Part One. Nine Days
The house smelled like her father.
Not of dust, not of dampness, not of old wood — specifically of her father: shag tobacco, machine oil, and the apples he used to stack in crates beneath the stairs.
Ksenia stood in the hallway without taking off her shoes and listened to the clock ticking above the door.
Pirat lifted his gray muzzle from his bed and gave his tail one weak wag. He wasn’t waiting for her either. He was waiting for the man who would never walk through that door again.
“Well, what is it?” Ksenia said, crouching beside him. “You’re the only one who doesn’t blame me, aren’t you?”
The dog sighed so humanly that her throat tightened. She stroked his worn fur and forced herself to stand.
She allowed herself exactly ten minutes to cry in this house. After that came practical matters: paperwork, meters, locks.
Her brother arrived an hour later in a white crossover, carrying some kind of tablet under his arm. Artyom always appeared as though a delegation were waiting to greet him.
He walked around the property, touched one of the terrace posts, and for some reason knocked on the gas boiler.
“The walls are dry,” he said in a businesslike tone. “The foundation still looks solid. Put three hundred thousand into it and it’ll be perfect.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Ksenia asked. “It’s the ninth day today.”
“That’s exactly why I’m talking about it. Nine days have passed. Time to deal with things like adults instead of sitting around sniveling.”
He sat down on their father’s stool, the same one with a cigarette burn in the wooden seat beside him.
Ksenia looked at his smooth realtor’s face, his expensive watch, his white sneakers standing in their father’s dirt.
“Deal with what?”
“The house. You give up your half in my favor,” Artyom said, clicking his stylus. “The notary is Wednesday. I booked us for eleven.”
“I don’t remember promising you anything.”
“There’s nothing to promise. It’s obvious.” He spread his hands like he did with clients. “I have two children. Twins. Kristina stays home with them and can’t work. We pay fifty thousand a month in rent. Do you even understand what that means?”
“I do. I pay a mortgage.”
“A mortgage means the apartment is yours. Yours, understand? You have an apartment. You have a job. You don’t have anyone hanging on your neck. I have four people in my family and not a single square meter that belongs to us.”
Ksenia opened the small window.
Suddenly it felt impossible to breathe in the room, even though there was plenty of air.
“Dad left the house to both of us. Half each. Did you read the will?”
“I did. And I think Dad made a mistake,” Artyom said calmly. “He was old and sentimental. He was afraid you’d be offended. But if we’re being fair, the house should go to the person who actually needs it.”
“And conveniently, that would be you.”
“Fairly speaking, it would be my children. Your nieces, by the way. Vika and Sonya, in case you still remember their names.”
She remembered.
She had bought them snowsuits, a stroller, a crib, a child safety seat for the car — all of it supposedly “on loan.” And that debt had dissolved like salt in water.
“Artyom, I came here every weekend for six years.”
“And I’m very grateful,” he said without even looking up. “But gratitude can’t be registered with the land registry.”
Her phone rang just as she was about to answer him.
The screen said Mom.
Artyom smiled openly. He knew the schedule of this orchestra.
“Ksyusha,” her mother said in her most exhausted voice. “Are you at the house? Have you spoken to Artyom?”
“I’m speaking to him now.”
“Then I’ll tell you right away so you don’t do anything foolish.” Galina Andreevna inhaled. “You have a good apartment, and your brother is in a difficult situation. You’re obligated to help him. They need the house, and you’re being stubborn about the inheritance.”
Ksenia said nothing.
She could hear the television in the background and the sound of her mother moving a cup.
“Do you hear me?”
“I hear you. ‘Obligated’ is an interesting word, Mom.”
“What’s interesting about it? You’re alone. How much do you really need? Artyom has a family, two children, loans. You’ll earn enough to buy everything ten more times. You’ve always been the independent one.”
“I’m forty-one years old, and I bought everything I have myself. Including the apartment all of you are now using as an argument against me.”
“Good for you. Then don’t create problems.” Her voice became firmer — the familiar firmness Ksenia knew so well. “We’re not going to start suing one another like strangers.”
“The one planning to take something away is the one threatening court. I’m not taking anything.”
“You’re taking it away from your nieces,” her mother snapped. “That’s what you’re doing.”
Artyom leaned back and tapped the stylus against his knee, looking satisfied.
As if he had switched on a machine and it was operating exactly as intended.
“Mom,” Ksenia said very evenly, “I’m hanging up now. And don’t call me again before Wednesday.”
“What?! Are you shutting me up?”
“I’m shutting down this subject.”
She ended the call.
Silence filled the room.
Pirat lifted his head and gave a quiet growl — at her brother, not at her.
“You shouldn’t talk to Mom like that,” Artyom said. “She’s seventy.”
“Sixty-eight. And she remembers perfectly well who brought her things when she was in the hospital.”
“Here we go. The list of heroic deeds.”
“They aren’t heroic deeds. They’re facts that both of you erased because they’re inconvenient.” Ksenia picked up the ring of keys from the table. “Go. I still have things to do here.”
He stood, straightened his jacket, and stopped in the doorway.
“Ksyukh, think about it. I can do this nicely, or I can do it the ugly way. The ugly way means Mom stops speaking to you, every relative finds out you stole a house from your nieces, and every month I remind you where your conscience is.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Predicting,” he said with a smile. “I’m a realtor, after all. I can see how stories end.”
The door slammed.
Ksenia stood still for a moment, then slowly and methodically, like someone trying not to smash a cup, walked into the kitchen and poured herself some water.
Her hands were shaking with anger so badly that the water spilled over the rim.
“It’s all right,” she told Pirat. “It’s all right. He has no idea how stories like this end. He’s never seen one through to the end.”
Part Two. Who Went to the Hospital
The design office smelled of coffee and printer dust.
Ksenia sat over a construction detail and had been staring at the same millimeter of the drawing for twenty minutes without seeing any of it.
“All right,” Zhanna said, placing a cup in front of her. “You’re going to burn a hole through that detail. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You’ve been walking around like a storm cloud for a week. Come on. I’ll get it out of you anyway.”
Ksenia told her.
Briefly and dryly, like writing an inspection report: the house, the will, her brother, her mother, the word obligated.
Zhanna listened with her arms crossed, and her expression grew increasingly unpleasant.
“Question,” she finally said. “Who went to see your father in the hospital?”
“I did.”
“How often?”
“I didn’t count. Every other day. For two months.”
“And your brother?”
“Twice. Once with balloons and cookies, and once when the doctor said things were getting bad.”
“Excellent.” Zhanna nodded. “Second question. Who pays your mortgage?”
“I do.”
“Third. Who looked after the twins when your brother’s wife had a health flare-up?”
“I did. I took three weeks off work.”
“Fourth.” Zhanna leaned toward her. “Why do you always have to lose in order for people to love you?”
Ksenia flinched as if someone had stuck a needle into an old wound.
Exactly an old wound — healed over with a crust, but still raw underneath.
“Don’t start with the psychology.”
“This isn’t psychology. They’ve been twisting you around their fingers for years because you keep offering them your neck. You dragged your mother from doctor to doctor until the very end. You buried your father. You dug the garden. And your brother built his career and showed up with a tablet.”
“He’s younger.”
“He’s thirty-six!” Zhanna barked so loudly that someone behind the partition coughed. “He isn’t twelve, Ksenia. He’s a grown man who learned one trick: say, ‘I have children,’ and everyone around him is supposed to silently open their wallets.”
“Mom says I’m being stubborn.”
“Your mother says whatever benefits her. She’s spent her whole life betting on her son, and she has no intention of admitting that the bet wasn’t particularly good.”
Ksenia took a sip of coffee.
Bitter, cheap, lifesaving.
“You know what’s worst?” she said. “I don’t even need the house.”
“Then what do you need?”
“To be noticed. Once. Just once, I want one of them to say, ‘Ksyusha, what do you want?’ Just once.”
“They won’t,” Zhanna said, shaking her head. “People like that don’t ask. They only calculate how much more they can take from you.”
That evening Nikita called.
Her ex-husband rarely called without a practical reason — Polina’s schedule, money for a tutor, an autumn jacket.
But this time he started talking about the house.
“Polinka told me,” he said. “She heard you talking to your mother on the phone.”
“Wonderful. What a lovely childhood.”
“Ksyusha. Do you remember what you said to me when we divorced?”
“I said a lot of things. Not all of them suitable for polite company.”
“You said, ‘That’s it, Nikita. I’m done living for other people.’” He paused. “You were right then. And now you’re about to start living for other people again.”
“I’m not about to do anything. I’m just tired.”
“You’re going to give it away. I’ve known you twelve years. You always give things away when you get tired.”
Ksenia sat on the windowsill.
Outside, headlights crawled through the November slush over wet asphalt.
“What do you care?”
“I care because our daughter has been asking about her grandfather for two months.” Nikita’s voice changed, becoming quieter. “She draws his house. With the chimney, the apple tree, and Pirat. She wants to spend the whole summer there. Yesterday she said to me, ‘Dad, Mom has a house now, right? I’m going to have my own garden bed there.’”
“Nikita.”
“What do you mean, ‘Nikita’? I’m just telling you a fact. It’s your decision.”
She was silent for a long time.
A door slammed downstairs. Someone laughed.
“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely,” he admitted honestly. “I like you when you’re angry. When you’re angry, you finally do what you need.”
Time passed slowly, month after month, until half a year had gone by since her father’s death.
Her mother called eight times in three days.
Then she sent a message:
Saturday at four, my place. Family meeting. Come and we’ll discuss this like normal people. If you don’t come, then you’re nobody to us.
Ksenia read it, saved a screenshot, and didn’t reply.
At four o’clock on Saturday she was not at her mother’s apartment.
She was sitting in a notary’s office on Komsomolskaya Street, third in line, filling out an application to accept the inheritance.
The notary, a woman, explained everything dryly and clearly.
“Six months from the date of death. You submit the application, have the property appraised, pay the fee, and receive the certificate. Your share is one half. You can renounce it, but the renunciation is irrevocable.”
“I’m not renouncing anything.”
“Then sign here and here,” the notary said, sliding the papers toward her. “And one more thing, since you asked. If co-owners cannot agree, each has the right to sell their share. But it must first be offered to the other co-owner. They have the right of first refusal.”
“So I can offer my brother the chance to buy my half?”
“You can. And he can offer you his. Whoever makes the first offer sets the price.”
Ksenia signed.
The pen moved across the paper with surprising ease, and with every signature something inside her seemed to straighten, like an arm recovering after being numb for too long.
Outside, she took out her phone.
Nineteen missed calls.
Mom. Brother. Mom. Mom. Brother. Her brother’s wife’s number. Mom again.
She didn’t listen to the voice messages.
She photographed the notary’s receipt, sent it to Zhanna, and wrote:
Started.
Zhanna replied one minute later:
Now I like you.
Part Three. The Price of Half
They eventually gathered at her mother’s apartment on Stroiteley Street a week later.
Ksenia came of her own free will, and that alone put her in a different position: she had not been summoned; she had chosen to appear.
Her mother had laid out a pie as though it were a celebration.
Artyom sat in the corner of the sofa, Kristina beside him staring at her phone, while the twins shrieked in the other room.
“Sit down,” her mother said. “Eat. You’ve become so thin and angry.”
“I’m not thin. I’m angry.”
“Ksyusha!”
“Mom, forget the pie. I came here to say one thing, and I’m going to say it.” Ksenia placed a folder on the table. “I accepted the inheritance. I’ll receive the certificate in May. Half the house is mine.”
Artyom straightened.
Kristina finally looked up from her phone.
“We’ve heard this already,” her brother said through clenched teeth. “You’ve decided to fight.”
“I’ve decided not to give it away. Those are different things.” Ksenia opened the folder. “But I have no intention of living on the other side of a wall from you. You hate me, and frankly I can barely stand you either. So I’m offering a simple solution: buy my half.”
“With what?” he laughed. “Buttons?”
“The house has been valued at six million two hundred thousand. Half is three million one hundred. I’ll take two million eight hundred if you pay immediately.”
“I don’t have two million eight hundred! I pay rent and I have two children!”
“Then I sell my share on the open market. By law I have to offer it to you first, so here I am offering it. Officially, by registered letter. If you refuse, I put it up for sale.”
Her mother gasped.
“Who are you going to sell it to?! Who buys half a house?”
“Mom,” Ksenia smiled, “you’d be surprised how many people buy halves of houses. Usually the most entertaining kind. I could sell it to gypsies.”
Artyom stood and began pacing the room.
He paced exactly as their father once had, and the resemblance almost hurt Ksenia.
“Do you understand that you’re a piece of trash?” he said quietly. “You want to move strangers in next to my children.”
“I want to receive the value of my share in money. That is my legal choice.”
“Legal!” He turned around sharply. “Mom, do you hear her? Now she’s talking about the law.”
Their mother began to cry.
She cried skillfully — not loudly, but pitifully, dabbing her eyes with a napkin.
“Your father is turning in his grave.”
“Dad wrote the will in his own hand, in front of witnesses, with a notary,” Ksenia said. “He’ll be turning in his grave if I give it up.”
Artyom stopped.
She could almost see a switch flip inside him: hysteria had failed, so now came calculation.
“Mom,” he suddenly said softly, sitting beside her, “you always wanted to live in that house yourself. You always said, ‘I want to die in that house.’”
“I did,” their mother sobbed.
“Then here’s what we do. You give Ksyusha your two-bedroom apartment. Its value is about the same as half the house. Almost. And you move in with me — meaning into the house. With us. With your granddaughters. You can help with the girls, enjoy the fresh air, the garden, Pirat — you love Pirat.”
Ksenia stared at her brother in silence.
She became almost curious to see how far his arrogance would go.
“What do you mean, give away my apartment?” their mother asked, bewildered. “But that’s… mine.”
“It belongs to the family,” Artyom corrected her. “You said it yourself: we’re a family. We’re not going to behave like strangers.”
“What if living together doesn’t work?”
“Mom, who exactly aren’t you going to get along with? Your granddaughters?” He laughed. “Kristina will be happy to have you there. Right, Kris?”
“Of course,” Kristina said evenly without looking up from her screen. “Help is always useful.”
Ksenia stood and walked out onto the balcony.
She needed three minutes to stop herself from saying aloud what was screaming inside her:
Mom, they’re selling you right now, and you’re bargaining for the privilege of becoming their nanny.
Two days later her mother called.
Her voice was cautious and coaxing.
“Ksyusha. I’ve been thinking. Let’s make an agreement.”
“What kind of agreement?”
“We’ll write down that the apartment will sort of become yours after I’m gone. But while I’m alive, I keep living there and you don’t make any claims on it. And in exchange, you don’t claim the house.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? I’m trying to meet you halfway!”
“Mom, you’re not meeting me halfway. You’re offering me a meaningless piece of paper.” Ksenia spoke calmly. “There are two options. One: my brother brings me the money. Two: I sell my share to an outside buyer. That’s all.”
“You’re going to put me in my grave.”
“Your son will put you in your grave when he leaves two three-year-olds with you all day. But that’s no longer my problem.”
“How dare you talk like that about Artyom!”
“I dare. I’ve developed courage,” Ksenia said. “You grew it yourself with all those phone calls.”
A week later a gray Mazda pulled up at the house.
A stocky man in a sheepskin coat climbed out carrying a tape measure and notebook.
It was Tolik, a cook from Nikita’s restaurant — a cheerful man with shameless theatrical talent.
Ksenia opened the gate.
Pirat gave one lazy bark for appearances’ sake.
“So,” Tolik said loudly, looking around the yard. “Half the house, right? One shared entrance? No problem, I’ll build a partition. My son-in-law is a builder. I’d like a speaker system too. I sometimes bring the guys over from work to hang out.”
“How many guys?” Ksenia asked just as loudly.
“About eight. We’re quiet people. Two in the morning at the latest.”
A face appeared briefly in the upstairs window.
Her mother.
She had come to “keep an eye on the house,” as she now called it.
A minute later she came running onto the porch, pulling a coat over her dressing gown.
“Who is that?! Ksenia! Who is this man?”
“A buyer,” Ksenia said politely. “He’s looking at my share.”
“Hello there, ma’am!” Tolik said cheerfully. “You have central gas here?”
Her mother opened her mouth, then closed it.
Then she turned toward her daughter.
Her face had become dry, ugly, furious.
“Are you mocking me?”
“I’m following the law. I offered it to my brother first. He refused in writing. Now I’m looking for a buyer.”
“You have no right!”
“I do.” Ksenia took out her phone. “Want me to call the notary? She’ll confirm it.”
Artyom arrived quickly, about forty minutes later, red-faced and without his tablet.
He jumped out of the car, slammed the door, and marched toward Tolik.
Tolik calmly raised the tape measure.
“Young man, who are you?”
“I’m the co-owner!”
“And maybe I’ll become the other co-owner. So let’s keep our hands to ourselves.”
“Tyoma,” their mother said in a trembling voice. “Tyoma, she’s serious.”
“Mom, she’s bluffing! Nobody will pay her decent money for half a house!”
“I don’t need decent money,” Ksenia shrugged. “Any money will do. I’ll sell for two and a half million if necessary. Just so you know who’ll be grilling kebabs under your window.”
And that was when her mother screamed.
She didn’t cry — she screamed, high and full of hatred.
And suddenly everything could be heard in that scream: the years, the resentments, the way she had spent her entire life dividing her children into “mine” and “that one.”
“Fine! Have it your way! Take the apartment! Choke on it! I’ll sign it over to you, as long as I never have to be anywhere near you again!”
“Mom!” Artyom shouted.
“And you shut up!” she snapped, turning on him. “This was your idea! Yours! I listened to you, and now I’m losing my apartment!”
“You’re not losing your apartment. You’ll live in the house!”
“In your house,” their mother said quietly. “I understand now, Tyoma. Yours.”
Ksenia looked at them and felt neither triumph nor pity.
Tolik tactfully walked toward the gate and lit a cigarette.
Part Four. The Signature
They completed the transaction at the end of May, right after Ksenia received her inheritance certificate.
And that was when Ksenia made a move no one expected.
“You transfer the apartment to me as a gift,” she said in the notary’s office. “But my half of the house does not go to Artyom. It goes to Mom.”
“What?” Artyom practically jumped out of his chair. “That wasn’t the agreement!”
“We never had any agreement,” Ksenia said without turning her head. “Mom is giving me the apartment. So Mom gets the share of the house. The two of you can decide what to do with the paperwork after that.”
“Mom! Tell her!”
Their mother sat straight-backed in a new blue dress, lips pressed tightly together.
She was silent for an entire minute.
And inside that minute was her whole life: her son, her daughter, her husband, the house, the choice she had made every day for forty years.
“Let it be that way,” she finally said. “I’ll sign.”
Artyom sat down.
He stared at his mother as if he had only just realized that she had a face of her own.
The papers were signed at twelve twenty.
Ksenia stepped outside, and May struck her eyes — green, noisy, mercilessly alive.
She stood on the steps and couldn’t understand why she suddenly felt so light.
Zhanna called that evening.
“Well?”
“That’s it. Mom’s apartment is mine. Half the house belongs to Mom.”
“Why did you do that?” Zhanna asked, confused. “You could have transferred your half directly to your brother, given it to him, and been done with it.”
“Because he wanted to get the house and leave Mom with nothing,” Ksenia said. “Now he doesn’t have the house. He has a mother who owns half of it. And he’s going to have to negotiate with her. His whole life. Every single day.”
Zhanna was silent for a moment.
“You’re terrifying.”
“I’m normal,” Ksenia said, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard. “I’ve just finally stopped shaking.”
After that, everything moved quickly and soberly, like a well-managed project.
She sold her mother’s apartment in five weeks — the two-bedroom place on Stroiteley went to a young couple using maternity capital.
She paid off her mortgage early, and the bank gave her a certificate confirming the loan was closed.
For the next six months she carried that certificate around in her handbag for no particular reason except that it made her feel good.
Then she sold her own one-bedroom apartment.
She added the remaining money, took out a small consumer loan, and bought a three-bedroom apartment in a brick building, with a south-facing balcony, twenty minutes from Polina’s school.
“Mom, whose room is this?” Polina asked the first time they walked into the empty apartment.
“Yours.”
“Completely mine? Forever and ever?”
“Forever and ever. We’ll put a desk here, shelves over there, and if you want, we can put wall bars here.”
“And can we have a dog?”
“A dog…” Ksenia looked at her daughter. “We’d have to ask Pirat. He’s old. He’s jealous.”
“He isn’t ours anymore?” Polina immediately looked sad. “He stayed at the house?”
“He stayed. The house belongs to Grandma and Uncle now.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is,” Ksenia agreed. “But we’ll have a summer house of our own someday. Not right away. A year or two. I’m already doing the calculations.”
That night, while unpacking boxes, she found a photograph of her father.
He was standing beside the porch wearing his cap, a shovel in his hand, Pirat beside his leg.
Ksenia looked at it for a long time, then placed it on the shelf.
“Thank you, Dad,” she said aloud. “For half the house. I understand why you did it now.”
He had done it so she would have a choice.
Not a house.
A choice.
Nikita came in July to drop off Polina and, as he put it, “check whether you’ve buried yourself under furniture.”
He inspected the three-bedroom apartment, tapped one of the walls, and looked into the kitchen.
“It’s good,” he said. “Properly good. Not good like people with money. Good like people with brains.”
“Was that a compliment?”
“An observation.” He sat down and turned the salt shaker in his hands. “Ksyush. Back when we divorced, I was an idiot.”
“You’re not much smarter now if you’re starting this conversation in your ex-wife’s kitchen.”
“Where am I supposed to start it? At a staff meeting?”
She laughed.
Unexpectedly, for the first time in months, she laughed loudly.
“Eat your soup, Nikita. Your soup is still worse than mine.”
“That is a lie. I’m a head chef.”
“You’re a head chef, and I’m the mother of your child. I’m entitled to lie.”
Part Five. How Stories Like This End
In August, Galina Andreevna called her daughter at half past ten at night.
Her voice was neither commanding nor plaintive.
It sounded broken.
“Ksyusha. Are you asleep?”
“No. What happened?”
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.” A pause. “Vika hurt her leg. I took her to the emergency clinic. By bus. Tyoma was busy.”
“And Kristina?”
“Kristina… Kristina has classes. She’s taking a manicure course now. In the evenings.”
“Every evening?”
“Almost.”
Ksenia said nothing and listened to her mother breathe.
“Mom. Say it directly.”
“They leave the girls with me,” Galina Andreevna blurted out. “From morning until night. Tyoma says, ‘You’re their grandmother, so take care of them.’ But I’m sixty-nine. I have blood pressure problems. I wake up in the morning and my hands barely straighten.”
“I warned you.”
“You did,” her mother agreed with unexpected humility. “Ksyush. Can I stay with you? Just for a while. Until I figure things out.”
Ksenia closed her eyes.
She knew that wording.
She had grown up with it.
Just for a while.
Until.
Not for long.
Three phrases from which an entire life could be constructed.
“No, Mom.”
“What?!”
“No. ‘For a while’ means forever, and we both understand that. I have a daughter, I have work, I have my own life, which I’ve only just managed to piece back together.”
“I’m your mother!”
“You are my mother, and you’re not living with a stranger. You’re living with your son,” Ksenia said. “The one you fought for. If you don’t like it, sell your share of the house and buy yourself an apartment.”
Her mother’s breathing quickened over the phone.
“You’re cruel.”
“I’m an adult.”
Her mother hung up.
Ksenia sat holding the phone for half an hour while anger circled inside her like water in a kettle just before it boils.
Then she stood, drank a glass of water, and went to bed.
And — unexpectedly even to herself — she fell asleep.
In October, Galina Andreevna announced to her son that she had found a buyer.
Ksenia heard about it later, from her mother herself, during one long, disjointed conversation.
Her mother told the story as though she were giving a report.
“I posted the advertisement myself. A girl at the government services office helped me. Some people came — a family, husband, wife, a boy about fifteen. They’re from the city. Looking for something inexpensive.”
“And Artyom?”
“He shouted,” her mother said. “He shouted so loudly, Ksyusha, that my ear was ringing. ‘You have no right,’ ‘This is Dad’s house,’ ‘I’ll drive you insane.’ And I told him, ‘Tyoma, I do have the right. My daughter explained it to me.’”
“Did he agree?”
“He offered me a contract. Some kind of agreement. He said he would pay me twenty thousand a month and the share would become his.”
“And?”
“And I remembered how I offered you the exact same thing,” her mother said quietly. “An agreement. A piece of paper. And I became so ashamed that I had to sit down.”
The sale was completed in November.
Her mother didn’t haggle.
She immediately knocked three hundred thousand off the price just to get it over with faster.
She didn’t need the money.
She needed speed.
Artyom came on the day of the transaction and stood outside the notary’s office like a monument.
Their mother walked past him.
He didn’t even say hello.
“You destroyed everything,” he said to her back. “You and your daughter.”
“I didn’t destroy anything,” she replied without turning around. “I simply stopped being convenient. You should try it. You might like it too.”
Later, he called Ksenia.
Once.
Late at night.
His voice was drunk.
“Happy now?”
“Not particularly.”
“You know what you are? You’re a—”
“Don’t continue,” she interrupted. “You won’t tell me anything I haven’t already heard, and I didn’t sign up to listen to insults anymore.”
“Dad sold me out,” he suddenly said. “Do you understand? My own father. He wrote that will and sold me out. He knew you would eat me alive.”
“He knew you would try to eat me alive,” Ksenia corrected him. “So he left me teeth.”
“Mom bought a one-bedroom apartment now. A one-bedroom! In exchange for Dad’s half of the house! Some strangers moved in. They’re doing renovations, putting up a fence across the property. Across the property, can you imagine? A fence.”
“I can.”
“I hate all of you,” he said evenly. “Dad, Mom, you.”
“That’s your right.” Ksenia looked at the clock. “But you know what, Tyoma? You used to boast that you knew how stories ended. This is how they end. When someone spends thirty years taking and never once giving anything back.”
She hung up.
December was busy for Ksenia and strangely happy.
She completed a major project, received a bonus, finally bought Polina those wall bars she had wanted, and learned to sleep eight hours a night.
Her mother moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Gagarina Street, sixth floor, elevator, windows facing the courtyard.
She called once a week now.
Almost politely.
Not once did she ask to move in.
Ksenia said nothing to anyone about the sale of the house.
No congratulations.
No consolation.
She had enough of her own concerns: the building entrance, utility meters, her daughter’s dentist, the annual report.
“Mom, can I stay here on Saturday?” Polina asked, standing in the doorway with her backpack. “And Sunday too?”
“What about Dad?”
“Dad said he’s coming too.”
“Coming where?”
“Here.” Polina smiled mischievously, the way only ten-year-old girls who understand everything about adults can smile. “He said just because. He said he’ll bring borscht.”
Ksenia turned toward the window so her daughter wouldn’t see her face.
“Well, let him come,” she said. “To be fair, his borscht is pretty good.”
That evening Nikita really did come — carrying a pot of borscht, a bag of tangerines, and the expression of a man who couldn’t quite believe himself.
They sat in the kitchen until midnight and somehow talked easily, without stepping on any of the old landmines.
“Ksyush,” he said at the door as he pulled on his jacket. “Would you give me a second chance?”
“I’ll think about it,” she replied. “I’m allowed to think now. I have an entire three-bedroom apartment for it.”
He laughed and left.
Ksenia closed the door, stood for a moment in the dark hallway, and for some reason remembered her father’s cap and the shovel beside the porch.
