Anna Pavlovna didn’t just drop the cup — it was as if she shattered a fragile shard of the past that seemed to have long ceased to exist. The porcelain crashed with a deafening clang into hundreds of sharp fragments scattered across the faded linoleum, like traces of former luxury, long dulled and lost its shine. A brown puddle of cooled tea slowly spread across the floor, as if sketching the outline of a nonexistent continent — strange, foreign, full of pain and forgotten promises.
“How dare you… how dare you?” The woman’s voice trembled like a string ready to snap under tension. Each word was forced out as if carrying the weight of all the years lived. “I gave birth to you, fed you, raised you… You’re my son!”
“You kicked me out,” Yegor sharply interrupted her, his arms crossed over his chest like armor protecting his soul from old wounds. “And that word — that’s the main thing. Not ‘gave birth to,’ not ‘fed,’ but ‘get out.’”
The lean man, about thirty-five, his face marked by time and bitterness, stood leaning against the doorframe. His gaze, heavy and almost painful, stabbed into the woman who once was his mother but now seemed a stranger. Thick eyebrows furrowed, his cold and hard eyes knew no forgiveness.
“My boy…” Anna Pavlovna tried to stand, but her knees refused to support her. She remained among the shards, as if part of her soul had also broken. “You don’t understand… Back then, it was a different time… Different circumstances…”
“You’ve been saying that for years,” Yegor’s voice faltered, but he clenched his teeth as if trying to suppress not only anger but also pain. “Ninety-eight, crisis, bandits on the streets, poverty… And you decided that I, a fourteen-year-old boy, should survive alone? And now, when you need help, you expect me to crawl back and take care of you? No. That won’t happen.”
He pushed off the doorframe and paced across the tiny kitchen, as if trying to contain the space that suddenly felt too cramped. The ceiling was low, and he had to tilt his head slightly not to hit it. The apartment he once lived in now seemed like a toy — as if it belonged not to him but to someone else long forgotten.
For Anna Pavlovna, everything began with a collapse that destroyed her world in an instant. Her husband, an engineer at a factory, hadn’t been paid for six months. She barely made ends meet working as a market saleswoman. And then Sergey disappeared. No note, no farewell call — nothing. Just vanished as if dissolved into thin air.
Three days later, the police sent word — the body was found near the railway tracks. Official version: accident. But Anna knew the truth: her husband couldn’t bear the pressure of poverty, despair, the impossibility of feeding his family. He gave up. And left her alone.
With a fourteen-year-old son. With debts. Empty hands. An empty apartment. An empty life.
“You’ll have to live with your grandmother,” she told Yegor, packing his things into an old, worn suitcase. Her voice trembled with a lie she was trying to pass off as hope.
“For how long?” the boy asked, fiddling with the sleeve of his sweater as if trying to hold onto something from his former life.
“Not long. Until I get back on my feet.”
He nodded silently. Grandma lived in a village two hundred kilometers away. The bus ran only once a day.
Yegor remembered that day in minute detail. How his mother wouldn’t look him in the eyes. How she gripped his hand tightly at the bus station. How she slipped an envelope with money into his hand and hurriedly kissed his cheek.
“I’ll come soon. Listen to grandma.”
He got on the bus and took a seat by the window, as if looking into the future. And his mother stood on the platform — small, lost, alone. The bus moved away, and she was left behind. Forever.
Grandmother Klavdiya Stepanovna lived in an old, crooked house at the edge of the village. She wasn’t expecting her grandson — Anna hadn’t even called to warn her. When Yegor knocked on the door, the old woman studied his face for a long time as if trying to remember who stood before her.
“Goshka? Anya’s?”
He nodded.
“And where’s your mother?”
“She said she’d come later.”
Klavdiya Stepanovna frowned but let him in. The house smelled of dampness, medicinal herbs, and oblivion. A kerosene lamp stood on the table — electricity in the village was given by the hour.
“Make yourself at home,” Grandma pointed to a worn-out sofa. “But don’t think this is a resort. There’s plenty of work and not enough hands.”
Thus began his village days. His mother didn’t call. Didn’t write. Didn’t come. For the first week, Yegor went out every day and stared at the horizon. The second week, he stopped.
Grandma was tough. She enrolled Yegor in the local school and made him work the rest of the time. He chopped wood, carried water, helped in the garden. His hands, used to notebooks and computer games, were covered in calluses.
“You’re not a guest here,” Klavdiya Stepanovna said. “If you want to live, work.”
And he did. At night he cried quietly into his pillow so his grandmother wouldn’t hear. And waited. Waited for his mother to come and take him back to the city. Waited. Waited. Waited.
A month passed. Two. Six months. A year.
One day he found an envelope in the mailbox. Inside — sparse lines in his mother’s handwriting:
“Goshinka, forgive me. I can’t take you. I have a new family. My husband doesn’t want a stranger’s child. Bear with your grandmother. Someday I’ll explain everything.”
That day something inside the fourteen-year-old boy broke. He tore the letter into tiny pieces and scattered them to the wind. Then he went into the forest and screamed until his voice broke.
“Grandma showed me your letter,” Yegor looked at his mother, who still sat on the floor among the shards. “Not right away. Three years later. When I ran away from the village.”
Anna Pavlovna lifted her eyes to him.
“I wrote to you… many times.”
“One letter, Mom. One. And it was better not to write at all.”
She shook her head.
“That can’t be. I sent letters every month. And money to grandma.”
Yegor smirked.
“Well, grandma lied to you. I never saw letters or money.”
Something like understanding flashed in Anna Pavlovna’s eyes.
“My God…” she whispered. “I thought you didn’t answer because you were angry…”
“I was angry,” Yegor leaned his palms on the table. “Every day, every minute. Do you know what it’s like to live with the thought that your own mother threw you away like an unwanted thing?”
Klavdiya Stepanovna was an old-fashioned woman. She believed children should be raised with strictness, that work was the best medicine for all troubles. She didn’t hug her grandson or say kind words. But she fed him, dressed him, made sure he went to school.
And she hated her daughter. Anna, in Klavdiya Stepanovna’s opinion, was always spoiled and frivolous. She left the village, went to the city, rushed into marriage. And now had dumped a grandson on her.
“Just like his father,” the old woman grumbled. “He also promised a lot but ran away with the first woman he met.”
She intercepted letters from her daughter at the post office. The money Anna sent — small amounts scraped from her meager salary — she pocketed. And told her grandson that his mother had forgotten about him.
“Don’t wait for her, Goshka. You have no mother anymore. Only me.”
Yegor didn’t believe it at first. Then he resigned himself. Village life toughened him. He grew up, became stronger, learned a lot. He did well in school — it was his ticket back to the city. But not to his mother. Just away from the village.
At seventeen, he ran away. Gathered his few belongings, took his diploma, and left by bus. Before leaving, grandma, as if repentant, gave him that very letter from his mother — the only one she had kept.
“She abandoned you,” Klavdiya Stepanovna said. “But you’re still my grandson. Don’t speak ill of her.”
The city greeted him indifferently.
Yegor arrived with a hundred rubles in his pocket and a firm intention never to return to the village. He didn’t go to his mother — pride wouldn’t allow it. Instead, he found work as a loader at the same market where Anna Pavlovna once traded.
He slept in a cold warehouse among crates of potatoes and onions, the air thick with the smell of earth, dampness, and oblivion. Each night, curled up between rows of vegetables, he dreamed not of a warm bed but of a future that seemed as unreachable as the stars. He saved every kopek, not even allowing himself a cup of hot tea if it wasn’t in the budget. His life was a harsh but fair school — a school of survival.
In the evenings, when work ended, he went to preparatory courses at the Polytechnic Institute. There, in the dim daylight lamp glow, under the sound of chalk on the board, he found refuge. A math teacher, noticing his incredible talent for solving complex problems, stopped him after class and said, looking into his eyes:
“You’ll study here for free. Because you don’t just have knowledge in your head. You have passion. And I can’t ignore it.”
That passion brought him to a new level. Yegor got into the institute on a budget spot. It was not just a victory. It was the first true triumph in his life. A small but firm victory over a fate that seemed to have already decided for him.
Getting a dormitory place, a scholarship, and a lab assistant job in the department, he felt the ground stop slipping from under his feet. He began to live. Not just survive — live. Every day his future became clearer, as if a thick fog that hid the path was lifting.
But one day, in a stuffy trolleybus, among a crowd of indifferent people, he saw HER. His mother.
She had changed little — only her hair was shorter and wrinkles around her eyes, like traces of time, spared no one. Yegor stood gripping the handrail, watching the woman who once was the center of his universe. She didn’t notice him. Got off at the “Hospital” stop and disappeared into the crowd, as if dissolved into the past.
He didn’t call out to her. Didn’t run after her. But something inside him twitched — as if someone pulled an invisible thread he had long tried to cut. That evening he found a phone book and looked up her address. She still lived in the same apartment. Their apartment.
“I did come,” Yegor looked out the window as light rain drizzled, as if nature sympathized with him. “In 2003. Stood under the door, heard voices. Yours and a man’s. And a child’s.”
Anna Pavlovna flinched, as if struck.
“When? How?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he waved off, as if shooing away memories. “I understood you found a replacement. A new family. Without me.”
“Yegor, I…” She got up from the floor, holding onto the table edge like a drowning person grabbing a straw. “You don’t understand. This man… he helped me get back on my feet. Paid off debts. But he was married and had a daughter. I was… just a mistress. I couldn’t bring you into that situation.”
“Better to leave me in the village?” Yegor grimaced, his voice bitter and dry. “Great decision, Mom. Parent of the Year award.”
“I was going to take you!” Her voice was desperate, almost pleading. “In a few months. When I stood on my feet. But you didn’t answer letters. Then grandma wrote that you don’t want to talk to me. That you hate me.”
Yegor slowly turned, his gaze piercing her like a knife.
“What?”
“She sent a letter. In your name,” Anna Pavlovna tremblingly pulled a drawer open and took out a yellowed envelope. “Here.”
Yegor took the letter. The handwriting was clumsy, childish. But not his.
“Mom, don’t write to me anymore. I don’t want to see you. I have a new life now. Grandma loves me. But you don’t. Don’t come. I won’t go with you anyway.”
“That’s not me,” he looked up. “That was grandma.”
Anna Pavlovna nodded, pursing her lips:
“I realized that… later. Much later. But then…”
She didn’t finish. Covered her face with her hands and wept — muffled, stifled, as if afraid to disturb the apartment’s silence. Tears ran down her cheeks as if for the first time in many years they were allowed to escape.
After graduating, Yegor got a job at an IT company. He started as a simple programmer but quickly climbed the career ladder — perseverance and diligence instilled by village life didn’t go to waste. By thirty, he headed the development department.
He married his classmate Masha — a quiet girl with freckles and always tousled red hair. She accepted him as he was — withdrawn, distrustful, with a deeply hidden resentment toward the world. She bore him two sons — Alexey and Kirill.
Life settled. He had a job, a family, an apartment in a new building. He had made it. Proved — first to himself — that he could survive, endure, and win.
He didn’t think about his mother. Or rather, he pushed memories deep inside, not letting them surface. But sometimes, looking at his children, he wondered — could she really do that? Abandon her own child? For what?
He met Anna Pavlovna by chance — at the same market where he had once worked as a loader. She stood behind a vegetable stall — still thin, only very gray now. She didn’t recognize him. But he recognized her — immediately, at first glance.
He wrestled with himself for a week. Then came back to the market. Stood opposite her stall. Watched her hand potatoes to an elderly woman, smiled, adjusted a stray lock from beneath her headscarf.
“Hello, Mom,” he said when the customer left.
Anna Pavlovna flinched. Raised her eyes. Confusion. Recognition. Shock.
“Goshinka?” she whispered. And suddenly sank onto a crate of onions as if her legs gave out. “My God… Goshinka…”
“Why did you come?” Anna Pavlovna wiped tears. “After all these years…”
“I don’t know,” Yegor answered honestly. “Saw you. Thought maybe we’d finally talk. Put the past behind us.”
“Put the past behind us?” She bitterly smiled. “There will be no full stop in our story, son. Only ellipses…”
They were silent. Outside, rain rustled, beating against the glass as if begging to come inside. The apartment was quiet. So quiet Yegor could hear the ticking of the old wall clock — the very one that hung here since his childhood.
“What happened to you all these years?” Anna Pavlovna asked.
He shrugged.
“Lived. Studied. Worked.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Yes. Wife. Two sons.”
“Boys?” Her eyes lit briefly. “How old?”
“Seven and five.”
“What are their names?”
“Alexey and Kirill.”
She nodded as if noting the names in her memory.
“Are you happy, Goshinka?”
The question caught him off guard. Was he happy? Yegor never thought about it. He had everything a successful man should have. But happiness?
“Probably,” he turned away. “And you?”
Anna Pavlovna shook her head.
“No. My happiness didn’t work out, son. That man… he never left his wife. Then he disappeared — like your father. And I kept waiting for you to come back. Hoping.”
“You could have gone to the village. Taken me.”
“I went,” she said quietly. “After a year. Klavdiya said you don’t want to see me. That if I tried to take you away, you’d run away. Or…” she faltered, “… or worse.”
Yegor chuckled.
“And you believed her?”
“She showed me your diary. There were such entries… I got scared. Decided not to hurt you. Wrote letters. Hoped you’d forgive me when you grew up, when you’d understand…”
“There was no diary,” Yegor cut in. “Another lie.”
Anna Pavlovna was silent. Then suddenly asked:
“Will you ever forgive me?”
Yegor looked at her — a small woman broken by life. His mother. A stranger.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
A month passed after their meeting.
Yegor didn’t intend to return to that apartment. There was nothing left to say. But his wife, learning about the meeting, insisted.
“You should talk to her again,” Masha said. “For yourself. To let go of the past.”
“Why?” He shrugged. “It’s already let go.”
“No, Yegor,” she put her hand on his shoulder. “You carry it inside like a splinter. I see it.”
He didn’t want to admit it, but she was right. The meeting with his mother stirred what he had tried to forget for years. Pain. Resentment. Feeling of abandonment.
Still, he didn’t go. Not immediately. Not when the old flame of resentment still burned inside. Not when every thought of his mother triggered a wave of bitterness like swallowing a pinch of salt. But one day, amid the everyday noise and routine, the phone rang. Sharp, relentless, like the voice of conscience he had ignored too long.
“Yegor Sergeyevich?” The voice was dry, official, as if reading someone else’s fate from a paper. “Your mother, Anna Pavlovna Sokolova, has been hospitalized. Stroke. Condition serious.”
He didn’t remember how he got to the hospital. Maybe ran. Maybe lost track of time. She lay on a white bed, like a faded photo from the past — small, defenseless, broken. The left side of her face frozen, her gaze unfocused like a person lost in another dimension. Yegor sat beside her, carefully took her hand — cold, limp but alive.
“I’m here, Mom,” he said, his usually restrained voice trembling.
Anna Pavlovna tried to smile. Couldn’t — her muscles refused to obey. Only something bright flashed in her eyes. Something like joy. Or maybe relief.
“Sorry…” she whispered with effort, words squeezed from her throat like drops of water from a dried well. “Sorry, son…”
He sat with her until dawn. Listened to her broken breathing. Remembered childhood — what had been before pain, rupture, betrayal. How she read him fairy tales, baked pancakes on Sundays, kissed his scraped knees as if her kiss could erase the pain. He didn’t know if those were tears or memories, but something burned inside.
In the morning, a doctor pulled him aside, as if knowing that not only the woman’s life but his own was at a crossroads.
“Condition stable but recovery will be long,” the doctor said. “She’ll need constant care. Rehabilitation. Can you provide that?”
Yegor nodded. He didn’t know how or what he would do, but he understood — he couldn’t abandon her. Not then, not now. Not in this world or any other.
Anna Pavlovna was discharged after two weeks. Yegor moved her into his apartment — his family, his life that had once been closed to her. She whispered she didn’t want to interfere, didn’t deserve it, didn’t want to ruin his life. But he just shook his head and, picking her up like long ago, carried her to the prepared room.
“Be quiet, Mom,” he said, and there was no anger or condescension in his voice. Only tired determination.
Masha supported him. The children, despite their young age, quickly got used to their grandmother who spoke slowly and funny but could tell stories that even the most restless would freeze waiting for the next word. Stories about the village, snow, grandmother’s tales, how people used to live differently — with faith, hope, pain.
Six months passed.
Anna Pavlovna almost recovered — only a slight limp and occasional headaches reminded of what had happened. She helped Masha with the children, cooked lunches, did laundry, cleaned. And waited. Waited for everyone to come home. Waited as if this was her new purpose — to be near but not interfere. To be present but not impose.
One evening, when the children were asleep and Masha had gone to a friend’s, Yegor and Anna Pavlovna were left alone in the kitchen. She was brewing tea — like in the old days. He looked out the window, where twilight thickened, and behind it — night.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For everything. I didn’t deserve a son like you.”
“Mom,” he turned to her, his voice soft but firm like steel wrapped in velvet. “I want to tell you something.”
She tensed as if expecting a blow. Ready for the worst. Because she was used to the worst.
“I can’t say I’ve fully forgiven you,” Yegor spoke slowly, each word heavy like a stone. “There in the village, I went through things that… It doesn’t matter. But I understand you were also a victim. Of grandma. Of circumstances. Of your own fears.”
Anna Pavlovna lowered her head, unable to meet his eyes.
“And I want you to know,” he continued. “You’ll stay here. With us. This is your home now.”
She raised her eyes — full of tears, pain, and some timid, almost childlike hope.
“Really?”
“Really,” he nodded. “We’re family. With all our scars, mistakes, and silences. But family.”
Anna Pavlovna stepped toward him. Uncertain. Afraid of rejection. Yegor hesitated a moment, then pulled her close. She buried her face in his shoulder and cried — silently, trembling all over.
“I’m so sorry to you, Goshinka…”
“Quiet, Mom,” he stroked her back like he used to in childhood. “The past can’t be changed. But we have the present. And the future.”
Outside, snow was falling — the first this year. Large flakes swirled in the light of a streetlamp, settling on the ground like a white blanket. Clean. Untouched. Like a blank sheet where a new story can be written.
A story about forgiveness. A second chance. About how time doesn’t heal wounds — but teaches you to live with them.
A year later, Yegor stood at the cemetery by a fresh mound. Klavdiya Stepanovna died quietly in her sleep. No one came to see her off — only he and his mother.
“You know,” Anna Pavlovna said, looking at the cross, “she did love you. In her own way. Crooked, wrong. But loved.”
Yegor looked at the wooden cross, feeling a strange emptiness inside. Neither relief, nor malice, nor sorrow — nothing.
“No,” he said firmly. “That’s not love. That’s the desire to possess, to control. Love doesn’t look like that.”
He scooped a handful of frozen earth and threw it on the mound.
“You almost destroyed me, old woman,” he said quietly. “Almost. But I survived. To spite you.”
A month later Anna Pavlovna mentioned returning to her apartment.
“I’m feeling well now,” she said at dinner. “No need to trouble you any longer.”
“No,” Yegor cut in. “You’ll stay here.”
“But…”
“Listen,” he put down his fork. “I didn’t take you in out of pity. Or nobility. You’re my mother. Whatever happened.”
She nodded, looking at her plate.
“But I want you to understand,” Yegor continued harshly, “I haven’t forgiven you. And maybe never will fully. Grandma is gone, but her splinters are still inside me.”
“Goshinka…”
“No, let me finish,” he raised his hand. “You made your choice then. I’m making mine now. I won’t abandon you like you abandoned me. But don’t expect it to be like some sappy movie — tears, hugs, ‘let’s forget the past.’”
Anna Pavlovna sat, head bowed low. A tear fell onto the tablecloth.
“We’ll live on,” Yegor stood from the table. “Day by day. Without expectations. Without illusions. Just live.”
He went out to the balcony, lit a cigarette — a habit left from village days. Took a deep drag, painful in his lungs.
Masha came out silently and stood beside him.
“You’re too harsh on her,” she said quietly.
“Maybe,” Yegor flicked ash. “But it’s honest. Better a bitter truth than a sweet lie.”
They stood looking at the city lit by thousands of lights. Thousands of windows — thousands of strangers’ lives, strangers’ stories. Who knows how much pain, resentment, unforgiven betrayals lay within.
“You know what’s the worst?” Yegor suddenly asked. “I still love her. Despite everything.”
Masha squeezed his hand. She knew — she’d never hear a greater confession from her husband.
Meanwhile, Anna Pavlovna gathered the shards of her life — slowly, painfully, realizing that some cracks can never be glued back. But one can learn to live with them. Day by day. Without expectations. Without illusions.
Just live.