“Your sister came to my office and caused a scene because I didn’t congratulate her on her name day! You gave her my work address! My colleagues are in shock! She screamed across the entire office that I’d gotten full of myself! Tell your psycho sister to forget the way to my office, or next time I’ll call security!” Elena spat out the words along with the water she was using to wash the remnants of black streaks from her face.
She was bent over the sink, furiously rubbing her skin with a cotton pad soaked in micellar water. Her mascara—expensive and waterproof—now looked like dirt smeared across a miner’s cheeks. The reflection in the mirror showed not a successful head of a logistics department, but a woman who looked as if she had just been dragged face-first across asphalt.
Igor stood in the bathroom doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame. He was turning the TV remote over in his hands, his entire posture making it clear he had been pulled away from something extremely important for the sake of some nonsense. His face wore an expression of condescending boredom—the same one that appeared every time Elena began talking about problems that had nothing to do with his dinner or clean shirts.
“Lena, are you starting again?” he drawled lazily, not even trying to grasp the essence of her complaint. “So Oksana dropped by. So she got a little carried away. She meant well. The woman had a holiday, her name day. She wanted to share some attention, and you, as always, took everything as an attack.”
Elena straightened up and hurled the dirty cotton pad toward the trash bin. It hit the rim and fell onto the tile, leaving a gray streak behind. She slowly turned to her husband. Her face was red from scrubbing, but her eyes remained dry and cold, like ice in a freezer. No tears, no self-pity. Only a dull, heavy rage.
“Share some attention?” she repeated in a frighteningly even tone. “Igor, I had a meeting with suppliers. We were discussing a six-month contract. And then your sister barges into the conference room, shoving past the secretary, with a bag of cheap pastries and starts shrieking at a frequency only dogs should hear: ‘Well, who do we have here acting so important? Who forgot that today is Saint Oksana’s Day?’”
Igor snorted, looking somewhere over his wife’s head.
“Well, she’s expressive. You know Oksanka. She’s a vivid person. She can’t keep her emotions inside. You could have taken a five-minute break, by the way. Shown some respect to a relative. Your suppliers wouldn’t have fallen apart. They’re people too, after all. They would’ve understood.”
“Understood?” Elena stepped toward him, wiping her face with a rough terry towel. “The general director was sitting there with his mouth open. She called him ‘mister’ and offered him an éclair in honor of her health. And when I tried to lead her into the hallway, she grabbed the door handle and started yelling that I’d become a star, that I’d traded family for my career, and that I didn’t care about holy holidays.”
“Well, you really did forget to congratulate her,” Igor shrugged, as if that justified any circus. “She’d been waiting since morning. Mom called, I called, Auntie from Saratov called. And you were silent. It hurt her. Maybe she crossed the whole city to see you. Wanted to surprise you, make a little celebration at that dreary job of yours.”
Elena looked at her husband and felt something dark and thick beginning to boil inside her. He genuinely did not understand. Or he was pretending not to. To him, Elena’s workplace was something insignificant, something toy-like—a place where anyone could show up at any moment, like some public passageway, and impose their own rules.
“You gave her the address,” she said, not asking, but stating it. “I asked you a hundred times. My office is a restricted area. There is a pass system. There is business etiquette. It isn’t your auto repair shop, where you can drink beer with your friends on the hood of a car at any hour of the day. Why did you do it?”
Igor clicked his tongue in irritation, finally deigning to look his wife in the eyes.
“What, did I reveal a state secret? She’s my sister, not a terrorist. She asked for the address, said she wanted to stop by, make peace, bring a treat. What was I supposed to do, refuse her? Say, ‘Sorry, Ksyusha, Lena is a high-flying bird now, you can’t even get near her unless you ride in on a crooked goat’? I’m not some henpecked husband, Lena, to deny my own sister over such a little thing.”
“This is not a little thing, Igor. This is my reputation. Today people asked me whether everything was all right with my head, since visitors like that come to see me. She tried to force my boss into a conversation about horoscopes while I was calling security! Security, Igor! To remove your sister!”
“There!” Igor jabbed the remote at her like an accusing finger. “That’s exactly who you are. Calling security on family. You’re a cruel woman, Lenka. Cold. Oksana came to you with her heart open, with pastries, and you threatened her with guards. No wonder she got upset and said too much. Anyone would have been enraged by a reception like that.”
Elena threw the towel onto the washing machine. The conversation in the cramped bathroom had become suffocating. It felt as though the walls were closing in. Her husband’s logic was impenetrable, like tank armor. In his distorted world, Oksana was the victim—a “bright little soul” with éclairs—while Elena was the aggressor, the one who had dared to work at work instead of dancing in circles around the Orthodox calendar of name days.
“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said, walking past him into the hallway. She brushed his shoulder hard, making no attempt to avoid him. “I am not going to discuss her delicate emotional constitution. I want to know one thing: do you understand that you set me up? That because of your loose tongue and her fit, I could lose my bonus, or even be fired for failing to align with corporate culture?”
“Oh, don’t make me laugh,” Igor snorted, trailing after her into the kitchen. “They’ll fire her. You work there like three people; everything rests on you. So there was a bit of noise and fuss. Tomorrow everyone will forget. But the fact that you offended my sister—that will last. She’s writing to me right now, by the way. Crying. Says you practically kicked her out.”
Elena stopped in the middle of the kitchen without turning on the light. The streetlamp outside the window pulled Igor’s silhouette out of the semi-darkness; he was already bent over his phone, fingers moving quickly across the screen. He was typing a reply. Consoling her. Supporting her.
“She’s crying…” Elena repeated quietly, feeling the cold in her chest turn into a desire to smash something. “Let her cry. Maybe then she’ll have less liquid left for all the poison she spits. I’m hungry. And I really hope you didn’t eat what I cooked yesterday. Because I’m not cooking today. My hands are dirty. I can’t wash your family off them.”
Elena sharply hit the light switch. The kitchen flooded with the harsh, unfriendly glow of LED lamps, instantly exposing every small flaw: crumbs on the table, Igor’s carelessly tossed pack of cigarettes, a cloudy stain on the tablecloth. She walked to the refrigerator, yanked open the door, and noted with grim satisfaction that the pot of yesterday’s stew was still there. Cold, untouched. So he had been waiting for her. Not to talk, but to be served.
Igor, squinting against the light, sat down at the table as if he owned the place, pushing aside a little bowl of dried-out cookies. He placed his phone in front of him, screen facing up, like an icon. The gadget immediately came to life, vibrating briefly but insistently, sending an unpleasant rattling sound across the polished surface of the table.
“Will you heat it up?” he asked in an ordinary tone, nodding toward the pot in his wife’s hands. “I haven’t had a bite since lunch. While I was calming Oksanka down on the phone, I lost my appetite, but now it’s come back.”
Elena silently slammed the pot onto the stove. The sound of metal on metal was loud and clanging, but Igor was not bothered. He began drumming his fingers on the table, beating out some irritating rhythm.
“You still haven’t answered,” Elena said without turning her back on him. She watched the blue flower of gas lick the bottom of the pot. “How exactly did that conversation happen? ‘Hello, brother dear, give me Lena’s address, I want to make her life hell’? Or did you offer it yourself?”
“Oh, stop exaggerating,” Igor grimaced. “She called and asked where you were, geographically. Said she was nearby, downtown, and had bought your favorite pastries, by the way. She wanted to stop by for ten minutes, have coffee, exchange congratulations. What’s criminal about that? So I sent her the geolocation. I didn’t know you had some top-secret facility there and entry was only by retina scan. You used to be simpler.”
“I used to work at some shady little office on the outskirts, where we drank tea three times a day,” Elena turned around, folding her arms across her chest. “Now I work for a major company. And I asked you, Igor, I begged you: no relatives at work. That is my space. But you decided your sister’s desire to ‘have coffee’ was more important than my requests.”
The phone vibrated again. The screen lit up, displaying a long message. Igor glanced at it, quickly read it, and the corners of his lips twitched in a barely noticeable smirk.
“She writes that you didn’t even offer her tea,” he announced, as if reading out a court verdict. “Says she stood in the reception area like a poor relation while your secretary glared at her like a wolf. Lena, that’s just rude. Turning a person away at the door is rock bottom. We’re not animals.”
“Rude is barging into a board meeting!” Elena’s voice became hard as granite. “Do you understand that she started telling my boss about how I was afraid of frogs as a child? She tried to show him photos from the country house where I was in a swimsuit! Igor, that is not a ‘surprise.’ That is sabotage. She did it on purpose—to humiliate me, to show that to her I’m still the same foolish Lenka, not a professional.”
Igor waved it off as if swatting away an annoying fly.
“Oh, come on. Get those complexes of yours treated. Oksanka is a simple soul, open-hearted. She wanted to lighten the atmosphere. And you sit there in your office, puffed up like a turkey, acting so important. You really have gotten full of yourself, woman. Is your crown not squeezing your head? Your own sister-in-law came to see you, and all you can talk about is reputation. Family is more important than your reports, you fool. Reports won’t bring you a glass of water in old age.”
Elena looked at him and felt something inside her finally break. Not love—no. Respect. She saw before her not a partner, but a spoiled teenager justifying another teenager’s hooliganism. He truly did not see the difference between casual family gatherings and business etiquette. To him, the world was one big sofa where everyone was supposed to be “one of us.”
She turned off the gas, served a plate of steaming stew, and placed it in front of her husband. Carelessly, so that a bit of sauce splashed onto the table.
“Eat,” she said curtly.
Igor looked at the sauce stain, then at his wife.
“Rude,” he stated, picking up his fork. “Is that how you talked to Oksana too? No wonder she was shaking by the end. She’s very vulnerable, by the way. She’s going through a difficult period right now—trouble with her husband, layoffs at work. She needs support, not your snobbery.”
“She’s been going through a difficult period for the last fifteen years,” Elena snapped, sitting down across from him but not touching the food. “And for all those fifteen years, the whole world has been expected to dance around her. But I’m tired, Igor. I am not a clown in her circus. And my office is not the arena.”
The phone vibrated again. The third time in a minute.
“Who’s typing now? The support group?” Elena nodded toward the gadget.
Igor chewed a piece of meat deliberately slowly, looking her straight in the eyes.
“It’s Oksana. She’s asking whether you’ve calmed down. And do you know what she’s suggesting? Peace. She’s ready to forgive you for your stunt, if you behave like a decent human being.”
“Forgive me?” Elena laughed, but the laugh came out dry and sharp, like a cough. “That’s amazing. She came to my workplace, humiliated me, nearly derailed a deal, and now she’s ready to forgive me? Do you even hear what you’re saying?… Continued just below in the first comment.”
“Your sister came to my office and caused a scene because I didn’t congratulate her on her name day! You gave her my work address! My colleagues are in shock! She screamed across the entire office that I’d gotten full of myself! Tell your psycho sister to forget the way to my office, or next time I’ll call security!” Elena spat out the words along with the water she was using to wash the remnants of black streaks from her face.
She was bent over the sink, furiously rubbing her skin with a cotton pad soaked in micellar water. Her mascara—expensive and waterproof—now looked like dirt smeared across a miner’s cheeks. The reflection in the mirror showed not a successful head of a logistics department, but a woman who looked as if she had just been dragged face-first across asphalt.
Igor stood in the bathroom doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame. He was turning the TV remote over in his hands, his entire posture making it clear he had been pulled away from something extremely important for the sake of some nonsense. His face wore an expression of condescending boredom—the same one that appeared every time Elena began talking about problems that had nothing to do with his dinner or clean shirts.
“Lena, are you starting again?” he drawled lazily, not even trying to grasp the essence of her complaint. “So Oksana dropped by. So she got a little carried away. She meant well. The woman had a holiday, her name day. She wanted to share some attention, and you, as always, took everything as an attack.”
Elena straightened up and hurled the dirty cotton pad toward the trash bin. It hit the rim and fell onto the tile, leaving a gray streak behind. She slowly turned to her husband. Her face was red from scrubbing, but her eyes remained dry and cold, like ice in a freezer. No tears, no self-pity. Only a dull, heavy rage.
“Share some attention?” she repeated in a frighteningly even tone. “Igor, I had a meeting with suppliers. We were discussing a six-month contract. And then your sister barges into the conference room, shoving past the secretary, with a bag of cheap pastries and starts shrieking at a frequency only dogs should hear: ‘Well, who do we have here acting so important? Who forgot that today is Saint Oksana’s Day?’”
Igor snorted, looking somewhere over his wife’s head.
“Well, she’s expressive. You know Oksanka. She’s a vivid person. She can’t keep her emotions inside. You could have taken a five-minute break, by the way. Shown some respect to a relative. Your suppliers wouldn’t have fallen apart. They’re people too, after all. They would’ve understood.”
“Understood?” Elena stepped toward him, wiping her face with a rough terry towel. “The general director was sitting there with his mouth open. She called him ‘mister’ and offered him an éclair in honor of her health. And when I tried to lead her into the hallway, she grabbed the door handle and started yelling that I’d become a star, that I’d traded family for my career, and that I didn’t care about holy holidays.”
“Well, you really did forget to congratulate her,” Igor shrugged, as if that justified any circus. “She’d been waiting since morning. Mom called, I called, Auntie from Saratov called. And you were silent. It hurt her. Maybe she crossed the whole city to see you. Wanted to surprise you, make a little celebration at that dreary job of yours.”
Elena looked at her husband and felt something dark and thick beginning to boil inside her. He genuinely did not understand. Or he was pretending not to. To him, Elena’s workplace was something insignificant, something toy-like—a place where anyone could show up at any moment, like some public passageway, and impose their own rules.
“You gave her the address,” she said, not asking, but stating it. “I asked you a hundred times. My office is a restricted area. There is a pass system. There is business etiquette. It isn’t your auto repair shop, where you can drink beer with your friends on the hood of a car at any hour of the day. Why did you do it?”
Igor clicked his tongue in irritation, finally deigning to look his wife in the eyes.
“What, did I reveal a state secret? She’s my sister, not a terrorist. She asked for the address, said she wanted to stop by, make peace, bring a treat. What was I supposed to do, refuse her? Say, ‘Sorry, Ksyusha, Lena is a high-flying bird now, you can’t even get near her unless you ride in on a crooked goat’? I’m not some henpecked husband, Lena, to deny my own sister over such a little thing.”
“This is not a little thing, Igor. This is my reputation. Today people asked me whether everything was all right with my head, since visitors like that come to see me. She tried to force my boss into a conversation about horoscopes while I was calling security! Security, Igor! To remove your sister!”
“There!” Igor jabbed the remote at her like an accusing finger. “That’s exactly who you are. Calling security on family. You’re a cruel woman, Lenka. Cold. Oksana came to you with her heart open, with pastries, and you threatened her with guards. No wonder she got upset and said too much. Anyone would have been enraged by a reception like that.”
Elena threw the towel onto the washing machine. The conversation in the cramped bathroom had become suffocating. It felt as though the walls were closing in. Her husband’s logic was impenetrable, like tank armor. In his distorted world, Oksana was the victim—a “bright little soul” with éclairs—while Elena was the aggressor, the one who had dared to work at work instead of dancing in circles around the Orthodox calendar of name days.
“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said, walking past him into the hallway. She brushed his shoulder hard, making no attempt to avoid him. “I am not going to discuss her delicate emotional constitution. I want to know one thing: do you understand that you set me up? That because of your loose tongue and her fit, I could lose my bonus, or even be fired for failing to align with corporate culture?”
“Oh, don’t make me laugh,” Igor snorted, trailing after her into the kitchen. “They’ll fire her. You work there like three people; everything rests on you. So there was a bit of noise and fuss. Tomorrow everyone will forget. But the fact that you offended my sister—that will last. She’s writing to me right now, by the way. Crying. Says you practically kicked her out.”
Elena stopped in the middle of the kitchen without turning on the light. The streetlamp outside the window pulled Igor’s silhouette out of the semi-darkness; he was already bent over his phone, fingers moving quickly across the screen. He was typing a reply. Consoling her. Supporting her.
“She’s crying…” Elena repeated quietly, feeling the cold in her chest turn into a desire to smash something. “Let her cry. Maybe then she’ll have less liquid left for all the poison she spits. I’m hungry. And I really hope you didn’t eat what I cooked yesterday. Because I’m not cooking today. My hands are dirty. I can’t wash your family off them.”
Elena sharply hit the light switch. The kitchen flooded with the harsh, unfriendly glow of LED lamps, instantly exposing every small flaw: crumbs on the table, Igor’s carelessly tossed pack of cigarettes, a cloudy stain on the tablecloth. She walked to the refrigerator, yanked open the door, and noted with grim satisfaction that the pot of yesterday’s stew was still there. Cold, untouched. So he had been waiting for her. Not to talk, but to be served.
Igor, squinting against the light, sat down at the table as if he owned the place, pushing aside a little bowl of dried-out cookies. He placed his phone in front of him, screen facing up, like an icon. The gadget immediately came to life, vibrating briefly but insistently, sending an unpleasant rattling sound across the polished surface of the table.
“Will you heat it up?” he asked in an ordinary tone, nodding toward the pot in his wife’s hands. “I haven’t had a bite since lunch. While I was calming Oksanka down on the phone, I lost my appetite, but now it’s come back.”
Elena silently slammed the pot onto the stove. The sound of metal on metal was loud and clanging, but Igor was not bothered. He began drumming his fingers on the table, beating out some irritating rhythm.
“You still haven’t answered,” Elena said without turning her back on him. She watched the blue flower of gas lick the bottom of the pot. “How exactly did that conversation happen? ‘Hello, brother dear, give me Lena’s address, I want to make her life hell’? Or did you offer it yourself?”
“Oh, stop exaggerating,” Igor grimaced. “She called and asked where you were, geographically. Said she was nearby, downtown, and had bought your favorite pastries, by the way. She wanted to stop by for ten minutes, have coffee, exchange congratulations. What’s criminal about that? So I sent her the geolocation. I didn’t know you had some top-secret facility there and entry was only by retina scan. You used to be simpler.”
“I used to work at some shady little office on the outskirts, where we drank tea three times a day,” Elena turned around, folding her arms across her chest. “Now I work for a major company. And I asked you, Igor, I begged you: no relatives at work. That is my space. But you decided your sister’s desire to ‘have coffee’ was more important than my requests.”
The phone vibrated again. The screen lit up, displaying a long message. Igor glanced at it, quickly read it, and the corners of his lips twitched in a barely noticeable smirk.
“She writes that you didn’t even offer her tea,” he announced, as if reading out a court verdict. “Says she stood in the reception area like a poor relation while your secretary glared at her like a wolf. Lena, that’s just rude. Turning a person away at the door is rock bottom. We’re not animals.”
“Rude is barging into a board meeting!” Elena’s voice became hard as granite. “Do you understand that she started telling my boss about how I was afraid of frogs as a child? She tried to show him photos from the country house where I was in a swimsuit! Igor, that is not a ‘surprise.’ That is sabotage. She did it on purpose—to humiliate me, to show that to her I’m still the same foolish Lenka, not a professional.”
Igor waved it off as if swatting away an annoying fly.
“Oh, come on. Get those complexes of yours treated. Oksanka is a simple soul, open-hearted. She wanted to lighten the atmosphere. And you sit there in your office, puffed up like a turkey, acting so important. You really have gotten full of yourself, woman. Is your crown not squeezing your head? Your own sister-in-law came to see you, and all you can talk about is reputation. Family is more important than your reports, you fool. Reports won’t bring you a glass of water in old age.”
Elena looked at him and felt something inside her finally break. Not love—no. Respect. She saw before her not a partner, but a spoiled teenager justifying another teenager’s hooliganism. He truly did not see the difference between casual family gatherings and business etiquette. To him, the world was one big sofa where everyone was supposed to be “one of us.”
She turned off the gas, served a plate of steaming stew, and placed it in front of her husband. Carelessly, so that a bit of sauce splashed onto the table.
“Eat,” she said curtly.
Igor looked at the sauce stain, then at his wife.
“Rude,” he stated, picking up his fork. “Is that how you talked to Oksana too? No wonder she was shaking by the end. She’s very vulnerable, by the way. She’s going through a difficult period right now—trouble with her husband, layoffs at work. She needs support, not your snobbery.”
“She’s been going through a difficult period for the last fifteen years,” Elena snapped, sitting down across from him but not touching the food. “And for all those fifteen years, the whole world has been expected to dance around her. But I’m tired, Igor. I am not a clown in her circus. And my office is not the arena.”
The phone vibrated again. The third time in a minute.
“Who’s typing now? The support group?” Elena nodded toward the gadget.
Igor chewed a piece of meat deliberately slowly, looking her straight in the eyes.
“It’s Oksana. She’s asking whether you’ve calmed down. And do you know what she’s suggesting? Peace. She’s ready to forgive you for your stunt, if you behave like a decent human being.”
“Forgive me?” Elena laughed, but the laugh came out dry and sharp, like a cough. “That’s amazing. She came to my workplace, humiliated me, nearly derailed a deal, and now she’s ready to forgive me? Do you even hear what you’re saying?… Continued just below in the first comment.”
