“Oh Lord, these female grievances again!” Slava rolled his eyes in irritation and threw up his hands. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill! It wasn’t some fatal illness that required me to sit here and cry. I told you, my mother needed help! She’s an elderly woman!”
Spring that year had arrived unusually gentle and early. Sunbeams played cheerfully across the panoramic windows of the city’s high-rise buildings, and the air clearly smelled of budding greenery and approaching change. For twenty-six-year-old Anastasia, that April was supposed to become the happiest month of her life, because it was the final step before the main event: her long-awaited wedding, scheduled for the end of May.
Nastya and Vyacheslav had been dating for a little over a year and a half. From the outside, their relationship seemed like a true modern idyll. Slava was an attractive, well-groomed young man with the gift of gab and plenty of ambition. He courted her beautifully, gave her lush bouquets on holidays, and knew how to impress Anastasia’s friends.
Nastya herself was sincere, romantic, and used to achieving everything through hard work. She dissolved into the relationship completely. She worked as a lead designer at a large advertising agency, earned very good money, but still believed that the most important thing for a woman was a reliable man’s shoulder and a cozy family home.
For the last several months, their life had resembled one continuous, joyful marathon: choosing a restaurant with an open terrace, tasting wedding cakes, spending long evenings making the guest list and searching for the perfect shade of napkins for the banquet table. Slava participated in these preparations mostly in name only, preferring to agree with his bride’s taste.
“Darling, you’re the designer. You know better. The main thing is that you like it.”
Nastya saw this as a sign of trust and care, although somewhere deep inside, at the very bottom of her subconscious, a sticky chill of doubt sometimes stirred. Slava knew how to speak beautifully about the future, but when it came to real actions that required effort or compromise, he always skillfully found reasons to stay on the sidelines.
But all these minor rough edges were completely forgotten when Anastasia’s parents, wealthy people who adored their only daughter, gave the young couple a truly royal gift for their future wedding.
It was a spacious, bright two-room apartment in an elite residential complex with gated grounds, underground parking, and a view of the embankment. The apartment had only rough finishing, and Nastya enthusiastically began developing the interior design project. That was when Slava suddenly became unusually active.
He could spend hours discussing where they would place a huge television, what smart-home system needed to be integrated, and how important it was to set aside a separate workspace for him with good soundproofing. Nastya was slightly hurt that, while discussing their future nest, her fiancé used the pronoun “I” more often than “we,” but in the pre-wedding bustle she wrote it off as male pragmatism. For the time being, they lived separately: Nastya in her cozy bachelorette studio, while Slava rented a small one-room apartment closer to work.
Fate, as often happens, suddenly and mercilessly made its own corrections to the perfect life plan.
It was April fourteenth, the eve of Nastya’s birthday. She was sitting at her laptop, finishing an urgent project so she could go into a mini-vacation before the wedding with a clear conscience. Toward evening, her abdomen began to ache. At first, Nastya did not pay much attention to it. She took a painkiller and lay down on the sofa, hoping it was just fatigue. But the pain did not subside. On the contrary, it became sharper and more encircling, concentrating on her right side. By midnight, it was unbearable. Bent in half and swallowing tears, Nastya called an ambulance with trembling hands.
After that, everything happened as if in a fog: the arrival of stern doctors, the cold stretcher inside the ambulance, the bright, blinding light of the emergency room at the on-duty hospital. Quick tests, palpation that made her vision go dark, and the grave verdict of the surgeon on duty:
“Acute appendicitis. We can’t delay. Prepare the operating room.”
Nastya only had time to write a short message to her mother before her phone was taken away and she was put under anesthesia on the operating table.
She regained consciousness closer to morning. Her mouth was dry, a dull aching pain throbbed in her side, and her head felt heavy after the anesthesia. Nastya barely managed to open her eyes. The white ceiling of the hospital room, an IV drip, the monotonous beeping of some device. She turned her gaze toward the window. Dawn was breaking outside on April fifteenth. Her twenty-seventh birthday. The saddest and loneliest celebration of her life.
The nurse who came in to check on the patient brought her phone. The screen was covered with dozens of notifications: friends and colleagues had started sending birthday wishes. There were several missed calls from her mother, who had already called the doctors’ office and knew that the operation had been successful. But Nastya’s eyes feverishly searched for another name. There was not a single message from Slava. No question about where she had disappeared the previous evening, no morning birthday greeting.
Weakness washed over her in waves, but Nastya stubbornly dialed her fiancé’s number. The ringing went on for a long time. Finally, Vyacheslav’s cheerful voice sounded on the other end.
“Yeah, baby, hi! Happy birthday, my future wife! I’ve been running around since morning. I wanted to call you later. Why are you awake so early?”
Nastya swallowed the lump rising in her throat.
“Slava… I’m in the hospital. They took me by ambulance last night. Acute appendicitis. I had surgery.”
For a second, silence hung on the line. Nastya waited for the voice of the man she loved to break with worry, for him to start frantically asking for the clinic address and room number, for him to promise he would be there in half an hour, dropping everything. But Slava’s reaction stunned her.
“Wow, that’s some news!” he drawled in an even tone, sounding more mildly surprised than concerned. “Well, thank God they already cut it out. These days it’s a minor procedure, practically a conveyor belt. How are you feeling? Coming out of anesthesia?”
“It hurts, Slava. And I was very scared last night,” Nastya answered quietly, feeling the first hot tear roll down her cheek. “Please come see me. It’s my birthday today, and I’m completely alone here. Visiting hours have already started…”
“Nastyush, come on, don’t cry,” her fiancé said, notes of impatience and irritation appearing in his voice, as if she were distracting him from something truly important. “You see, here’s the thing… I really can’t today. I promised Mom a week ago that we’d go to the dacha. The season is starting. We need to cover the greenhouse, burn last year’s trash, and put the house in order after winter. She can’t manage on her own. Her blood pressure keeps jumping. If I cancel now, she’ll nag me to death.”
Nastya could not believe what she was hearing. She was lying in a hospital bed after surgery, helpless and weak, while her future husband talked about greenhouses and last year’s leaves.
“Slava, are you serious?” she whispered with dry lips. “I’m lying in a hospital room. On my birthday. I need your help. And you’re going to clean up trash at the dacha?”
“Nastya, don’t be dramatic!” Vyacheslav snapped. “You’re under the supervision of doctors, in warmth. What am I supposed to do there? Sit by your bed and watch you sleep? I’ll come, I definitely will. In a couple of days, when we get back from the dacha. By then you’ll have recovered a bit and we’ll be able to talk normally. Come on, rest and regain your strength. Kisses!”
Short beeps sounded in the phone. Nastya slowly lowered it onto her chest. At that moment, the physical pain from the fresh incision seemed insignificant compared to the dull, icy emptiness rapidly filling her heart. Her perfect, caring fiancé, the man with whom she planned to spend her entire life, had simply brushed her aside at her most vulnerable moment.
Nastya spent her entire birthday in a half-daze. Doctors checked her stitches, nurses gave her painkiller injections. Her phone kept exploding with calls and congratulations, but she answered only with short messages.
Toward evening, Yulia Andreevna, Nastya’s mother, quietly entered the room. She was carrying a small but incredibly beautiful bouquet of delicate ranunculuses and a thermos of homemade chicken broth. Seeing her daughter’s pale, tear-stained face, the woman understood everything at once. She did not fuss, gasp, or lament. Yulia Andreevna had always been wise and calm, with an analytical mind.
She placed the flowers on the bedside table, poured fragrant broth into a cup, and sat down on the edge of the bed, gently taking her daughter’s cold hand.
“Now tell me, my dear. What happened? And don’t tell me you’re crying because of the stitches. I’ve known you since you were in diapers.”
Nastya, like a little girl, pressed her nose into her mother’s hand and burst into tears. She told her everything: about the fear during the night, the call to Slava, the greenhouse, the dacha, and how indifferent his voice had been.
Yulia Andreevna listened silently, without interrupting. Her face became more and more thoughtful. When Nastya calmed down a little and began sipping the broth, her mother said quietly but very firmly:
“Nastenka, listen to me carefully. I have never interfered in your relationships. I believed you had to make your own choices. But now I must say what I see. Marriage, family — it is not choosing pretty napkins for a restaurant and arguing about the size of a television. Family means two people being in the same boat during any storm. Today was your first small storm. And your Slava did not even try to throw you a lifebuoy. He stayed on the shore.”
Nastya lowered her eyes.
“Mom, maybe he really couldn’t let his mother down… Her blood pressure…”
“Her blood pressure always jumps precisely when she needs attention,” Yulia Andreevna said with a faint smirk. “My girl, stop making excuses for him. A person who truly loves you would postpone every dacha in the world, hire workers if that wretched greenhouse really had to be covered, and rush to you in slippers just to hold your hand. And do you know the last time his eyes burned with that kind of excitement? When your father and I handed you the keys to that apartment. That was when he was full of enthusiasm.”
Her mother’s words fell heavily, like stones, but each one hit its mark. Nastya lay there silently, staring at the ceiling. That evening, in the silence of the hospital room, it was as if the rose-colored glasses finally slipped from her eyes.
The next three days became a time of complete reassessment for Anastasia. While her body recovered after the operation, her mind worked with frightening clarity. She analyzed their entire year-and-a-half romance. And suddenly she began noticing everything she had previously brushed aside. How skillfully Slava had shifted restaurant expenses onto her when they had just started dating. How he had never once offered help when she moved from one rented studio to another, citing an “important project.”
How he always placed his mother’s whims above Nastya’s plans. All his “care” had been nothing more than a beautiful facade behind which hid an incredibly selfish, infantile, and calculating man who was looking not for a life partner, but for a convenient, well-off woman who could solve his material problems. And the apartment gifted by her parents was the main trophy in that game.
Slava finally deigned to appear at the hospital only on the third day after the operation.
The door to the room swung open, and Vyacheslav appeared in the doorway. He looked fresh and rested, wearing a fashionable jacket, and in his hands he casually held three cellophane-wrapped bunches of some gloomy, half-wilted tulips, obviously bought on sale at the nearest supermarket.
“Hello, patient!” he announced cheerfully, plopping down on the chair beside the bed and placing the flowers on the nightstand. “So, how are you doing here? You already look pretty okay. When are they discharging you? We have a meeting with the decorator scheduled for tomorrow, and I won’t be able to decide anything alone. By the way, we got so much done at the dacha! Mom sends her regards. She says you should stop getting sick, because right before the wedding it’s a bad omen.”
He chattered nonstop, not even bothering to ask whether she had been in pain, how she had slept those nights, whether she had been scared alone. He brought neither fruit, nor water, nor basic sympathy. In his universe, everything was wonderful.
Nastya looked at him with an absolutely calm, cold, unfamiliar gaze. There was no longer any hurt in her, no tears. Only a crystal-clear, liberating emptiness.
She slowly sat up in bed, holding the edge of her hospital gown over the bandage.
“Are you finished?” she asked quietly, interrupting his stream of consciousness about the garden beds they had dug up.
Slava stopped short, blinking in surprise.
“Yeah… What’s wrong? Why are you so gloomy? Is this again because I didn’t come on the first day? Nastya, I already explained…”
“You went to your mother, and I spent my birthday alone in the hospital,” Nastya said, pronouncing every word sharply. Her voice did not tremble. It rang with a steeliness Slava had never heard before.
“Oh Lord, these female grievances again!” Slava rolled his eyes in irritation and threw up his hands. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill! It wasn’t some fatal illness that required me to sit here and cry. I told you, my mother needed help! She’s an elderly woman!”
“And that is why you left the woman you planned to call your wife alone in a hospital room after surgery,” Nastya stated. It was not a question. It was a verdict. “You know, Slava, I’m very glad my appendix became inflamed now and not a month later, after we would have stamped our passports.”
Slava tensed. The arrogant, confident smile slowly slid off his face.
“What are you talking about? Nastya, are you on some kind of pills?”
“I am completely sober, Slava. For the first time in a year and a half.”
Nastya reached for the bedside table, opened the top drawer, and took out her makeup bag. From a small pocket, she pulled out a gold engagement ring with a neat diamond. She had taken it off before the operation, and now it seemed like a foreign and meaningless piece of metal to her.
She held the ring out to Slava.
“There will be no wedding, Slava. I am breaking off our engagement. You can take the ring. I don’t need it anymore.”
Vyacheslav froze, staring at her outstretched palm as if a poisonous snake lay on it. The silence in the room became deafening.
“You… are you serious right now?” His voice cracked, sounding pitiful and uncertain. “Because of some stupid dacha? Because I didn’t come with flowers on your birthday?! Nastya, have you lost your mind? We’ve already invested so much money! The restaurant, the dress…”
“The dress is mine. My father paid for the restaurant. The only thing you invested was your precious time, Slava. And I am giving you your freedom back. You can spend the whole year at your mother’s dacha.”
And then the mask of the noble fiancé cracked at the seams, revealing Vyacheslav’s true face to the world. His face twisted with anger and panic.
“What about the apartment?!” burst out of him, and the shout echoed off the walls of the hospital room. “We already ordered furniture for it! I already planned my office! You can’t just cancel everything because of your female hysteria! It’s my apartment too. We were going to build a family there!”
Nastya gave a bitter little smile.
“No, Slava. It is my parents’ apartment. And it is registered in my father’s name. I will live there. And you can gather up your illusions and return to your rented one-room flat.”
“You… you’re just a calculating bitch!” Vyacheslav hissed, losing the last remnants of his dignity. He jumped up from the chair, nearly knocking it over. Red blotches of fury spread across his face. “Who will even need you with all your demands? You think too highly of yourself! You think that just because your parents are rich, you can throw people away?! My mother was right. You’re cold and selfish!”
“Leave,” Nastya said quietly but commandingly, pointing at the door. “Take the ring, your sad little bouquets, and leave. If you’re still here in one second, I’ll press the call button and say you’re threatening me. Security will escort you out quickly.”
Slava breathed heavily. He realized he had lost. Completely and utterly. This quiet, convenient girl, whom he had manipulated so skillfully, had suddenly shown a steel core. His entire house of cards, built on plans for someone else’s real estate and a comfortable life at someone else’s expense, collapsed in an instant.
He abruptly snatched the ring from the table, shoved it into the pocket of his jacket, grabbed his wilted tulips, and, slamming the hospital-room door loudly, flew out into the corridor. His departure was pathetic and disgraceful.
Nastya was left alone. She lay back on the pillows, feeling an incredible calm spreading inside her. The pain in her side still made itself known, but it was a healing wound. Far more important was that another wound was healing — the one she might have received by tying her life to a traitor.
A long and happy life waited ahead of her.
A life in which she would never again allow herself to be pushed into second place. And her spacious, bright apartment on the embankment would become an excellent beginning to that new, honest life.
