“Just make sure all the documents in Svetlana’s name are in perfect order,” Tamara Igorevna’s voice oozed metal and molasses at once.
She was addressing the notary but looking at me. Her gaze was like a surgeon’s before an operation—cold, appraising, faintly disgusted.
Her daughter, Svetlana, sat beside her with lips pressed tight. A copy of her mother, only watered down, like a watercolor.
Silently, I worried the strap of my bag. Inside, in a hidden pocket, lay a sealed envelope from Grigory Petrovich.
I could feel its light yet significant weight. “Open it if things become absolutely unbearable,” he’d told me.
I didn’t yet know what “unbearable” meant, but I already felt that moment was close.
“And why are you here, Kira?” Tamara Igorevna couldn’t hold back, tearing through the sticky atmosphere of the office, which smelled of old paper and other people’s secrets. “Decided to watch justice triumph?”
“Yefim Semyonovich asked me to come,” my voice came out even, emotionless. I had learned how.
Over the years of marriage to her son—my late husband—I had defended a dissertation in survival inside a terrarium.
I remembered her yelling at me by his hospital bed: “You didn’t save him!” as if it were me, and not alcohol and a wild life, that had sent him to the grave so early.
The notary, an elderly man with tired eyes, raised a hand, calling for order.
“Let’s begin. The reading of the will of Grigory Petrovich Belyaev.”
Tamara Igorevna smiled triumphantly. She was sure of victory. As sure as one is of the changing of seasons.
“My husband was a man of honor,” she declared, cutting off the notary.
“He always knew that the family nest, this apartment, should belong only to our own flesh and blood, our dear Sveta! It’s my daughter’s right by birth!”
Svetlana flushed with pleasure, tucking an impeccably set curl back into place.
I remembered Grigory Petrovich. His quiet smile when he taught me to play chess on the old board in his study. He was the only one in that family who saw in me not a maid and not an incubator for grandchildren, but a person.
“Don’t listen to them, girl,” he once told me after another of Tamara’s tantrums. “Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. Just know where you’re going.”
The notary cleared his throat and, ignoring her tirade, began to read in a dry, colorless voice. The document was short. A list of accounts, some country plot…
And then he came to the main part.
“…as well as all immovable property belonging to me at the time of my death, namely the four-room apartment at 7 Zodchikh Street, Building 2, Apartment 91…”
Tamara Igorevna leaned forward, her face frozen in the anticipation of triumph.
“…I, being of sound mind and memory, bequeath to…”
The split-second pause felt like an eternity. The air in the office thickened, became viscous.
“Kira Andreevna Voronova.”
The name rang out like a gunshot. My name.
Svetlana was the first to recover. She let out a thin, mouse-like squeak.
The color drained into a dark crimson in Tamara Igorevna’s face, as if some murky liquid were seeping into a cracked vessel. Her carefully constructed world collapsed, and she stood amid the rubble.
“What?” she hissed, leaning toward the notary as if she hadn’t heard. “What did you say? Repeat that!”
“The will is perfectly clear, Tamara Igorevna,” Yefim Semyonovich replied imperturbably, adjusting his glasses. “The apartment goes to Kira Andreevna. The signature is notarized, the testator’s capacity is confirmed.”
“It’s a forgery!” Tamara screeched. “She drugged him! Bewitched him! The old man lost his mind, and this hussy took advantage!”
She sprang up, knocking over the chair, and jabbed a finger at me as if casting a hex.
“You! I always knew what you were made of! You came into our family with everything laid out for you! You ruined my former husband, and now you’ve gone after the father!”
I shrank under the torrent of venom. Part of me wanted to shout back that her son had brought himself to ruin with his lifestyle, and that his father had died of heartbreak watching it all. But I kept silent. The old habit of silence and endurance was stronger.
“Mom, Mom, calm down,” Svetlana whined, grabbing her hand. “My heart is going to stop… What will we do now? Where will we go? It was all mine… Dad promised…”
The notary lifted his tired gaze to me. There was sympathy in it.
“The apartment was acquired by Grigory Petrovich long before your marriage, Tamara Igorevna. It was never community property. He had every right to dispose of it as he saw fit.”
That legal clarification worked on her like a red rag on a bull. She realized there was no way to undermine it from that angle. So she changed tactics.
Her face transformed instantly. The fury vanished, replaced by a mask of grief. She slowly approached me.
“Kirochka… dear child…” her voice trembled, swollen with false tears. “You’re a smart girl. You understand. This is some terrible mistake. Grisha couldn’t have done this to us. To his own daughter…”
She took my hands. Her palms were icy and clammy.
“Sveta has absolutely nowhere to live. She’s crammed into a tiny one-room flat on the outskirts with a good-for-nothing husband. And you’re young, healthy. You’ll earn your own way. But this… this is the family nest. Every object here remembers our family.”
It was her signature move.
Playing on pity. How many times I had fallen for it, how many times I’d made concessions to avoid a scandal, to preserve a fragile peace. Inside, everything clenched with that familiar guilt.
“Tamara Igorevna, I… I don’t know what to say,” I stammered, feeling the old habit of being a “good girl” take over. “Maybe you could live there for a while… until you find something…”
A flicker of predatory satisfaction crossed her face. She’d spotted a weak point.
“What do you mean, ‘for a while’?” she snapped at once; the tears dried instantly. “Do you mean to throw us out onto the street in a month? No, Kira. If you have a shred of conscience left, you must do the right thing. You are simply obliged to renounce the inheritance in Svetlana’s favor.”
She said it as if offering the only correct and obvious solution. As if I should have thought of it myself.
Behind her, Svetlana watched me with a look that mixed hope and demand.
And in that moment I understood. They would not back down. Any compromise would be taken as weakness.
Any concession would lead only to new demands. They didn’t just want to stay in the apartment. They wanted to take it. To take what Grigory Petrovich had left to me.
And they would stop at nothing to grind me into the dirt and make me feel guilty for his last will.
Something inside me gave way. Not with a clang, but with a dull, heavy crack, like an old tree splitting under an unbearable load.
All the years of humiliation, all the swallowed insults, all the attempts to be convenient and invisible—suddenly all of it lost its meaning.
I slowly freed my hands from her clutching fingers.
“No, Tamara Igorevna,” my voice sounded unfamiliar—firm and cold. “I am not obliged.”
She was taken aback. She hadn’t expected resistance. Her face contorted.
“What did you say?” she hissed. “You ungrateful wretch! We took you in, accepted you into the family! And you… What did you do to bewitch him, the old man? Jumped into his bed, did you? Decided to snatch an easy little apartment in the center of Moscow?”
That was the last straw. An insult to the memory of Grigory Petrovich—the only person who treated me warmly.
Enough. That was it.
I looked straight into her eyes. Without fear. Without fawning. For the first time in all these years.
“You’re mistaken. It wasn’t about any bed. It’s that your husband was a smart and perceptive man. And he saw everything.”
Calmly, I opened my bag and took out the sealed envelope.
“What kind of trick is that?” Tamara sneered.
“It’s a letter. Grigory Petrovich gave it to me a month before he died, on one condition: open it if you try to challenge his will. He said it would save my nerves. I think the moment has come.”
I turned to the notary, who was watching the scene with open interest.
“Yefim Semyonovich, may I read one paragraph aloud? I think it will clarify the testator’s motives.”
He nodded.
I broke the seal. My hands didn’t shake. Inside was a sheet of paper folded in half, covered in the familiar, slightly angular handwriting. I found the lines I needed.
“‘…and I do this not out of ill will, but out of a bitter realization. My wife, Tamara, and my daughter, Svetlana, see in this apartment only square meters and a monetary equivalent. They have never loved this home.
They did not value what I tried to create—a family. I remember all too well how they urged me to sell it and invest the money in my son-in-law’s doomed business—the very one that left them penniless.
I remember how they put me in a care home when I fell ill, to avoid dealing with an old man.
They forgot about me for three months. The only person who visited me every day was Kira.
She didn’t bring me oranges for show, but books and chess. She spoke to me not about money, but about life.
That is why I leave my home to the one who saw a home here, not an asset. To the one who saw a person in me, not an inconvenient burden…’”
I lowered the letter.
A deafening silence filled the office. Tamara Igorevna’s face turned paper white. Svetlana stared at the floor, her shoulders trembling.
Their greatest secret, the shameful thing they had hidden so carefully, had just been dragged into the light.
Tamara Igorevna opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She looked like a fish flung onto the shore. Her world, built on lies and manipulation, crumbled to dust under a few lines on a page.
“That… that’s slander,” she finally squeezed out, but her voice was weak and unconvincing. “He wasn’t in his right mind when he wrote that!”
“I think he was more clear-headed than ever,” I replied calmly, folding the letter and slipping it back into my bag. “He had simply grown tired of hypocrisy.”
I turned to the notary, fully ignoring my former mother-in-law and her daughter.
“Yefim Semyonovich, what are my next steps to accept the inheritance?”
That simple, businesslike question finally swept the ground out from under them. I wasn’t arguing, screaming, or taking revenge. I was simply accepting what was due to me by law and by conscience. And that was more frightening than any revenge.
“I curse you!” Tamara howled, red blotches blooming again across her face. “You will never be happy in that apartment! Every corner will remind you how you treated us!”
At last, Svetlana raised her head. Her tearful eyes were filled not with hatred, but with a kind of pitiful, pleading fear.
“Kira, please… Mother mustn’t get upset…”
“Your mother shouldn’t have forgotten her husband for three months,” I cut her off, without looking at her. “That was bad for her health too.”
I stood up, making it clear the conversation was over.
“You had everything: a family, a home, a father’s love. You trampled it all yourselves. And now you demand that I pay your bills. That won’t happen. Ever.”
I walked to the door. Tamara Igorevna stared at me as if I were a ghost. All her swagger, all her imperiousness had evaporated. What remained was a spiteful, frightened old woman.
A week later, after receiving the keys, I entered the apartment alone for the first time. It greeted me with the scent of books and dry wood.
Nothing had changed. On the coffee table in the living room stood the chessboard. The pieces were set exactly as we’d left them in our last game.
I ran my hand over the carved white queen. Grigory Petrovich had taught me the main rule—always protect your own.
He couldn’t protect himself from the betrayal of those close to him, but he protected me.
This inheritance was not just walls and a ceiling. It was his final move in our long game.
A move that gave me not only a home, but the right to finally start my own game by my own rules.
Epilogue
Six months passed.
I sat in a big armchair by the window in the living room. The very living room where I used to be afraid to breathe too loudly. Now it was my living room.
I replaced the heavy, dusty curtains with a light, bright voile, and the room filled with sunlight.
The apartment was transformed. I didn’t do a full renovation—just refreshed what needed it and got rid of the things steeped in Tamara Igorevna’s spirit—showy luxury and bad taste.
But I left Grigory Petrovich’s study almost untouched. His books, his chess set, his old globe—all in their places. It was my small island of memory of him.
I was no longer the downtrodden, ever-apologetic Kira. The day in the notary’s office had been my personal Rubicon.
I learned to say “no.” I learned to value myself and my space. I quit the dead-end job I’d clung to out of fear and opened my own small online school to prepare students for exams.
Business took off.
I tried not to think of Tamara and Svetlana. They tried to sue, to contest the will on the grounds of the testator’s “incapacity.” But Grigory Petrovich’s letter, supported by testimony from the staff of that very care facility, shut the case down quickly.
The judge looked at them with such open contempt that they shuffled out of the courtroom, shrunken.
I last heard of them through distant acquaintances. Svetlana divorced her husband, whose “business” finally went belly up.
They sold her one-room flat to pay off debts and now rent something tiny out in the Moscow suburbs.
Stripped of status and accustomed comfort, Tamara Igorevna declined rapidly. They said she became a querulous neighbor who constantly complained about life—and whom everyone tried to avoid.
Their curses didn’t come true. I was happy in that apartment. Because happiness turned out not to be in square meters.
It was in the right to breathe freely. In the right to be yourself. In the right not to apologize for existing.
That evening, friends were coming over. For the first time in many years, I was hosting a celebration at my place. I took the old chessboard down from the shelf. I picked up the white queen—the most powerful piece on the board.
Grigory Petrovich had placed it in my hands. He taught me that sometimes the best defense is offense. And that the most important battle is the one you win against yourself—against your fear and your uncertainty.
I smiled at my reflection in the dark windowpane. The game was over. And I had won it.