The door slammed with indifferent loudness, cutting off the sounds from the stairwell. Vadim stepped aside to let her go first. The girl. I knew they would come.
He had called in the afternoon, his voice soaked with that brisk businesslike cheerfulness I’d learned to hate, and said that in the evening there would be “an important conversation and a surprise.” In that moment I understood—the time had come.
She walked into my apartment, and the first thing I sensed was her smell. Sweet, like an overripe peach left in the sun. Cheap and cloying, it instantly began to push out the familiar scent of my home—subtle, with notes of sandalwood and old books.
She looked around with poorly concealed superiority, as if sizing up which of my curtains would best match the color of her hair.
Vadim, without taking off his shoes, went into the living room. His expensive shoes left dirty marks on the parquet. His voice was even, almost casual. That confidence in him was new—and frightening.
For the past six months, after his big deal, he seemed to have decided he’d caught God by the beard, and that everything was now allowed. He stopped being my husband and became the master of life. His own—and, as he thought, mine too.
“Lena, meet Katya.”
He swept his hand around the room, the sofa, the bookshelves, me. A gesture of an owner pointing out his property.
“She’s the mistress here now.”
I didn’t flinch. I didn’t scream. Inside, everything had gone numb long before this evening. I simply nodded, accepting his words as a given. Like a weather forecast you’d already heard that morning. That call had been the signal, the final dot in my months-long plan.
The girl—Katya—cast a quick, appraising glance at me. Triumph sloshed in her eyes, the triumph of a victor.
She was young, and that youth seemed to her an impenetrable armor. She saw in me only a fading backdrop to her triumph.
I walked slowly to the antique dark-oak chest of drawers that had belonged to my grandmother. My fingers, steady and light, opened the secret compartment under the carved cornice—one Vadim had never suspected existed.
Inside lay two thick black envelopes. The result of three months of my quiet, invisible work.
I took one. Held it out to Katya. My voice came out calm—perhaps even too calm.
“Welcome. This is for you.”
Her hand froze for a moment. A flicker of puzzlement crossed her well-groomed face, quickly replaced by a condescending smirk. She must have decided it was a pathetic attempt to buy her off or pass along some documents.
“What is it?” she asked, turning the smooth cardboard between her fingers.
“Open it and you’ll see,” I said.
Vadim frowned. He’d been expecting tears, hysteria, a scandal—all the things he could manage, all the things he could contemptuously ignore. My self-possession threw him off.
“Lena, don’t start,” he ground out. “Don’t make a scene.”
“I’m not starting anything, Vadim. I’m finishing.”
With curiosity, Katya tugged at the edge of the envelope. Inside wasn’t a single sheet, but a stack of glossy photographs. She pulled out the top one.
Her face changed instantly. The smirk slid off; her lips twisted unattractively. She began flipping through the photos rapidly, and with each new one her breathing grew uneven, noisy.
The smell of overripe peaches in the room suddenly became suffocating, unbearable.
Her fingers slackened, and the glossy cards fanned to the floor.
An unseemly mosaic of someone else’s life: shabby interiors with rugs on the walls, men with greasy hair and heavy, predatory looks, an unremarkable door with a “Massage Salon” sign, out of which she emerges, adjusting a cheap jacket.
“What is this circus, Lena? Where did this come from?” Rage and bewilderment battled on Vadim’s face. He took a step toward the photographs, but my voice stopped him.
“It’s a lie! Photoshop!” Katya screeched, her voice breaking into unpleasant, high notes.
“Photoshop?” I shook my head slowly. “In his chase for an impressive image, Vadim forgot to mention that before marriage I worked ten years as a senior financial analyst at a serious company.”
I know how to gather and analyze information. And I had my own funds for it—from selling my parents’ dacha, remember? I simply hired a very good private detective.
And he’s ready to confirm the authenticity of every shot in court. Just like Semyon Arkadyevich, who’s in the third photo. He becomes very talkative when you hint at possible problems with the tax authorities.
The name, tossed into the air, hit like a blow. Katya recoiled. Vadim turned a disgusted gaze on her. He was no longer looking at a pretty toy, but at a dirty asset that compromised him.
“Who is this Semyon Arkadyevich? Katya, I’m waiting for an explanation.”
She started to gasp. The mask of a confident huntress crumbled, revealing a frightened provincial girl caught in a cheap lie.
“Vadim… darling, don’t listen to her…”
I went back to the chest and took the second envelope.
“She hasn’t told you everything, Vadim. When the detective got enthusiastic, he dug into your life too. Just in case. Turns out there was a lot of interesting material there as well.”
I held the envelope between two fingers, as if weighing it on a scale.
“That envelope was for her. So she’d understand the game is over.”
A heavy, viscous pause hung in the air. Katya stared at me with animal terror. Vadim—with poorly concealed revulsion and growing alarm.
“And this, Vadim, is for you. This is your side of the story. Much more detailed.
With account statements, offshore transfers.
And the names of your business partners and how you cheated them.”
Vadim’s hand froze. His face turned into a hard, gray mask.
“You’re threatening me? In my own house?”
“In my house, Vadim. This apartment, if you’ve forgotten, came to me from my parents. And you were just… living here. Very comfortably living.”
Sobbing, Katya collapsed to her knees before me. Pathetic, crushed.
“Please… don’t… I’ll give everything back… I’ll leave, you’ll never see me again…”
I didn’t look at her. My whole world was focused on the man I’d lived with for fifteen years—the man I realized I hadn’t known at all.
“Blackmail is ugly, Lena.”
“And bringing your mistress into the home where your wife lives— is that pretty? Is that the act of a decent man?”
He shoved Katya away in disgust as she tried to clutch his legs. She was no longer a prize but a problem. An expensive mistake that could ruin everything.
“Shut up,” he snapped at her, then looked back at me. In his gaze flashed the respect a predator has for a stronger predator. “What do you want?”
“For this misunderstanding not to be here. In five minutes.”
Vadim jerked Katya up from the floor and practically hurled her into the stairwell.
“You can pick up your things tomorrow!”
The door slammed. He was breathing heavily, leaning against it.
“Now we talk.”
He sat in his favorite armchair. The master. Even now he tried to be one.
“I’m not taking that envelope, Lena. We’re adults. Let’s make a deal.”
“I’m not making a deal. I’m turning a page. Without you.”
“Divorce? Half the property? I agree.”
“I want you to leave. Now. With one overnight bag. You’ll sign a waiver of any claims to this apartment and everything in it. In return…” I nodded at the black envelope, “…this stays between us.”
Silence fell. The silence of a chess game in which one of the pieces has been checkmated.
“You’ve thought it all through,” he said tonelessly.
“I had plenty of time while you were building a new life.”
He stood up. For the first time that evening I saw not a cocksure alpha, but simply a tired, aging man. All his show of strength had rested on my weakness. When the weakness vanished, he deflated.
He walked silently into the bedroom. I heard him open the closet, the clicks of zippers on a bag. Ten minutes later he came out with a small suitcase. He stopped at the threshold.
“Goodbye, Lena.”
I didn’t answer. I watched him quietly close the door behind him. I went to the chest, took the black envelope, and tossed it into the fireplace. I no longer needed leverage. I simply wanted him gone.
Two years passed.
The first year was a year of silence and of returning to myself. I threw out all the furniture Vadim had bought.
I changed the wallpaper. I walked a lot, read books I’d been putting off for years, rebuilt professional contacts and even took a few large freelance projects.
I got to know the woman I had become—a strong, independent woman who valued her solitude.
And then Nikita appeared in my life. A simple, laconic engineer I ran into at a bookstore—we both reached at the same time for the last copy of a Brodsky poetry collection.
We talked for hours about literature, about life, about the past. He was raising his son alone after his wife’s sudden death from illness. We drew closer slowly, carefully, like two people who know the price of loss.
In that same living room it no longer smelled of sandalwood but of freshly brewed coffee and something elusively childlike. On the sofa there was a fortress made of pillows.
The door opened, and Nikita came in. He carried grocery bags and a little wind-up toy dog.
“Yegor and I decided our garrison needs a guard dog,” he smiled.
A six-year-old boy peeped out from behind his back.
“Lena, does it bark?” he asked, reaching his hands for the toy.
I crouched, wound up the dog. It hopped comically across the parquet. Yegor laughed. And in that laughter I understood what real victory is. It isn’t revenge. It’s the chance to sit on the floor in your own apartment and listen to a toy dog bark. And to feel that you’re exactly where you belong.
Another three years passed.
Autumn light flooded the kitchen. The smell of cottage-cheese casserole with raisins—Nikita’s signature dish, which Yegor loved—filled the air.
Yegor himself, now nine, was intently assembling a complex model sailing ship at the big oak table we’d bought together.
I sat in a wicker chair, reading, and watched them. The harmony of that moment was so complete that my former life seemed like the plot of a bad, implausible film.
Rumors about Vadim reached me rarely. His business hadn’t collapsed, but it had sagged badly. Without my connections and analytical brain—which he’d been used to exploiting for free—he’d lost his grip, his confidence, the gleam in his eye.
They said he never married, just kept swapping one young copy of Katya for another. He didn’t become a miserable drifter; he simply turned into an empty space, a shadow of his former grandeur.
Katya wrote once. A long, rambling message. “I understand everything now… He cleaned me out… Help me, for God’s sake, just a little money for a ticket home…” I blocked her without answering. It was someone else’s trash I wasn’t going to drag into my home.
“Lena, look!” Yegor ran up to me, showing me the nearly finished ship with scarlet sails. “We’ll call it Hope!”
I hugged him. Nikita came over and kissed the top of my head.
“The casserole’s ready. Time for tea.”
And we sat down at the table. The man I loved. The boy who had become dear to me. I looked at them and understood the main conclusion. Strength isn’t in destroying the life of your enemy.
True strength is in building your own. The mason who painstakingly lays the bricks and raises the walls of his house will always be stronger than the one who knows only how to blow up someone else’s with a flourish.
Because after an explosion, all that’s left is ash. But a house— it remains standing. And in its windows, the lights will always be on.