Dawn caught us on the dusty road leading out of the village. In one hand I clutched little Sonya’s palm; in the other— a light suitcase stuffed less with clothes than with disappointed hopes. The bus chugged away from the stop, carrying us from the place where, only a few hours earlier, I had still believed in something. I left without saying goodbye to Mark. He was out fishing at daybreak, the dawn he’d rhapsodized about the night before. And staring through the grimy window at the fields sliding past, I understood a simple, bitter truth: I had not met a man whose love was worth fighting for. And yet it had all begun so beautifully, so dazzlingly romantic, it took my breath away.
Mark burst into my life when he was in his final year at the institute. He wouldn’t leave me alone—showered me with compliments, looked at me with such enamored eyes that all my doubts drowned in them. He kept saying he loved me, that he couldn’t imagine life without me and my four-year-old daughter, Sonia. His push, his youthful sincerity and ardor melted the ice around my heart, which hadn’t yet recovered from the loss of my first husband. Three months after we met, we moved in together—into my apartment. He brimmed with plans and promises.
“Alychka, my love,” his eyes shone like two bottomless lakes, “in a month I’ll have my diploma, and we’ll go straight to my village. I’ll introduce you to my parents, all my relatives! I’ll tell them you’re my future wife! You’ll say yes, won’t you?” He held me, and the whole world seemed so simple and clear.
“All right, yes,” I answered, and a timid hope warmed me inside. He so often said his mother was kind, generous, a real people person who loved guests and knew how to make a home cozy. I believed him. I wanted so badly to believe.
The village where Mark was born and raised greeted us with quiet evening sun. All the relatives lived right there, side by side. I didn’t yet know that the local beauty, Irinka— in love with Mark since diapers, the pride of the neighborhood and, as everyone thought, the perfect future bride— lived nearby. Nor did I know about Grandpa Tikhon, Mark’s father’s father, who lived close by in his old little house and often went to his son’s bathhouse because his own had long since sagged with age. Grandpa Tikhon was living out his days in peace, often glancing at the hill beyond the edge of the village where his wife rested beneath a birch. He knew they were expecting guests today—his grandson was bringing a bride.
The day before, Grandpa Tikhon stopped by his son’s and found his daughter-in-law, Galina, in a dark, brooding mood.
“What, didn’t you and Sergey get along again?” he asked, ready to lecture his son.
But Galina, seeing him, was the first to let her simmering displeasure spill out:
“Hello, Grandpa. You know Mark’s decided to marry? He’s bringing his chosen one here tomorrow.”
“I know, Sergey told me. Well, good—time he did. He’s finished school, found a job. Let him start a family before the wind blows him off course,” Grandpa remarked philosophically.
“That’s all well and good,” Galina snorted, her face twisting in a grimace of offense. “Only this chosen one… She’s three years older than he is! And she’s got a child, four years old! As if we don’t have enough village girls! Our Irinka, for example— a beauty, a nurse, a hard worker… And this one, who is she? Who knows who the child’s father is, what kind of kin she has. Why should he take on someone else’s burden? She can have children of her own! No doubt she’s delighted to have landed a fellow with a university degree…”
“Galina, it’s not right to meddle in the children’s lives,” Grandpa Tikhon tried to put in, but his daughter-in-law no longer heard him.
She’d been raging for days, nursing a grudge against her son and the unknown woman who dared steal him from the ideal future Galina had in mind. And she devised a quiet, poisonous plan: she wouldn’t make an effort, wouldn’t lay out a lavish table, wouldn’t beam smiles. Let this city woman understand at first glance she wasn’t wanted here. She’d snared her Mark—and was glad of it.
We arrived toward evening, tired but still full of bright expectations. Mark practically glowed with happiness. He hadn’t been home in a year; he missed his parents, his grandpa, these places. His mother opened the door. He rushed in first, set down the suitcase, and Sonya and I stood modestly on the threshold, waiting to be invited in.
“Sonny boy, dear Markushenka!” Galina hugged him as if afraid to let go, and the glance she slid over me and my daughter was cold and appraising. “At last you’re home! Now we have a degreed specialist!” She stressed the word “you,” giving me a meaningful look, as if to say: “not like some people.”
“Mom, where’s Dad? Grandpa Tikhon?”
“They’re in the bathhouse. They’ll be right in. They waited and waited for you”—again, only “you.”
Then her eyes fell on me, and she spoke with sugary, barbed sarcasm:
“So this must be… Alisa? With the child?” She swept me from head to toe with a slow, humiliating look. “Well then, come in and wash up. Mark, show them where things are.”
From the first words everything was clear to me. Mark seemed not to notice either the tone or the look. Happy, he took my hand and led me through the house. Just then his father and grandfather returned from the bath. Sergey, Galina’s husband, turned out to be a blunt but sincere man, and Grandpa Tikhon had the warmest, kindest eyes. They embraced me and Sonya and Mark with genuine warmth; their joy seemed real.
“Well now, kids, good you came!” Sergey boomed. “Galina, set the table, why are we standing around? Guests have come a long way, they’re tired and hungry. And the old man and I could use a bite after the steam, too!”
The table was laid more than modestly. I saw Mark lift his brows in brief surprise— he knew how capable his mother was. I could barely eat. A lump of hurt and bad foreboding clogged my throat. I was quietly angry at Mark: why hadn’t he introduced me properly, said those very words about a future wife? Why was he allowing them to treat me this way?
Sergey poured homemade wine into shot glasses and was about to give a toast, but Galina beat him to it:
“To you, son! To your diploma, to the new job! We wish you all the best, we never doubted you!”
They drank again and again. Every toast was only about Mark, only for Mark. Sonya and I might as well not have existed. And he… He beamed, laughed, reminisced with his father and grandfather and… kept silent. He didn’t say a word for us, didn’t try to turn the conversation to me, didn’t present me as his love. I didn’t recognize him. I tried to excuse him to myself: “He hasn’t seen his family in so long, he’s relaxed; he does love me…”
Grandpa Tikhon now and then cast us gentle, sympathetic looks, then turned sharp, prickly eyes on his daughter-in-law. He understood everything. And he felt bitter and sorry for us.
I saw that Sonya—well-mannered, patient— was nodding off from exhaustion. I turned to Galina:
“May I put Sonya to bed? Could you tell me where we might go?”
She nodded reluctantly and waved a hand. “Follow me.” In a tiny room stood a narrow single bed and a nightstand.
“You two sleep here,” she tossed over her shoulder. “The linen’s clean.” And she left, slamming the door.
I tucked in my daughter, asleep on her feet, and at once heard her voice ring out clearly in the hall:
“She says she won’t come back, she’s tired, she’ll sleep with her daughter.”
In that moment it felt like my heart would burst with pain. I lay down on the edge of the bed, the back of my head against the wall, and quiet, bitter tears slid down my cheeks. “What am I doing here? Where is that kind, welcoming mother he talked so much about? Why doesn’t he see this? Why is he silent?” If I could have, I would have left immediately. But outside, the unfamiliar village was in pitch darkness. I cried softly so as not to wake my child, cried from hurt for both of us. I fell asleep with my strength spent.
A touch on my hand woke me. It was Mark.
“Alya, come to my room. Why are you squeezing onto this bed? There’s a couch there; I’ll carry Sonya. I’m sorry I was so… wrapped up in my family today. They missed me. We’ll talk about everything tomorrow, I promise. About the wedding, everything,” he whispered. His words were tender, but lacked the one thing that mattered—understanding.
I didn’t close my eyes again all night. I replayed every moment of the evening—each word, each look. I remembered my first meeting with my mother-in-law, my late husband’s mother. How she embraced me, a strange girl; how she cried with joy that her son had found a woman like me. How we talked until midnight. How she became my second mother. I remembered Dmitry himself: his strength, his reliability, his ability to be a wall, a shield. He would never, under any circumstances, have allowed anyone to so much as glance at me askance. And here… Mark’s mother told me everything without words. And he… He just smiled and pretended nothing was happening.
“They think their son made a mistake. That I have a child. And it’s all about Sonya. But they’re wrong if they think I’ll let them humiliate me or her. Tomorrow we’re leaving,” I decided firmly, watching the first rays of morning at the window.
Breakfast had the illusion of family idyll. They reminisced about Mark’s childhood and school pranks, laughed. Sergey slipped candies to Sonya and smiled at her, and Galina watched with poorly masked irritation. Then, with a theatrical sigh, she said in a sorrowful tone:
“Well, son, your carefree life is over. Now you’ll have to bend your back and feed…” Her eyes dropped to Sonya, and in the air hung the unspoken but screaming words: “someone else’s child.” She didn’t say it aloud, but she said everything. I looked at Mark. He gave a silly smile, pretending he didn’t catch the hint. Only Sergey rapped his fist on the table:
“Galina!”
But my cup of patience had overflowed. And at that very moment Mark, as if noticing nothing, cheerfully proposed:
“Alya, Sonya, let’s go— I’ll show you the village, the river! Let’s go visit Grandpa Tikhon!”
Taking drowsy Sonya by the hand, he headed for the door. Stunned, I followed.
On the walk I told him everything—every hurt, all the injustice. He only waved it off, persuading me I’d misunderstood, that it was just motherly jealousy, that I needed to take things easier and not so much to heart. He didn’t grasp the main thing: I didn’t need him to quarrel with his mother. I needed just one word. A single word in our defense. But he was deaf and blind.
“All right, sweetheart, don’t get heated,” he stroked my shoulder. “A couple of days and we’ll leave. Tomorrow morning I’ll go fishing—at daybreak the bite is amazing, you’ve no idea!”
By morning he was gone. At dawn he slipped out, leaving us alone in the house with his mother. I stepped into the hall to wash up and ran into Galina. Her face was twisted with spite.
“Mark says you’re leaving. Because of you. When am I supposed to see my son now? You’ll keep him on a leash at your skirt! Feeding you and your child…”
I listened to her tirade. And I listened to myself from the outside. I felt no malice, no hurt. Only a cold, crystalline clarity. To my own surprise, I answered calmly, with a light, almost polite smile:
“You know, Galina Petrovna, my first husband was a military man. An officer. Honest, straightforward, decent. He didn’t know how to lie or wriggle. And he loved me more than life. But unlike your son, he didn’t paint his love with words—he proved it with deeds. Every second. And he would never—do you hear? never— allow anyone, even his own mother, to humiliate me or our child. He would have stood like a wall. My first mother-in-law, Dmitry’s mother, is still my second mother. She loves Sonya madly. She has a successful business. She’s the one who bought me the apartment where we lived with your son. And she’s already put a wonderful three-room place in the center in Sonya’s name for her future. I, by the way, have two university degrees and speak three foreign languages fluently. After Dima’s death she didn’t want to go on living, but found the strength—for us. And now she’s the only one who sincerely wishes me happiness and says I need a husband, and Sonya needs a father. As for finances… your son can’t even dream of the income level I have. I earn several times more. My mother has handed me two large stores to manage. So your fears that Mark will have to ‘feed someone else’s child’ are completely groundless.”
Galina listened, her eyes widening by the second. Shock, confusion, and a rapidly rising sense of her colossal mistake played across her face. She was already cursing herself black and blue inside.
“And you know,” I continued in the same quiet, steady tone, “I’m even grateful to you. God doesn’t make mistakes. You opened my eyes in just one evening. You showed me the true face of your family and… of your son. I don’t need a mother-in-law who sees me as an enemy. And I certainly don’t need a husband who can’t stand up for me, for the woman he supposedly loves, or for a child. Thank you for that. And a special thank-you for… the clean bed. All the best to you.”
I didn’t wait for her answer. I turned and went to pack. My hands didn’t shake. My soul felt empty and bright at once. I woke Sonya, dressed her, and walked out of that house without looking back.
We walked down the village street toward the bus stop. I held my daughter’s hand tight and carried our little suitcase. I felt not a drop of regret. Only a light sadness that I’d allowed myself to be fooled by pretty stories. I realized I had always doubted my love for Mark. I liked his infatuation, his persistence, his eagerness to be with us. I thought I could love him for his love. But it wasn’t the right choice. Not the right love. Not the right life.
The bus pulled away and I closed my eyes. The road lay ahead. The road home—to real life, to the true love that, I knew, would surely find me. Because I had learned to value myself and my little princess. And that is what matters most.