— “Which apartment are you planning to split?” the wife asked.
— “Fine,” the husband answered roughly. “Either way, half the apartment is mine.”
Marina shook her head.
— “Let’s consider that your family spent that money remodeling the home of their grandson and son,” she explained firmly. “You wanted to start a new life—please, be my guest!”
— “Oh, Marinochka, hello,” her mother-in-law said in surprise. “We were only expecting you in two days.”
— “Good evening, Natalya Ivanovna,” Marina replied. “I have to be at work on Monday. Is my family at your place?”
— “Bogdan is with us, and Sasha drove his colleague Liza home. Didn’t you two talk?”
Now it was Marina’s turn to be surprised.
— “Sasha didn’t pick up. And who is this Liza?”
— “Sashenka just brought Bogdan to us, and his colleague was sitting in the car,” the mother-in-law answered nervously. “I invited her in for tea and pie.”
— “A very entertaining story,” Marina said tensely. “And where are my husband and his colleague now?”
— “They left about two hours ago.”
Marina picked up her son and drove home. On the way, little Bogdan, without realizing it, shared a lot of interesting things.
— “Daddy and Auntie Liza and I went to a café and had ice cream,” he chirped.
Marina could barely keep her emotions in check. Her thoughts swirled like a storm.
It’s worth noting this was Marina’s first solo vacation. She had won a voucher to a sanatorium at work. Sasha had been thrilled and insisted she absolutely had to go. Even then, though, an uneasy feeling had stirred deep inside her—hard to explain. She brushed it off, and, as it turned out, she shouldn’t have…
She put the child to bed. Sasha still hadn’t shown up. His phone was off. Around midnight, the phone rang.
— “Marisha, hi,” Sasha whispered. “My phone died.”
— “Hi,” his wife answered, holding back her anger. “And where are you?”
— “Bogdan and I stayed over at Mom’s,” her husband lied.
— “You know, that’s wonderful,” Marina said with biting sarcasm. “I’m lying here in our bed, Bogdasha is fast asleep in the nursery. The only thing is, I don’t see you anywhere.”
Silence hung on the other end, and then Sasha abruptly hung up. He showed up forty minutes later.
— “Let’s not make a scene,” Sasha said confidently. “What’s done is done. I didn’t want you to find out about Liza’s existence, but since you have…”
— “Great plan. So you hauled some stranger into your parents’ house. Introduced her to your father and mother. My son went out with this…”
— “I didn’t want you to be the one who knew,” her husband admitted honestly. “But I did want to introduce Liza to my parents and to our son. I needed to understand if she’d fit into my life.”
Marina stared at her husband, trying to grasp whether this was actually happening.
— “So you don’t just have an affair on the side—you’re also trying to neatly fold your mistress into your family?”
— “I really didn’t want it to turn out like this. How was I supposed to know you’d come back early?”
Tears burst from Marina’s eyes—hurt, pain, the feeling of betrayal.
— “I’m going to bed. Tomorrow we’ll discuss how we’re going to live from here,” he said.
Sasha left for work quietly. Marina dropped Bogdan off at daycare and decided to stop by her mother-in-law’s.
— “Natalya Ivanovna, answer me just one question. What did I ever do to you? Why did you do this to me?”
— “Forgive me, Marinochka. Before you left, I knew nothing about this Liza.”
— “And after? Afterward you found out and sat drinking tea with her.”
— “Try to understand and forgive me. Sasha is my son; I can’t go against his wishes.”
Marina gave a sad smile and headed down the stairs.
In the evening Sasha was waiting at home.
— “I think our divorce is already a done deal, isn’t it?” he asked.
Marina was silent.
— “Let’s talk about how we’re going to split the apartment.”
His wife raised her eyebrows in surprise.
— “Which apartment are you planning to split? Hopefully not the one I inherited from my father a month before our wedding.”
— “Let’s say so,” Sasha agreed. “But we both know what uninhabitable condition it was in. How much money I put into the renovation.”
— “First of all, that money was your parents’, not yours.”
— “Be that as it may. In any case, half the apartment is mine.”
— “Let’s consider that your family spent that money remodeling the home of their grandson and son,” his wife explained firmly. “You’re the one who wanted to start life over—by all means, go ahead! You dragged six years of our marriage through the mud, and I’m merely trying to mirror that back to you.”
At that, her husband’s face twisted. He started hurling insults at Marina. The shouting woke Bogdan. Sasha shot his wife a vicious look and left.
Her husband filed for divorce and division of property. He couldn’t wrest the apartment away in court. A year has passed since then. At first, Sasha took Bogdan occasionally. The new wife, Liza, turned out not to be as kind and compliant as Marina, and she didn’t get along with the mother-in-law either. Natalya Ivanovna tried to maintain a relationship with Marina, but nothing came of it.
Soon Marina decided to sell the apartment and move to Pyatigorsk, the place where she had stayed at the sanatorium. There, she hoped to start a new life…