“Dim, they’re nowhere to be found! Absolutely nowhere! I’ve checked the kitchen twice, the bedroom closet, the desk drawers—there’s no sign of the folder!”
Alisa stood in the hallway already dressed in her pantsuit, phone in hand. She had about ten minutes before she needed to leave if she wanted to make it on time, but her passport, diploma, and a few other original documents that were all together in a single folder on the console by the mirror last night had suddenly disappeared. She’d been searching for nearly an hour: calmly at first, then more and more frantically, and about ten minutes ago she broke down and cried out of frustration, annoyed at herself for letting the tears flow.
“Are you sure you put them here?” Dmitry asked, opening the top drawer of the cabinet again, even though he had just checked it himself.
“I’m sure! I gathered everything in advance on purpose. I even double-checked the list last night. Where could they possibly have gone?”
“Maybe you moved them and don’t remember?”
“I’ve been job hunting for four months, Dim! Four months! Do you think I’m heading to my final interview like I’m just going out to buy bread?”
Valentina Petrovna appeared from the kitchen. She had come to visit her son and daughter-in-law the previous evening, planning to go to her friend’s house across town in the morning. She said staying at Dmitry’s would make her trip easier—or at least, that was how she explained her visit.
“Alisa, why are you getting so worked up?” she said. “You’ve turned the whole apartment upside down over a job.”
Alisa spun around to face her sharply.
“This isn’t just any job. This is the interview I’ve been waiting almost a month for, after two rounds of selection.”
“Well, if it doesn’t work out here, you’ll find something somewhere else. Dima’s working. You’re not starving.”
“Mom, not now,” Dmitry cut in shortly. “Do you remember seeing the folder? It’s blue, thick.”
“How would I know where you keep things? I’m just a guest.”
Valentina Petrovna shrugged and went back to the kitchen. Alisa glanced at the clock and felt her stomach tighten with anxiety. In the last four months, she’d gotten used to rejection emails, the ones that said, “we’ve decided to go with another candidate,” and to phone calls after which they’d promise to call back but never did. But this job was different—a big company, a solid position, official salary almost a third higher than her old job before layoffs, medical insurance, training paid by the employer. And most importantly, it was a job in her actual field—not just a random spot willing to take someone desperate for money.
Before she was let go, Alisa had spent seven years at one company. The department was almost entirely shut down, leaving only two people out of nine. At first, she wasn’t too worried. She had savings, solid experience, and was sure she’d find something new within a month at most. The first month went by calmly. The second felt worse. By the third month, she started accepting interviews she would have dismissed right away before. By the fourth month, her confidence was all but gone.
Dmitry was earning well and never once mentioned that Alisa was living off him. But it still bothered her that it was now him paying for the apartment, food, gas, utility bills, and almost everything else. She kept buying clothes and little things for herself from her own savings, but the money was disappearing faster than she liked to admit.
Valentina Petrovna saw things differently.
“Why are you trying so hard anyway?” she’d asked Alisa a month ago, when Alisa was preparing yet again for an online interview. “Dima has a good salary. You’d be better off just taking care of the house. Once you have a baby, you’ll have to leave work anyway.”
“Dima and I will decide for ourselves when to have a baby and who’s going to quit what,” Alisa replied at the time.
Her mother-in-law was offended, but not for long. A week later, she was back to telling her son that a man who provides for his family shouldn’t have to watch his wife come home tired in the evening and order takeout instead of cooking. Dmitry would joke, change the subject, or sometimes tell his mother not to interfere. Yet he willingly shared the details of their life with her—where Alisa had interviewed, what salary was promised, how many rounds were left, and when the next meeting was scheduled—Valentina Petrovna knew almost everything.
This used to annoy Alisa, but she never started a big fight about it—until this morning.
“Dima, I need to call the recruiter,” she said, checking the time again. “I’m literally running out of time.”
“Call them. Tell them the delay is because of documents. I’ll keep looking.”
“What documents?” Valentina Petrovna appeared in the hallway again. “You said there weren’t any documents.”
Alisa didn’t even answer. She opened the recruiter’s number and walked over to the window in the other room.
Meanwhile, Dmitry searched the closet in the hallway, the pockets of his jacket, the key shelf, and the drawer with chargers. He was already starting to realize that his wife couldn’t just lose an entire folder in their two-room apartment. Just last night, she had shown him her diploma and laughed that the photo didn’t even look like her. He clearly remembered the folder on the console.
Dmitry’s phone battery was almost dead, so he decided to grab his power bank from his old sports bag. Then he remembered he’d lent it to his mother yesterday when she complained about her phone dying. Her bag was by the console. By this time, the scheduled interview time had already passed, and even by taxi it would take almost an hour to get to the office.
“Mom, do you still have my power bank?” he called out.
“Check my bag, it’s probably there.”
Dmitry unzipped the bag, saw the charger on top, grabbed it, and along with the cable, lifted the firm blue edge lying to the side.
At first, he didn’t even realize what he was looking at.
Then he pulled the folder out completely.
At that moment, Alisa was speaking on the phone from the other room:
“Yes, I understand… No, I would have left on time, but something came up… I can come later, if there’s any chance you can still meet me… Yes, of course, I’ll wait.”
Valentina Petrovna came out of the kitchen and stopped in her tracks when she saw the folder in her son’s hands.
Dmitry looked at her, then at the bag, then back at his mother.
“What’s this?”
“Dima, please don’t start right away.”
“What do you mean ‘don’t start’? Why is Alisa’s folder in your bag?”
“I was going to explain everything later.”
“Later?!”
Alisa appeared in the doorway, holding her phone to her ear. From her face, Dmitry could tell the recruiter was still on the line.
“Mom, why the hell are Alisa’s documents in your bag?! She ran around the apartment for an hour, crying, missed her interview, and you did this on purpose?! Are you out of your mind?!”
“Don’t yell at me!” Valentina Petrovna took a half step back. “I’m your mother, you know!”
“And she’s my wife! Why did you do this?”
“Because someone needed to think responsibly!” she snapped. “You just don’t get it. She’ll get this office job, who knows when she’ll be home at night, you’ll be eating takeout again, the house will be a mess, then kids will come, and what then? She’ll be focused on her career?”
“What kids, Mom? What takeout? You took her documents!”
“I didn’t steal them! I just took them for a while. I would have returned them today.”
“After the interview?”
“Even after, whatever! Nobody dies from missing one interview.”
Alisa closed her eyes and turned toward the wall.
“Yes, I’m here,” she said into the phone. “Sorry… Yes. I can be there in about an hour and twenty minutes, maybe a bit earlier… I understand. Thank you for checking.”
She ended the call and stared at the screen for a few seconds, then put her phone in her bag.
“What did they say?” Dmitry asked immediately.
“They’ll try to find out if the manager can wait for me. But he has another meeting afterward. They said I should come, but they can’t promise anything.”
Dmitry handed her the folder.
“I’ll call a taxi.”
“Call it.”
Valentina Petrovna pressed her lips in disapproval.
“Alisa, you’re making me look like some kind of criminal. I’m only thinking of your family, you know.”
“Don’t,” Alisa replied quietly. “Just don’t talk to me right now.”
“See, Dima? The way she talks to me after everything I’ve done for you…”
“Mom, please be quiet,” her son interrupted. “I’m really trying hard not to say something I’ll regret.”
“You want me to be quiet? In your house?”
“In our house. And yes, be quiet.”
The taxi arrived seven minutes later. Alisa left alone, because Dmitry decided to stay and finish the conversation with his mother. Later, he would think many times that maybe he should have gone with his wife. But at that moment it felt important to get at least an admission from Valentina Petrovna that what she did was wrong.
He got the admission. But no remorse.
“Yes, I moved the folder,” his mother said after Alisa left. “So what? Do you think I didn’t see what she’s becoming with this job hunt? Four months of nothing but vacancies, applications, calls. As if there’s no other life.”
“She lost her job through no fault of her own.”
“She could have just lived calmly. You make enough money.”
“And what if I lose my job tomorrow?”
“You won’t. You’re a good specialist.”
“Alisa is a good specialist too!”
“A woman doesn’t need to focus so much on her career.”
Dmitry stared at his mother for a few seconds, unable to understand how she could say all this so calmly.
“You knew the exact time of the interview.”
“You told me yourself.”
“Yes, I did. Because I thought I could share good news with my mother, not because I was giving you a schedule for when it would be most convenient for you to ruin my wife’s life.”
“Oh please, I didn’t ruin her life! Don’t exaggerate. She’ll find another job.”
“Start packing.”
“What?”
“Pack your things and go home.”
“Dima, are you serious right now?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re kicking your mother out over one folder?”
“I’m asking you to leave because you deliberately made Alice miss her important interview, and you still think you had the right to do it. And you will apologize to her. Today.”
“Why should I apologize? For thinking about both of you beyond just today?”
“For taking her documents and hiding them.”
“I’m not saying anything to her. You’ll see — one day you both will thank me. Especially you, when you realize a wife shouldn’t just be running around to offices.”
Dmitry was silent for a few seconds, then opened the closet and took out his mother’s scarf.
“That’s it. Pack your things.”
Valentina Petrovna packed up quickly and demonstratively. Several times she started to say that her son would realize himself that his wife is ungrateful, that women nowadays only think about themselves, and that she was the only one trying to look at their life sensibly. Dmitry barely responded. He ordered her a car, carried her bag to the hallway, and waited until she left.
At the door, his mother finally said:
“When you start having problems because of her work, remember this conversation.”
“We’ve already started having problems. Because of you.”
Alice came home after two in the afternoon.
Just by looking at her face, Dmitry understood everything.
“You didn’t get it?”
“I arrived an hour and twenty-seven minutes late. The manager had already gone to another meeting. The recruiter spoke to me for about five minutes and said she’d let him know that it was a force majeure situation. That’s it.”
“Can they reschedule it?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they won’t.”
“I sent my mom home.”
“Good.”
“And I told her not to come here anymore.”
“Good.”
Dmitry approached his wife, wanting to hug her, but Alice took off her jacket and walked past him into the bedroom.
“Alisa…”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now, really. I barely slept since five in the morning, then there was the search, the taxi, the commute, and I waited there for forty minutes before being told that no one would see me today. I just want to change and go to bed.”
Three days later, she received a rejection. It was a short message without any details: the company had finished its selection and chosen another candidate.
Alice read the message during breakfast. Dmitry was sitting across from her and at first didn’t even realize why his wife suddenly put down her spoon.
“Did you get a reply?”
She nodded and turned her phone toward him.
“Maybe they already had another candidate anyway,” he said carefully. “We just don’t know.”
“Maybe.”
“Alisa, I’m not defending my mom.”
“I know.”
“I just want to say you’ll find something better.”
“I’ve been looking for four months, Dima.”
“You will.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t argue. And for some reason, that scared Dmitry more than if she had started yelling.
Before the job cuts, there were hardly any conversations about whose money belonged to whom in the family. Dmitry earned more, Alisa less, but both had jobs, each transferring a set amount to cover shared expenses, and managed the rest on their own. If one needed to make a big purchase, they just talked it out. Alisa could buy her husband an expensive birthday gift without asking if she was allowed to spend that much. Dmitry could pick up the bill for a vacation if she had less free money that month. Neither of them kept track down to the last penny.
After the layoff, things didn’t change overnight. The first month, Alisa acted as if she was just on a long break between jobs. She still paid for her phone, cosmetics, clothes, and outings with friends. By the second month, she bought things for herself less often. In the third month, she turned down a weekend trip with Katya, even though she’d already agreed to go before. By the fourth month, she was comparing prices even where she never used to care about a 100-ruble difference.
Dmitry barely noticed any of this. To him, family was still family, and the money on his card didn’t suddenly turn into his personal property just because his wife wasn’t working for a while. But Alisa saw things very differently. She hated logging into her banking app to watch her savings shrink, and then hearing Valentina Petrovna repeat, almost on purpose, “Why work at all if Dima can pay for everything?”
A few days after turning down the trip, Alisa got a call from another company. The salary was almost half of what she used to make, though the recruiter sounded upbeat about a “friendly team” and the chance to occasionally stay late without extra pay. Alisa listened until the end, thanked her, and said no.
“Maybe it was a mistake?” Dmitry asked that evening. “You could have taken it just for now and kept looking for something better.”
“For that kind of pay, I’d blow half of it on transportation and lunches. And I wouldn’t even get home before eight.”
“Yeah, that’s not a great option.”
“Your mom would probably say this just proves her point.”
“Don’t go there, Alisa.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Exactly. Now you bring it up in every conversation.”
She looked at him and didn’t keep arguing. Dmitry went quiet too. He understood that his wife was angry not just at his mother. She was upset with the whole situation, the tough job market, the lost months, and with the fact that someone else’s action ended up being the turning point that made everything worse. But knowing that didn’t make their daily talks any easier.
For the first two weeks after their argument, they almost never brought up Valentina Petrovna again. Dmitry stopped answering her calls, then started declining them, and eventually just put his phone on silent whenever he saw “Mom” on the screen. She texted him: at first angry, then upset, and finally just completely normal, like nothing had happened. She asked about work, offered to send homemade cutlets, complained about her blood pressure. Dmitry didn’t reply at all.
Alisa started sending out her resume again.
Her savings ran out about a month later. She realized it one evening when she tried to order new contacts and checked her card balance.
“Dima, can I borrow eight thousand until I get my first paycheck?” she asked.
“Of course. Why even ask?”
“Because it’s your money.”
“It’s ours.”
“No, it’s your salary right now.”
“Alisa, don’t start.”
“I’m not starting anything. I’m just saying how it is.”
He transferred her twenty thousand. A minute later, the money was returned back to his account.
“What’s going on?”
“I asked for eight.”
“Take twenty, so you don’t have to ask every time.”
“I don’t need twenty.”
“What if you need more later?”
“Then I’ll ask you.”
Dmitry started to get angry.
“Are you doing this on purpose now to make me feel guilty?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s what it feels like.”
“I just don’t want to be more dependent on you than I already am. That’s all.”
“I’m your husband, not your creditor.”
“I know.”
A week later, he accidentally found out that Alisa had borrowed three thousand from her friend for a hairdresser and to travel to two job interviews. He saw a message from her friend pop up on her phone while it was lying on the table.
“Are you serious?” he asked in the evening. “You’re borrowing money from Katya when we have enough in our account?”
“It’s your account.”
“There we go again.”
“I’ll pay her back after I get my salary.”
“What salary? You don’t have a job yet.”
“Then when I get a job.”
“So you’re just going to keep borrowing three thousand from everyone except me?”
“Maybe.”
“What are you trying to prove with all this?”
Alisa slammed her laptop shut.
“I’m not trying to prove anything. It just disgusts me that your mother got exactly what she wanted. Now even my shampoo is bought with your salary.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Nothing.”
“No, wait. My mom comes up every time we talk now. I kicked her out, I don’t talk to her, I was on your side from the very start. What else am I supposed to do?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m really sick of your ‘nothing’ already!”
“And I’m sick of having to calculate whether I can buy myself jeans just because you earn the money!”
“Then just buy them! I honestly don’t care!”
“Well, I do care!”
For the first time since that morning, they had a real fight—not about Valentina Petrovna, but about money, food, who pays for what, and why Alisa refuses to take her husband’s card to the store. At one point, Dmitry said he wasn’t going to spend his whole life apologizing for his mother’s actions.
Alisa replied immediately:
“I’m not asking you to apologize. But your mother only knew the exact time of my interview because you told her every detail of what’s going on at our place. How much they offered me, when the meeting was, where the office was—everything.”
“So now it’s my fault I trusted my mother?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s exactly what you said.”
“I said you told her too much. I asked you before not to discuss our finances or my interviews with her.”
“You asked me not to talk about salary. You never said anything about the timing of your interviews.”
“Because it never crossed my mind that I needed to ban that separately!”
After that argument, Dmitry went to sleep on the couch. The next morning, they talked as usual, but something had shifted. It wasn’t catastrophic—no one was packing their bags or talking about divorce. But now, whenever Dmitry picked up his phone, Alisa would fall silent more often, and if she asked who was calling, Dmitry would get irritated.
What bothered Dmitry most was that he genuinely had no idea how to fix things. He couldn’t get Alisa’s interview back, and calling the company to demand she be hired would have been ridiculous. Paying her the difference between that salary and a future one? Even worse. He tried several times to ask friends about potential job openings, but after his first suggestion, Alisa asked him to stay out of it.
“I’ll find something myself,” she told him.
“I’m not getting you a job through connections. I’m just checking where people are hiring.”
“Dima, please. It’s important for me to do it on my own right now.”
He didn’t argue.
Alisa kept going to interviews. One went well, but at the last minute the employer chose someone with experience in a different program. At the second, they told her outright they were hesitant to hire a woman her age because “in a year or two, they all go on maternity leave.” After the third, they promised to respond by Friday—then disappeared.
Each rejection used to upset her for the rest of the evening. Now, she would simply open up her spreadsheet of job openings silently, mark off another line, and send out a few more applications.
Dmitry saw this and found it harder and harder to know how to talk to her. If he asked how the interview went, he might get a curt “fine.” If he didn’t ask, sometimes Alisa would say, “So you don’t care at all anymore?” They didn’t argue more often—they argued more easily. Now, it didn’t take a big reason: an unwashed mug, a forgotten grocery bag, or a question about why someone came home late was enough.
Still, they both tried to keep living as before. On Fridays, they watched shows together, visited friends for birthdays, and even managed a trip out of town once. Everything was almost fine until Dmitry snapped a photo of Alisa by the water and said without thinking:
“Mom would love this place.”
He immediately realized what he’d said. Alisa didn’t reply—she just asked him to delete the unflattering picture. The rest of the evening, they talked about anything but family.
Three months later, Alisa finally found a job.
The position was worse than the first one in almost every way. The salary was about a quarter less, the office was all the way across town, and she had to take a transfer to get there. On a good day, the commute was fifty minutes one way; on a bad day, over an hour. But after three months of rejections, Alisa accepted right away.
“Maybe you should keep looking?” Dmitry asked when she told him she’d accepted the offer. “The commute’s awful.”
“I’ll look for something else while I’m working.”
“The pay’s really not great either.”
“But it’s mine.”
He wanted to say something, but stayed silent.
In her first weeks at the new job, Alisa was up every morning at six. She wouldn’t get home till after seven, sometimes later. If Valentina Petrovna could have seen their daily life during that time, she’d have thought she was right: cooking meals for two days in advance, leaving cleaning for the weekends, even ordering takeout a couple of times. But somehow, Dmitry didn’t feel unhappy about it. What bothered him most was how tired his wife had become—by evening, she barely spoke at all.
By then, it had been over four months since he’d seen his mother.
Then one day, she called him from an unfamiliar number.
“Dima, please don’t hang up. I just want to know how you are.”
He thought about disconnecting, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. The call lasted about three minutes. Valentina Petrovna didn’t apologize. She asked about his health, his job, and said she missed him. She only mentioned Alisa once:
“Did she at least find a job somewhere?”
“She did.”
“See? I told you she’d find another one.”
After that, Dmitry quickly brought the conversation to a close.
A week later, his mother called again. And then again. Dmitry barely noticed how he started answering. First for two minutes, then for ten. His mother stopped talking about Alisa, making it easier to chat. Dmitry kept convincing himself it didn’t really change anything. He didn’t invite her over—she already had his address, and she never came. He didn’t tell Alisa, knowing it would cause a fight. And if the conversations were innocent, why start another argument at home?
That’s how he explained things to himself for almost two months.
That’s how he explained things to himself for almost two months.
Alisa found out by accident.
On a Saturday morning, Dmitry left his phone in the kitchen and went to take a shower. When the screen lit up with an incoming call, Alisa didn’t mean to answer—it was just habit to glance at it.
“Mom.”
She waited until the call ended. A minute later, a message came through: “Call me back when you can.”
When Dmitry came out of the bathroom, Alisa was sitting at the table.
“Your mom called,” she said.
He stopped in his tracks.
“I saw.”
“How long have you two been talking again?”
“Alisa, please, not now.”
“How long?”
“A couple of months.”
“A couple of months?”
“Yeah. We talk sometimes.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“Because I knew how you’d react.”
“So you lied in advance just to avoid my reaction?”
“I didn’t lie to you. You never asked.”
Alisa gave a short, sarcastic laugh.
“Well, that’s clever.”
“What do you want from me? Should I never talk to my mother again?”
“I just wanted you to tell me the truth.”
“What truth? That I talk to my own mother on the phone? Is that a crime now?”
“No. Apparently, in this house, nothing counts as a crime. You can hide someone else’s documents, ruin their job, then wait a couple of months and go right back to chatting like nothing happened.”
“She doesn’t come here. She doesn’t call you. She doesn’t bother you at all.”
“Because you explained to her that she was wrong?”
Dmitry stayed silent.
“Did she apologize to you?” Alisa asked.
“No.”
“To me?”
“You know she didn’t.”
“Did she at least admit she understands what she did?”
“Alisa, she’s my mother. I can’t make her think the way we want her to.”
“But you can still secretly talk to her.”
“I don’t want to live through this scandal again!” Dmitry raised his voice. “How much more of this? You have a job, everything is fine. Yes, the place is worse. Yes, your commute is longer. But we’re still moving forward! Why do you keep dragging that morning back into our lives?”
Alisa looked at him and asked very calmly:
“Because for you, it’s over, right?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But that’s how you live.”
“How am I supposed to live, then?”
“I don’t know, Dima. Honestly, I really don’t know anymore.”
They didn’t end up getting a divorce.
After that Saturday, Dmitry stopped hiding his calls with his mother, but he also didn’t try to discuss them with Alisa anymore. If Valentina Petrovna called while his wife was around, he would step out onto the balcony or into another room. Alisa never stopped him. Sometimes she wanted to ask what his mother talked about now, and whether she still believed she’d saved their family from the wrong kind of life. But she never did.
Valentina Petrovna stopped coming to their apartment. She never apologized, neither for the folder nor for messing up Alisa’s job interview. In the rare conversations she had with her son, she kept insisting she was “just worried back then” and that everything worked out in the end: after all, Alisa had a job.
Only Alisa truly knew the cost of this so-called “worked out.”
Every morning, she spent almost an hour commuting, and the same again in the evening. Her salary was clearly less than what she had been offered at the first company. After a few months, she stopped borrowing money from her friend and could pay for her own things again, but the joy she expected from this independence was much less than she imagined. It had simply cost her too much.
And Dmitry found himself more and more often checking where Alisa was before answering a call from his mother. Not because his wife forbade him to talk. She didn’t forbid him anything. He just didn’t want to see her face when that familiar name appeared on his screen.
They kept living together—paying rent, buying groceries, arguing over little things, and sometimes even laughing together at dinner. To outsiders, they seemed like a perfectly ordinary family.
But now, each of them had something the other knew about, yet chose not to mention. Alisa’s was the resentment over her lost job and how easily Dmitry had learned to live right next to that pain. Dmitry’s was his mother, whom he was speaking to again, knowing that every conversation reminded his wife of that morning.
And Valentina Petrovna still believed she had only been trying to protect her son from future problems.
There was one problem she had truly solved: after what she did, Alisa never again told Dmitry in advance where her job interviews were, or what time they were scheduled…