Tatiana found out about her husband’s affair by accident.
As so often happens, wives are the last to know. Only later did Tatiana grasp the meaning of her colleagues’ strange looks and the whispers behind her back. Everyone at work knew that her best friend, Nadezhda, was having an affair with her husband, Andrei. But Andrei’s behavior hadn’t aroused Tatiana’s suspicions.
She found out one evening when she came home unexpectedly. Tatiana had worked for several years as a doctor at a Moscow hospital. That day she was supposed to be on the night shift. But toward evening a young colleague, Lyudmila, asked a favor:
“Tanechka, could we swap shifts? I’ll work tonight, and you can take mine on Saturday—if you don’t have plans. My sister’s wedding is on Saturday.”
Tatiana agreed. Lyudmila was a pleasant, helpful girl, and a wedding was a good reason.
That evening Tatiana returned home, happy at the thought of surprising her husband. But a surprise was waiting for her. No sooner had she stepped inside than she heard voices coming from the bedroom—Andrei’s, and another one she recognized at once but never expected to hear at that moment and in those circumstances. It was the voice of her best friend, Nadezhda. What she heard next left no doubt.
Tatiana left the apartment as quietly as she had entered. She spent the night at the hospital without closing her eyes. How could she face her colleagues now? They knew everything, while she had blindly believed Andrei, trusting him without limits. He had become the center of her life; she had even put off her dream of having a child every time Andrei said he wasn’t ready, that they should wait and enjoy life for themselves. Now Tatiana understood: he saw no future for their family.
That night she made the only decision she could. She wrote a request for vacation with subsequent resignation, went home, packed her things while Andrei was at work, and hurried to the train station. She had inherited a small house in a village from her grandmother—the perfect place where no one was likely to look for her.
At the station she bought a new SIM card and dropped the old one in a trash bin. Tatiana severed all ties with her past life and stepped into a new one.
A day later she stepped off at the familiar station. Tatiana had last been here ten years ago, for her grandmother’s funeral. Everything seemed just as quiet and deserted. “Exactly what I need right now,” she thought. She got a lift part of the way, then walked about twenty minutes on foot. The garden was so overgrown that she could barely find the front door.
It took several weeks to put the house in order. She couldn’t have managed alone, but the neighbors, who remembered her grandmother, Anna Ivanovna—a schoolteacher with forty years’ experience—were happy to help. The warm welcome surprised Tatiana, and she was sincerely grateful.
Word that a doctor had arrived in the village spread quickly. One day a neighbor, Olga, burst into Tatiana’s place in a panic:
“Tanyush, I’m sorry, I can’t help today. My daughter ate something bad—her stomach hurts.”
“Let’s go have a look,” Tatiana said, grabbing her medical bag.
Little Katya turned out to have food poisoning. Tatiana treated her and explained to Olga what to do next.
“Thank you, dear,” Olga sobbed. “You’re our doctor now. The hospital is sixty kilometers away. We had a feldsher, but he left, and no replacement was sent.”
From then on, the villagers started turning to Tatiana for everything. She couldn’t refuse them—she had been received too warmly here.
When the district authorities learned about her work, they offered her a position at the district clinic.
“No, I’ll stay here,” Tatiana said firmly. “But if you open a feldsher’s point here, I’ll gladly take it.”
The officials were flattered that a Moscow doctor with her experience wanted to work in the backcountry, but Tatiana held her ground. A few months later they opened the point, and she began seeing patients.
One late evening there was a knock at the door. That didn’t surprise Tatiana—illnesses don’t follow schedules. A stranger stood on the threshold.
“Doctor Tatiana,” he introduced himself. “I’m from Zarechye, fifteen kilometers away. My daughter is very ill. At first I thought it was a cold, but the fever has lasted three days. I’m begging you—help us.”
She quickly gathered what she needed as he described the symptoms. At home they found a pale girl struggling to breathe beneath a blanket. After examining her, Tatiana said:
“This is serious. She needs to be hospitalized.”
The man shook his head.
“It’s just me and her. My wife died soon after she was born. She’s all I have. I can’t lose her.”
“But the hospital has better conditions. I don’t have the necessary medicines here.”
“Tell me what’s needed—I’ll get it. Just please don’t take her to the hospital. There’s a 24-hour pharmacy in the district center; I can drive there. But there’s no one to stay with her.”
Tatiana could see how frightened and desperate he was. She looked closely at him—a man about her age, tall and lean, with thick chestnut hair. His dark-green eyes burned with resolve.
“I’ll stay with her,” Tatiana said. “What’s the girl’s name?”
“Alysa,” he whispered. “And I’m Sergei. Thank you, doctor.”
Sergei left to get the medicines, clutching her prescription in his hand.
Alysa’s fever wouldn’t break; the girl tossed and turned, cried, and called for her daddy. Tatiana took her in her arms, rocked her, and softly hummed a lullaby until Alysa calmed a little.
Sergei returned deep in the night with everything needed. Tatiana administered the medicine and said wearily:
“Now we wait.”
They kept vigil by the bed until morning. At dawn the fever began to fall, and sweat beaded on the girl’s forehead.
“A good sign,” Tatiana said with relief. The fatigue receded before the joy of victory over the illness.
“You saved my daughter,” Sergei said, at a loss for words.
A year passed. Tatiana continued working at the feldsher’s point, but now she lived in Sergei’s spacious house. They were married six months after that terrible night when Alysa’s life hung by a thread.
It took a few more weeks for the girl to fully recover. Alysa grew attached to Tatiana, and Tatiana loved her with all her heart, though she sometimes thought about how long she had postponed her own dream of a child.
In the evenings, tired but happy, Tatiana would come home to two people who were now her own. This time Sergei met her on the threshold with a smile. Tatiana froze for a moment, then he embraced his wife joyfully and whispered, “Now our family is going to get even bigger.”