as though she had heard something indecent. “Store-bought appetizers at my anniversary celebration? People will immediately realize they weren’t made from the heart and were simply brought in from a shop. No, Galya. It’s better to make everything ourselves. Even if the dishes are simpler, at least they’ll be genuine.”
“But when you say ‘ourselves,’ you mean with my hands,” Galya said quietly. “Unfortunately, I have only two of them, and I also need them for my work.”
Her mother-in-law sighed and looked at her with mild reproach, as though Galya were a child throwing a tantrum for no reason. Then she changed the subject and began discussing the best place to buy herbs for decorating the dishes.
Galya no longer had the strength to argue. She simply nodded, feeling something inside her tightening even further.
One evening, Galya was simultaneously cooking broth, responding to an email from her client, and trying to remember where she had placed the sketches for her presentation when the phone rang.
It was her mother-in-law, calling to ask whether Galya had managed to bake a trial batch of pastries so they could “see how they turned out and adjust the recipe if necessary.”
Distracted by the conversation, Galya failed to notice the broth boiling over and flooding the stove. A moment later, the plate she was carrying to the sink slipped from her hands.
The fragments, the puddle, the ruined dinner, and the unfinished report on her laptop screen all converged at once. The realization that she was no longer physically capable of fighting on two fronts burst out of her at the exact moment Gena returned from work and appeared in the doorway.
What followed was the scene with which this story began: the shattered plate, the towel thrown onto the table, the list knocked onto the floor, and the words Galya spoke in the calm, exhausted voice of someone who had finally reached her limit.
She was going to stay with her friend. She was turning off her phone because her work was more important than someone else’s whims.
Gena never had a chance to respond.
Lena’s home was quiet and uncomplicated—no lists, no tablecloths, and no telephone calls every few hours.
Galya switched off her phone that first evening and, for what seemed like the first time in a very long while, slept properly. The following morning, she sat down at her laptop with a clear mind.
Her work progressed differently once she removed the constant background noise of anxiety from her thoughts: Would she have enough time to buy everything? Would she finish cooking? What would her mother-in-law say if something went wrong?
Only one task remained—to finish the project. Galya worked on it methodically and without distraction, as though making up for every day she had spent being torn between the kitchen and her job.
Lena approached her carefully. She brought her tea and sometimes simply sat silently beside her without asking unnecessary questions.
Once, she asked:
“How are you doing? Do you regret it?”
“I regret not doing it sooner,” Galya replied without looking away from the screen. “You know, until the very end, I thought that if I tried hard enough, everything would somehow settle down on its own. But it didn’t. It just kept building up until I couldn’t take it anymore.”
By the end of the week, the project was complete. It had been proofread, formatted, and sent to the client slightly ahead of the deadline Galya had feared so much.
Only after closing the final file and sending the email did she allow herself to breathe freely.
That same evening, she switched on her phone. The screen lit up with dozens of notifications—messages from Gena, several missed calls from her mother-in-law, and voice messages she was not yet ready to listen to.
Gena’s first message was brief:
“Call me when you can. I was wrong.”
Several more followed. Judging by the intervals between them, they had been written on different days. Each message was calmer than the one before it.
It turned out that the celebration had taken place after all, although not in the way Nina Petrovna had imagined.
Unable to find anyone willing to prepare the entire menu at the last minute, Gena consulted his sister and ordered some of the dishes from a café. The relatives brought the rest themselves, each contributing something different.
The table was simpler than originally planned, but it was full, warm, and perfectly festive. According to Gena, his mother grumbled for form’s sake before admitting to the guests that “we decided to keep things simpler this time, and it seems to have turned out even cozier.”
“Forgive me,” Gena said when Galya finally called him. “I didn’t see what was happening. I thought you were simply tired and that you only needed to endure it a little longer before everything worked itself out. But I was really just placing something on your shoulders that I should have handled myself—with my mother, not with you.”
“I’m not upset because you wanted to help your mother,” Galya replied quietly. “I’m upset because you refused to listen to me.”
“I listened,” he said. “Come home. There won’t be any more lists. I’ll handle this myself, I promise.”
Galya remained silent for a little while, looking out the window as evening settled over the city—an ordinary evening without lists or other people’s dinner services.
She remembered standing among the broken pieces in her kitchen several days earlier, feeling as though she were losing herself beneath the weight of other people’s expectations. She also remembered the strange lightness she experienced after saying “no” for once instead of her usual, “All right, I’ll take care of it.”
The fear that people would consider her a bad daughter-in-law had not disappeared. But now it was accompanied by another realization: her own strength and time were valuable too. They did not exist solely to solve other people’s problems.
“I’ll come home tomorrow,” she finally said. “I want to stay here at Lena’s a little longer and clear my head. And Gena,” she added after a pause, “when I return, we need to agree in advance on how we’ll handle situations like this from now on. Together—and before anyone promises something on my behalf.”
“Agreed,” he replied quietly. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
She placed the phone on the table, switched off the lamp, and sat in the darkness for a little while longer, listening to the evening city outside the window.
Her mother-in-law’s wedding dinner service, the list, and the shattered plate—all of it remained somewhere on the other side of a week that had finally ended.
Ahead of her was a new morning, when she would return to her apartment—hers in every sense of the word. From now on, she would be the one to decide what she cooked and for whom.
