“What on earth is this?!” Denis’s voice flew in from the kitchen before he even appeared in the doorway. “Look at this frying pan! Do I have to remind you every single time how to wash dishes properly?”
“What on earth is this?!” Denis’s voice flew in from the kitchen before he even appeared in the doorway. “Look at this frying pan! Do I have to remind you every single time how to wash dishes properly?”
Anna stood by the sink, looking at the foam she had just spread over that very frying pan. She said nothing. She simply kept washing it—slowly, methodically, as if every movement of the sponge was part of some inner count she had been keeping for a long time.
Denis walked past her to the refrigerator, opened it, grimaced, and closed it.
“And there’s no milk. Excellent. Just excellent.”
He was tall, moderately broad-shouldered, with that particular expression people have when they are used to considering themselves right by default. He worked at an insurance company, wore shirts without a single crease, and believed that this was a sign of character. Order, for him, was not merely a habit. It was a way of controlling the world. And the people in it.
“Iron my mother’s robe. She’s used to order!” he threw over his shoulder as he headed toward the living room. “She’s coming on Friday, and I don’t want to hear any complaints afterward.”
Anna turned off the water. She placed the frying pan on the drying rack. She wiped her hands on a towel—the one with the little blue stripes, the one she had bought herself three years ago because she had not liked the previous one. Such a small choice, but back then it had felt like a victory.
In the next room, Mitya was breathing softly—four years old, still not awake after his afternoon nap. On the floor beside his little bed stood a large checkered bag. Inside it were already packed three pairs of jeans—small ones, with a dinosaur patch on the pocket—his favorite hooded sweater, two sets of pajamas, and a soft rabbit missing one ear, whom Mitya called Gosha.
Anna went into her son’s room carefully, on tiptoe. She crouched beside the bag. She took a stack of T-shirts from the shelf and counted them—four, that would be enough. She folded them neatly, almost mechanically. Her hands worked on their own, while her mind was somewhere else entirely.
Her mother-in-law, Raisa Pavlovna, came once every three months, and every time she somehow managed to leave behind the feeling that the apartment had undergone an inspection. She walked through the rooms with the air of someone holding an invisible notebook, writing down remarks: dust here, the curtain hung wrong there, and over there—oh, really—a stain on the tablecloth.
“Anya, dear, you understand how things should be done,” she would say in that tone that was worse than any shouting. Quiet, gentle, and with such an undertone that Anna wanted to sink through the floor.
In his mother’s presence, Denis blossomed. He became different—his voice softer, his smile wider. They would sit in the kitchen, drink tea, and Raisa Pavlovna would say something like, “So, how are you managing here, son?” as if Anna did not exist in the apartment at all. Anna had grown used to it. Or thought she had.
The bag was almost packed when the phone rang. An unknown number, Moscow area code.
“Anna Sergeyevna?” The voice was businesslike, a little dry, with that professional clarity that immediately made it clear: this was a person accustomed to speaking to the point. “My name is Pavel Ignatyev. I’m a lawyer. We need to meet. It concerns your aunt—Zoya Alexandrovna Korshunova.”
Anna slowly sat down on the edge of the bed. Mitya stirred in his sleep but did not wake.
“Aunt Zoya?” she repeated, almost in a whisper. “But she… she died two years ago.”
“Exactly,” Ignatyev confirmed. “The matter concerns her property. More precisely, a will that until recently was held by a notary in Saint Petersburg. There are circumstances you apparently do not know about. I would prefer to explain in person.”
Anna looked at the bag at her feet. At the little jeans with the dinosaur. At Gosha with his torn-off ear.
“All right,” she said. “When?”
Aunt Zoya had been the only person in the family who never gave advice. She simply lived—loudly, brightly, a little chaotically. She owned an antique shop on the Petrograd Side, smoked thin cigarillos, wore rings on every finger, and once said to Anna, “Do you know what the trouble is with good girls? They’re always waiting for permission.” Anna had been twenty-two then. She had laughed and not understood. Now she was thirty-one. And she seemed to be beginning to understand.
The meeting with the lawyer was scheduled for the next day, at an office on Nevsky Prospect. Anna put the phone in her pocket and left the nursery, carefully closing the door behind her.
In the living room, Denis was watching something on his laptop. He did not look up.
“Will there be dinner?”
“Yes,” Anna said evenly. “In about twenty minutes.”
She returned to the kitchen and put a pot on the stove. Outside the window, the city hummed—a tram somewhere in the distance, voices in the courtyard, a car horn. An ordinary evening. An ordinary kitchen. Only inside, something had shifted—just slightly, like the needle of a compass someone had turned in another direction.
Anna took her mother-in-law’s robe from the hanger in the hallway. She looked at it. Neat, beige, with mother-of-pearl buttons. Raisa Pavlovna had left it behind during her last visit—deliberately or not, that was always the question.
She carried the robe into the room. Laid it on the ironing board. Turned on the iron. And while it was heating, she thought about Aunt Zoya. About the shop on the Petrograd Side. About the will that had lain with a notary for two years. About the fact that Pavel Ignatyev had said “there are circumstances”—just like that, in the plural.
The iron clicked. Ready.
Anna ran it over the sleeve of the robe. Smoothly, without a single crease. Exactly the way Raisa Pavlovna liked it.
In the morning, Denis left for work earlier than usual—something about a quarterly report; he did not bother to explain. He simply put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, and said from the doorway:
“I won’t take Mitya to kindergarten myself. I have a meeting at eight. And buy milk.”
The door closed. Anna finished her coffee standing by the window. Mitya was still asleep.
She got her son ready quickly—sleepy, warm, smelling of children’s shampoo. He fussed, did not want to put on his boots, demanded to take Gosha to kindergarten. Anna explained that Gosha would stay home and wait, promised him a cartoon in the evening, and buttoned his jacket all the way up. An ordinary morning. There had already been more than a thousand mornings like it.
They walked to kindergarten—ten minutes through the courtyard and a small park with peeling benches. Mitya pulled her by the hand and told her something about an excavator he had seen from the window the day before. Anna listened and nodded, while thinking about Ignatyev. About “the circumstances.” About Aunt Zoya, who had died quietly and suddenly—her heart, the doctors had said, nothing had foretold it.
The lawyer’s office was in an old building on Nevsky—one of those that look respectable on the outside and smell of wood and a little dust inside. Third floor, no elevator. Anna climbed the staircase with its high steps and pushed open the heavy door with a brass plaque.
Pavel Ignatyev turned out to be younger than she had imagined. About thirty-five, calm, wearing thin-rimmed glasses. He spoke quietly and looked straight at her—not piercingly, but directly, like a person who had nothing to hide.
“Please, sit down,” he said, opening a folder on the desk. “Anna Sergeyevna, your aunt made a will four months before her death. She left you the shop on the Petrograd Side—the premises are owned, not rented—and a bank account. The sum is not enormous, but… substantial.”
Anna was silent for a second.
“Why am I only finding out about this now? Two years have passed.”
Ignatyev paused briefly—exactly the way people pause when the next sentence will be unpleasant.
“Because there was another claimant. A certain Boris Korshunov—your aunt’s second cousin once removed. He contested the will, claiming that Zoya Alexandrovna was legally incompetent at the time she made it. The case dragged on for a year and a half. Three weeks ago, the court issued its final decision in your favor.”
Anna felt something in her chest slowly tighten—not from fear, but from some strange, almost unfamiliar feeling. As if someone inside her, long switched off, had suddenly flipped a switch.
“Boris Korshunov,” she repeated. “I barely know him. I saw him maybe twice at family gatherings.”
“He knew the notary well,” Ignatyev said briefly. And that said everything.
She went to the Petrograd Side immediately after the meeting. She simply got on the metro and went—without planning, without thinking; her feet carried her there on their own.
The shop stood in a quiet lane between two apartment buildings. The sign had faded—“Antiques and Rarities”—but the door was the same, wooden, with a little bell above it. The manager, an older woman named Nelli Fyodorovna, was already waiting for her at the entrance—Ignatyev had warned her in advance.
“We’ve been operating in minimal mode all this time,” she said, letting Anna in. “Zoya Alexandrovna asked us not to close. She said: if you close it, everything will die.”
Anna stopped in the middle of the shop. She looked around.
Everything was as she remembered it: old clocks on the wall—seven of them, all different, all ticking; shelves with porcelain; a display case with Soviet badges and brooches; stacks of records in the corner; the smell of wax and something resinous. And a photograph above the cash register—Aunt Zoya at about forty, laughing, rings on her fingers, a cigarillo between her teeth.
“Did Boris come here?” Anna asked.
Nelli Fyodorovna pressed her lips together.
“He did. Twice. He looked around, walked about, touched things. Once he tried to take several items—said they were rightfully his. I didn’t let him. I threatened to call the police, and he left. But the way he looked…” She paused. “He looked unpleasant.”
“Does he know about the court decision?”
“Probably. People like that always find things out first.”
Anna walked along the shelves. She ran her finger along the edge of a porcelain shepherdess—carefully, almost tenderly. Aunt Zoya used to say that every object in the shop had its own story. That antiques were not dead things, but living memory. Anna had listened with only half an ear back then. Now she regretted it.
“Nelli Fyodorovna,” she said, “do you want to stay and work here?”
The woman looked at her attentively. As if weighing whether Anna was serious or not.
“I do,” she finally replied. “If, of course, you understand what you’re taking on.”
“I don’t understand yet,” Anna said honestly. “But I’ll figure it out.”
She returned home half an hour before she had to pick up Mitya. She went into the room and looked at the checkered bag beside the child’s bed. It was still standing there—packed and silent, like a question she was not yet answering.
The phone vibrated. Denis.
“Are you home? I’ll be late. Don’t wait for me for dinner.”
“All right,” she said.
“And did you iron the robe?”
A pause. Very brief.
“Yes,” Anna answered. “Everything is ready.”
She put the phone away. Sat quietly for a minute. Outside the window, the city hummed—the tram, voices, someone’s music from an open window across the way.
Then she stood up, put on her jacket, and went to pick up Mitya.
Raisa Pavlovna arrived on Friday, exactly as announced—at half past eleven, with a large wheeled bag and a box of homemade cookies she baked especially so she could later mention casually, “Well, mine always turn out better.”
Anna opened the door, took her coat, and hung it on a hook.
“You’ve lost weight,” Raisa Pavlovna said instead of greeting her, looking her over from head to toe. “It isn’t good to lose weight like that. Denis said you’re eating poorly.”
“Hello, Raisa Pavlovna.”
“Yes, yes, hello.” She was already heading into the living room, inspecting the hallway as she went. “You have dust on this shelf. Here, see?”
Mitya ran out to meet his grandmother with a shout and flung himself onto her. That was the only moment when Raisa Pavlovna became truly soft—with her grandson, she knew how to be different. Anna watched it and thought: so a person can do it. When she wants to.
Denis came home by lunchtime. He immediately blossomed at the threshold—smiling, hugging her, saying, “Mom, you look well.” The three of them sat in the kitchen, with Mitya spinning around nearby. Anna set the table, poured the soup, put out the bread.
“Did you iron the robe?” Denis asked without looking at her, addressing the space somewhere between his mother and the window.
“I did,” Anna said.
Raisa Pavlovna looked at her son with a slight smile. Then at Anna—without a smile.
“He takes care of you,” she pronounced in a tone that allowed no objection. “Order in the home is respect for the family.”
Anna took her spoon. Began to eat.
In the evening, when Mitya had fallen asleep and Raisa Pavlovna had settled in the living room with the television, Anna went into the kitchen. Denis was standing by the window with his phone.
“Denis,” she said quietly. “I need to tell you something.”
He turned around with an expression that suggested he was already tired of the conversation in advance.
“Did something happen?”
“Aunt Zoya left me a will. The shop on the Petrograd Side and money in an account. The court confirmed everything three weeks ago. I found out on Wednesday.”
A pause. Denis slowly lowered his phone.
“Why were you silent for three days?”
“I was thinking.”
“About what?”
Anna looked at him directly. Just like that—directly, the way Ignatyev had looked at her in the office on Nevsky.
“About what I’m going to do with it.”
Something in his face changed slightly. Not much—just a tiny crack in his habitual confidence.
“Well? What are you going to do with it?”
“Work. The shop is operating. There’s a manager there. I want to understand it, get involved in the business. It will take time.”
“Anna,” he said her name with that particular intonation she knew by heart. The tone of a person who was being interrupted at an important point. “Do you even understand what the antiques business is? It isn’t just some shop full of junk.”
“Aunt Zoya ran it for twenty years.”
“Aunt Zoya was alone. You have a child, a home,” he made an indistinct gesture with his hand, “all of this.”
Anna nodded.
“I remember.”
The conversation did not become a scandal. It simply ended—like a thread that snaps after being pulled from both sides for too long.
Raisa Pavlovna left on Sunday. Saying goodbye, she patted Mitya on the cheek, nodded to Anna, and said quietly to Denis, thinking Anna could not hear:
“Keep an eye on her. These inheritances never lead to anything good. She’ll start imagining things.”
Anna heard. She buttoned Mitya’s jacket all the way up and said nothing.
The following week she went to the Petrograd Side again—this time with a notebook. Nelli Fyodorovna greeted her differently now, without the cautious reserve of the first time. She took out folders, showed her the records, explained where everything came from. Anna listened, wrote things down, and occasionally asked questions.
In the middle of the day, a man entered the shop. About fifty, in an expensive coat, with the kind of face that suggested he was always running slightly late and everyone around him was to blame for it. He swept his gaze over the shelves, then stopped at Anna.
“So you’re the new owner,” he said without making it a question.
“Boris?” Nelli Fyodorovna asked from the cash register, and there was something like warning in her voice.
“Boris Korshunov,” he confirmed, looking only at Anna. “Zoya Alexandrovna’s cousin’s nephew. I believe we met at the funeral.”
“We did,” Anna said calmly.
“Court is court,” he said, lowering his voice slightly. “But there are things courts don’t decide. Zoya personally promised me a few pieces from the collection. Verbally. I’m prepared to settle this amicably.”
Anna looked at him. At the expensive coat, the heavy signet ring on his finger, that look of a man accustomed to getting what he wants—simply by another route if the direct one is blocked.
“Do you have anything in writing? Any confirmation at all?”
“I told you—verbally.”
“Then I have nothing to discuss with you,” she said evenly. “If something in writing appears, contact the lawyer. I can give you his details.”
Boris was silent for a second. Then he smiled—unpleasantly, just as Nelli Fyodorovna had said.
“You still don’t understand what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Maybe,” Anna agreed. “But I’ll figure it out.”
He left. The bell above the door swung and fell silent.
Nelli Fyodorovna exhaled.
“Zoya Alexandrovna wasn’t afraid of him either,” she said. “He used to come to her too. She would throw him out and laugh afterward.”
Anna looked at the photograph above the cash register. Aunt Zoya was laughing—widely, without looking back, with a cigarillo between her teeth and rings on her fingers.
Do you know what the trouble is with good girls? They’re always waiting for permission.
She came home late. Mitya was already asleep. Denis was sitting in the living room, watching her silently as she took off her jacket in the hallway.
“Where were you?”
“On the Petrograd Side.”
He nodded. Said nothing.
Anna went into the nursery and stood over sleeping Mitya. She fixed his blanket. Then she came out, took the checkered bag—still standing by the wall—and put it away in the closet. Not because she had changed her mind. Simply because its time had not yet come. Now she felt that clearly. Everything had its moment.
She lay down and closed her eyes. Outside the window, the city hummed. Somewhere on the Petrograd Side stood a shop with seven different clocks on the wall—and all of them were ticking.
A month later, Anna was appearing at the shop every other day. Nelli Fyodorovna picked Mitya up from kindergarten—they had somehow quietly become friends, and he called her “Aunt Nelly” and demanded that she read to him about cars.
Denis was silent. He did not make scenes, did not forbid anything—he simply stayed silent with the air of someone watching a temporary misunderstanding that would resolve itself on its own.
Boris Korshunov showed up once more—this time with some shady type in a leather jacket, whom he introduced as his “lawyer.” Anna called Ignatyev right in front of them. They left quickly.
One evening Denis said:
“How long is this going to continue?”
Anna looked up at him.
“This is my work now, Denis.”
“You have a home and a child.”
“They haven’t gone anywhere.”
He fell silent. Then he said more quietly, almost without his usual hardness—and that was unexpected:
“I don’t understand what’s happening to you.”
Anna was silent for a second.
“I know,” she said without anger. “But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening.”
It was neither an end nor a beginning. Just a point after which they both knew—the real conversation still lay ahead. A conversation without the old familiar roles.
On Saturday, she took Mitya with her to the shop. He walked between the shelves, touched the porcelain dogs with one finger, and stared at the clocks for a long time.
“Why are there so many of them?” he asked.
“Because time can be different,” Anna said.
Mitya thought about it and nodded—with the seriousness only a four-year-old can have.
Anna looked at the photograph above the cash register. At Aunt Zoya with her laughter and her rings.
Behind her, the bell swung—the sound of a new customer entering.
Anna turned around.
“Good afternoon. How can I help you?”
The divorce was finalized in March—quickly, without court, without scandal. Denis himself suggested not dragging it out. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he had understood something of his own. Anna did not ask.
Mitya stayed with her. Denis took him on weekends—arrived on time, brought him back on time, bought him toys. He turned out to be a better father than he had been a husband. That happens too.
Raisa Pavlovna called once—said everything she thought in an even voice, without breaking down. Anna listened. Answered briefly: “I understand you.” After that, Raisa Pavlovna did not call again.
Anna rented an apartment on the Petrograd Side—a small one, on the second floor, with a window overlooking a courtyard well. Mitya immediately claimed the windowsill and placed Gosha there to watch over the courtyard.
In the mornings they walked to kindergarten. The new route was longer, but it passed a bakery—and Mitya demanded a croissant every time. Anna agreed every time.
The shop was improving—carefully, without sudden leaps. New customers came, and there was talk of a small exhibition. Nelli Fyodorovna blossomed, began bringing homemade jam to work and telling stories about every object on the shelves. Anna listened and wrote them down—thinking of creating something like a small blog about objects with history.
Boris Korshunov disappeared. Ignatyev said he had moved on to another matter, found a new target. People like that do not stay in one place for long.
One evening Mitya asked:
“Mom, are you sad?”
Anna looked at him. She thought honestly—was she sad or not?
“Sometimes,” she said. “But everything is all right.”
He climbed onto her lap and made himself comfortable.
“Then okay,” he decided.
Outside the window, the courtyard hummed. In the shop on the Petrograd Side, seven different clocks were ticking. And each one moved at its own pace.
Now in the spotlight…
