The silence was crystalline, fragile, and bottomless, like a lake on a moonlit night. Veronika was sinking into it as into a fluffy cotton cocoon, desperately clinging to each moment of precious oblivion. After twenty-eight days of an endless marathon at work—where reports blurred before her eyes into one continuous gray canvas and the open space’s hum rang in her ears even at night—these first hours of Saturday morning were her salvation. Her personal, hard-won oasis of peace.
And that oasis shattered with a crack under the deafening, insistent ring of the doorbell.
Her heart lurched and stopped, then began to pound so wildly that her vision flickered. Like a sleepwalker, Veronika rose from the bed; her legs carried her to the hallway on their own. The cold laminate burned her bare soles. She reached for the handle automatically, still not fully understanding where she was. A heavy, leaden drowsiness clouded her eyes.
On the threshold, like the embodiment of morning itself, stood Galina Sergeyevna, beaming. Her dress, with its bright, aggressive floral print, hurt the eyes. In her hands she clutched an old, well-worn woven net bag, from which emanated an intrusive, choking smell of fried onions and fresh yeast dough.
“Verunya, my dear! I brought you some pies!” Her voice twanged like a taut string, piercing the apartment’s silence. “With cabbage—fresh, straight from the oven! I know how my Dmitry adores them! And you’re probably starving all alone while he’s away on his business trip!”
Veronika stood there paralyzed in her threadbare terrycloth robe. She looked at her mother-in-law’s smile—broad, self-satisfied, brimming with the inexhaustible energy of someone who doesn’t know what it is to lie awake from overwork. The office buzzed in her ears again. Numbers swam before her eyes.
And at that very moment something inside her—the thin, invisible thread that had for years borne the weight of patience, concessions, and silent rage—stretched to the limit and snapped. Not with a loud crack but with a quiet, final click that resonated in the depths of her soul. There was no anger. No hysteria. A wave of absolute, soul-chilling calm washed over her. Her thoughts were as sterile as a scalpel.
Silently, almost ceremoniously, she took the heavy net bag from Galina Sergeyevna with both hands. Her fingers felt the rough rope and the living, warming heat emanating from the parcel. Pies. A symbol of kindness that weighs heavier than lead. A symbol of care that strangles more tightly than a noose.
Taking her silence for capitulation, Galina Sergeyevna had already bent down to slip off her worn-out flats, preparing for a triumphal procession to the kitchen—the usual seizure of territory.
Veronika turned around. Her steps were slow and measured, as if she were walking along the edge of a cliff. She walked down the corridor to the steel hatch of the garbage chute, chipped and scribbled over. Her hand lay on the cold, sticky handle. She pulled. A black, bottomless maw opened, smelling of decay and other people’s lives.
She lingered, eyes on the net bag. On this symbol of the slavery in which she had lived all three years of her marriage. And then, without a shadow of doubt, she simply unclenched her fingers. The bag tumbled into the darkness. A dull, muffled thud against something metallic somewhere deep in the shaft sounded like a shot announcing the start of a war.
She turned and walked back. Galina Sergeyevna froze in a ridiculous pose, one shoe in her hand. First her shining face showed bewilderment, then a slow understanding that spread across her features, and finally—ice-cold horror.
“The pies reached their addressee,” Veronika said in her new, even, metallic voice. “And now you go after them. Entry to this home is closed to you. Forever.”
She took hold of the heavy front door handle. Galina Sergeyevna tried to say something, to produce a sound, but only a garbled, hoarse whisper escaped her throat. The door swung shut smoothly, almost soundlessly, right before her nose. Veronika turned the key in the top lock. The click sounded deafening. Then in the bottom lock. Another click. Paragraph.
She pressed her forehead to the cold steel and listened. There were no shouts or pounding behind the door. Only heavy, uneven breathing, and then quick, shuffling, almost running footsteps, fading down the stairs.
Veronika took her phone from the robe pocket. Turned on the camera. Snapped a sharp, clear shot of the keyhole. She caught the glint of light on the metal—as if it were the last tear she hadn’t shed. She opened her messenger, found the contact “Husband.” She sent the photo. Then she typed a message. Each word cast from steel and ice: “I changed the lock cylinder. Only I will have the key. If your mother gets a new one, I will change the apartment. And the husband.”
She hit “send,” switched the phone to silent, tossed it on the shelf in the hallway, and went back to the bedroom. War had been declared. And for the first time in years she felt not like a victim, but like a commander on the eve of a decisive battle.
Dmitry returned the next day. Veronika heard his key scrape helplessly in the unfamiliar keyhole. First softly, then with rising fury. Then he began yanking the handle, shaking the door. Wood and metal emitted short, protesting sounds. The doorbell rang—sharp, imperious, full of a sense of ownership.
She didn’t hurry. She finished the last sip of cooled tea, set the cup in the sink, smoothed her hair. She was ready. Ready as never before in her life.
He burst into the apartment just as she stepped away from the door. His duffel bag crashed to the floor.
“Explain. Now,” his voice was hoarse from exhaustion and pent-up rage. He stood there breathing heavily, his fingers clenching and unclenching.
Veronika calmly closed the door but didn’t lock it. The space between them was charged, like a live wire.
“What exactly interests you, Dmitry? Be specific. So much has happened in the last twenty-four hours. I, for one, slept for the first time in a month. It was delightful.”
His face twisted with anger. This new, chilling certainty of hers drove him mad.
“Cut it out! You know exactly what I mean! My mother! She’s in a panic! You threw her pies in the trash! You kicked her out like some beggar! You changed the locks without consulting me!”
He hurled the words, his body taut, ready to attack. He expected her to break. To cry, to start apologizing—then he could set everything back to the way it was, to the familiar universe where his word was law and his mother’s feelings an unquestionable shrine.
But Veronika looked at him with cold, almost clinical interest.
“Those weren’t pies. That was an act of aggression disguised as kindness. And I didn’t throw her out. I set a boundary. I did change the locks, yes. So that boundary would be tangible.”
“Have you completely lost your mind? That’s my mother! She cares about us! And you’re acting like a selfish, ungrateful—”
“She cares about you,” Veronika cut him off, her voice ringing like steel. “She comes to your home to check whether her little boy is living well. She shows up at seven in the morning on the only day I can sleep in, because her desire outweighs my needs. I put up with it for three years. Three years, Dmitry. I’ve reached my limit.”
She spoke softly, but each word fell like a hammer on an anvil. He recoiled as if from a physical blow. He wasn’t prepared for this. He was used to compromises, to her weary sighs, to her “fine, let’s not fight.”
“So what now?” He tried to collect himself, lowering his tone, switching to intimidation tactics. “You’ve decided you run everything here? You’ll decide who gets to enter my own apartment?”
“In the part of it that is my personal space, my fortress, where I have to recover—yes. I will.”
“Then listen up,” he hissed, moving so close she could smell his travel cologne. “You’re going to pick up the phone right now. You’re going to call my mother. You’ll humbly apologize. You’ll say you’re overworked, that you had a nervous breakdown. And tomorrow morning we’ll go make me a duplicate key. Clear?”
She looked him straight in the eyes. There wasn’t a trace of fear in her gaze. Only the weariness of the many-year lie they had been living.
“No, Dmitry. I will do none of that. I have nothing to apologize for. And the key to this apartment will be only with me and you. Until the moment you decide to give one to your mother. At that very instant, consider that this apartment no longer exists for me.”
He froze. For the first time he saw in her eyes not a threat but a statement of fact. This wasn’t a scandal. It was a verdict. Cold, deliberate, and not subject to appeal. With horror he suddenly realized that all his levers—anger, blackmail, guilt—had crumbled to dust. She wasn’t afraid of them anymore. She stood on the edge and was ready to step into the abyss, and that step frightened him far more than her resistance.
A positional war began. A week of viscous, silent confrontation. They moved around the apartment like shadows, avoiding touches, glances, words. He ostentatiously pushed away the dinner she cooked. They slept on opposite edges of the bed, an invisible but insurmountable wall of ice and resentment yawning between them.
He changed tactics, switching to refined psychological pressure.
“Mother called,” he’d throw out, staring at the TV. “Her blood pressure’s over two hundred. She didn’t sleep all night. She’s crying. She can’t understand how her daughter-in-law, whom she took in like a daughter, could do this.”
Veronika silently turned the pages of her book. Her silence was her main weapon. It drove him crazy because it deprived him of footing. He didn’t know how to fight silence.
Having been rebuffed, Galina Sergeyevna didn’t surrender. She began a siege. First, the intercom started to rattle. The harsh, vibrating buzz tore through the quiet several times a day. “Verunya, it’s me, open up, let’s talk like adults,” came the plaintive, distorted voice from the receiver. Veronika would simply lift the handset and set it down beside her, leaving her mother-in-law to speak into the void.
Then came the surveillance. A couple of times, leaving the building, Veronika noticed the familiar gaudy dress by the neighboring house. She would turn around and leave through the back entrance, her heart pounding not from fear but from contempt.
Each such foray ended in an evening performance.
“Do you understand what you’re doing? An elderly woman is lurking outside like a spy just to talk to you! Do you even have a heart?”
“I have a right to personal space,” Veronika retorted. “If your mother has nothing better to do than conduct surveillance, that’s very sad. But that’s not my problem.”
The climax came on Thursday. Veronika was returning home, wrung out like a lemon. While she rummaged in her bag for her keys, the door of the neighboring apartment opened a crack.
“Ver, hi! Do you happen to have a couple of eggs? I’m making an omelet for my grandson and I’ve run out,” peeped out the neighbor, Irina, a kind but excessively curious woman.
“I’ll check,” Veronika said, opening her door and stepping into the hallway.
And at that moment, from the dark corner of the stairwell, from behind the concrete elevator column, a figure flitted out like a gray moth—Galina Sergeyevna. She didn’t say a word. She just tried to slip into the apartment behind her, a pitiful, pleading smile frozen on her face, clutching a small pot of geranium in her hands.
“Verochka, dear, just for a second, I brought you a little flower, to make peace…”
Something exploded inside Veronika. The very ice-armor she had hidden behind cracked, and a lava of rage accumulated over years gushed out. She spun around and, before the woman could cross the threshold, shoved Galina Sergeyevna back onto the landing with all the force she had stored for years. The older woman staggered, nearly dropping her pathetic “peace offering.”
“Get out of my home!” Her voice, low and ringing, echoed through the stairwell. “Do you hear me, you old hag? And I don’t want to see you here again! Ever!”
She slammed the door so hard the walls trembled. She turned both locks. Leaned her back against the wood, breathing hard. Goosebumps ran over her skin, her temples throbbed. She felt neither fear nor remorse. Only a purging fury.
Not three minutes later, the phone rang. “Husband.” She answered.
“You bitch! You dared raise your hand against my mother!” His shout was full of genuine, animal hatred. “She’s hysterical! You almost shoved her under a car!”
“I warned you,” her voice was as calm as a lake after a storm. “Deal with your obsessed relatives yourself. They’re your demons. Not mine.”
She hung up and blocked his number. The war had entered its final, decisive phase. She knew—now he would stop at nothing.
After the geranium incident, an ominous silence fell. Dmitry slept on the couch in the living room. They didn’t speak. Veronika felt it—the calm before the storm. On Saturday evening he came home from work strangely calm, almost serene.
“Lousy day, I’m wiped,” he said, heading to the kitchen. “I’ll go take a shower, wash all this fatigue off.”
She nodded, continuing to work on her laptop, but her whole being tightened like a string. Something was wrong. Too calm. Too quiet.
She heard the water turn on in the bathroom. The monotone hiss of the shower was deceptively soothing. She closed her eyes, trying to catch what exactly was setting her on edge. And then she heard it. The barely audible click of the front door lock. Not loud and confident, but quiet, sneaking, thieving.
Her heart didn’t drop or leap. It simply stopped, then began to beat evenly and loudly, marking off the strokes like a metronome before an execution.
She stood up. Threw on her robe. Slipped soundlessly into the corridor.
They were standing there, in the half-dark of the entryway, caught in the act like petty pickpockets. Dmitry, his hair wet from the shower, jeans hastily pulled on. And Galina Sergeyevna, clutching to her chest that same pot of geranium like a talisman. A new, freshly cut key gleamed in his hand. Seeing her, they went rigid. The mask-smile slid from the mother-in-law’s face, revealing fear and triumph at once. Dmitry opened his mouth but couldn’t produce a sound.
Veronika said nothing. She slowly took them in with her eyes—her traitor husband and his mother, who had won her pitiful Pyrrhic victory. Her gaze dropped to the key. Gleaming, sharp, like a knife in the back. Then she turned and went to the bedroom.
“Veronika, wait! It’s not what you think!” he shouted after her, but his voice carried only the panic of someone caught red-handed. “We just wanted to talk! Peacefully!”
She slammed the bedroom door. The lock clicked. He heard drawers opening and closing, the zipper of a travel bag hissing like a snake. He pounded on the door.
“Open up! Let’s discuss this like adults!”
The door opened. She came out dressed in simple jeans and a sweater, without tears on her face, without trembling hands. In one hand a bag, in the other a folder with documents and a laptop. She walked past them without looking, as if they didn’t exist.
On the threshold she stopped and turned. Her face was pale and beautiful in its indifference.
“Congratulations, Galina Sergeyevna. You’ve won. Your boy is all yours again. You can feed him pies at night or at dawn. There’s no one to get in your way anymore.”
She shifted her gaze to Dmitry. His face was twisted with a mix of shame, anger, and animal fear.
“And don’t forget to change the locks again. Now this is entirely your home. And your responsibility.”
She stepped over the threshold. The door began to close slowly. The last thing they saw was her calm, almost detached look—devoid of hatred or pain. Only emptiness. Absolute and bottomless.
The door closed with a soft yet final click.
In the ensuing quiet, the silence rang deafeningly. Dmitry and Galina Sergeyevna were left standing in the middle of the spacious hallway that had suddenly become cramped and stifling. Victors. Conquerors of scorched earth where nothing living remained. Only the smell of fried onions and a dusty geranium on the floor as a monument to their great, meaningless victory.