My phone buzzed on the table, lighting up with a notification from social media.
Tamara Igorevna—my mother-in-law—had posted a new photo. “Enjoying the Turkish sunshine!” the caption read. In the picture she was smiling brightly, a cocktail in her hand, with the sapphire sea behind her. And I zoomed in on the background. Purely on autopilot.
Near the edge of the water, two figures stood. A little blurry, but painfully recognizable.
My husband Dima—who was supposed to be on an “urgent business trip” in Yekaterinburg—had his arm around my younger sister Ira’s waist. Ira was laughing, her head thrown back.
His hand sat on her waist with a confidence that didn’t look accidental. It looked… familiar.
The world didn’t shatter. Nothing tore inside me.
The air in the room didn’t thicken. I just stared at the screen while a puzzle assembled itself in my mind with perfect clarity—made of dozens of small details I’d refused to see for far too long.
His sudden late-night “meetings.” Her mysterious “admirer” she never wanted to talk about.
His irritation whenever I asked for his phone. Her avoiding my eyes at our last family dinner.
His line: “Nastya, you’re tired, you need to rest,” whenever I cried after yet another pregnancy loss.
And her words, said that same day: “Maybe you two just aren’t meant to be.”
Calmly, I took a screenshot. Opened an editor. Cropped out my mother-in-law’s glowing face and left only what mattered.
Then I sent the edited photo to Ira—without a single word.
After that, I called my husband. He didn’t pick up right away; when he finally did, I could hear surf in the background and some music.
“Yeah, Nastya, hi. I’m in a meeting. Not a great time.”
His voice was upbeat—almost pleased. Nothing like a man buried in work.
“I just wanted to ask,” I said evenly, no tremor at all, “what’s the weather like in Yekaterinburg? Not too hot?”
He hesitated for a second.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Work. Nastya, I’ll call you back—seriously, I can’t talk right now.”
“Of course,” I said, smiling even though he couldn’t see it. “Call me when your ‘trip’ is over.”
And I ended the call.
My phone buzzed again immediately. Tamara Igorevna—she’d obviously seen my comment under her photo:
“How lovely! Please send my regards to Dima and Ira as well!”
I rejected the call and opened my banking app. There it was: our joint account—the one his paycheck went into and most of our expenses came out of. The latest transaction stared back at me:
“Sea Breeze Restaurant, Antalya. Paid 15 minutes ago.”
In seconds, I opened a new account in my own name and moved every last cent into it. Then I froze the shared credit card attached to that account. His personal debit card was now just a useless piece of plastic.
Let them enjoy their vacation.
From now on, they could pay for it themselves—if they had anything to pay with.
Less than ten minutes passed before my phone started going insane. First Ira. Ten missed calls, then an avalanche of texts.
“Have you lost your mind? What is this Photoshop? Why are you doing this?”
“Nastya, delete your comment right now! Dima’s mom is calling me hysterical!”
“It’s not what you think! We ran into each other by accident!”
By accident. In another country. At a hotel my husband was paying for.
I read everything and felt nothing but a cold, ringing calm.
Then Dima joined in. His messages were different. First—rage.
“What the hell are you doing? My card won’t work! Did you block it?”
“I don’t get it—what kind of game is this? Answer your phone!”
I stayed silent. I walked to the closet and pulled out a large suitcase. His suitcase. Opened it and set it on the bed.
While I folded his clothes with methodical precision, my phone rang again. My mother.
“Nastya, sweetheart, what happened? Ira called me crying her eyes out. She says you’re accusing her of something…”
“Mom, everything’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that Ira is vacationing in Turkey with my husband. And he’s supposed to be on a work trip.”
My mother went quiet, choosing her words.
“Nastya, but you know Ira… she’s so impulsive. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding? You’re the older sister—you should be wiser. You can’t just cut people off like that.”
“Wiser—meaning I should let my sister sleep with my husband?” I asked, my voice flat as ice.
“Oh, don’t say it like that… You need to talk it through… figure it out…”
“Thanks for the advice, Mom,” I said, and hung up.
A new wave of messages from Dima. His tone shifted from furious to pleading.
“Nastya, I don’t know what you’ve imagined, but you’ve left me without a penny in a foreign country! That’s cruel!”
“Please unlock the card. We’ll come back and I’ll explain everything. You don’t want to ruin our family over some nonsense, do you?”
Nonsense. That’s what he called ten years of marriage.
I smirked and tossed his razor kit into the suitcase. The final performance came from my mother-in-law: a voice note dripping with poison.
“I always knew you were a snake! Trying to ruin my son’s life? He picked you up from the trash and you—”
“He’ll be thrilled to get rid of you! Ira is a good girl, a beauty—not like you, you little gray mouse!”
I didn’t listen to the end. I deleted it and blocked her number.
Then I took a picture of the packed suitcase by the front door and sent it to Dima.
With a single caption:
“It’s waiting for you. Along with the divorce papers.”
The quiet lasted almost five days. During that time I changed the locks on my apartment, spoke to a lawyer, and called Dima’s boss—Igor Semyonovich, an old friend of our family.
I didn’t complain. Not exactly.
I simply “shared my concern,” saying Dima had gone to Turkey on a “last-minute deal” even though he was supposed to be on a critical site in Yekaterinburg—and that I was terribly worried about his condition. Igor Semyonovich understood without anything needing to be spelled out.
On the fifth evening, the doorbell rang.
In the peephole, there they were—wrinkled, angry, sunburned noses peeling.
I didn’t open the door.
“Nastya, open up!” Dima’s voice was hoarse with rage. “Enough with the circus!”
He jammed his key into the lock.
Useless.
“What… you changed the locks?” disbelief cut into his tone.
I opened the door—but kept the chain on. I was wearing my best dress, light makeup, and red lipstick.
“What are you doing here?” I asked politely.
“I came home!” Dima tried to yank the door.
“This is my home, Dima. And yours, apparently, is wherever my sister is.”
That’s when Ira stepped forward.
“Stop acting like a victim, Nastya,” she hissed. “Yes, it happened. Dima fell in love with me. You just have to accept it. You can’t give him anything anyway—no passion, not even a child.”
It was a blow below the belt. They both knew what two lost pregnancies had done to me.
And that’s when something inside me clicked. The “wise older sister” who kept swallowing everything… died.
I looked Ira straight in her brazen eyes and smiled.
“A child?” I said softly. “Are you sure you want to bring that up? You still haven’t paid off the loan for your ‘recovery,’ have you? And you didn’t manage to carry your own baby to term—and the man you were with vanished right after.”
Ira’s face drained white. Dima stared at her, then at me, completely stunned.
“What loan? What baby?” he mumbled.
“Oh—he doesn’t know?” I feigned surprise. “Well then you’ll be interested to learn your new ‘perfect girl’ has been living off my money for the last six months. And she wasn’t the only one.”
I turned to Dima.
“Your things,” I nodded toward the suitcase in the hallway, “will be delivered to your mother by courier tomorrow. The divorce papers are with my lawyer. And now, please—step away from my doorstep.”
And without waiting for an answer, I closed the door slowly and deliberately right in their faces. The lock clicked.
For a while I could still hear muffled shouting through the door—accusations thrown back and forth. He was yelling about the baby. She was screaming that he was broke. Then it all went silent.
The next morning I called my father. I told him everything—calmly, without tears, just the facts. He was quiet for a long time, then he said, “I understand, sweetheart. You did the right thing.”
A week later Dima called from an unfamiliar number. His voice was completely different.
“Nastya… forgive me. I was an idiot. That Ira… she drove me crazy.”
I listened in silence.
“I got fired. Igor Semyonovich said I set him up. I’m living with my mother—she nags me from morning to night. Nastya, I’ve lost everything. Can we start over?”
I paused.
“You know, Dima,” I said, “I checked our shared accounts. And I found a couple of interesting loans taken out in my name—without my knowledge. For ‘business development.’ So I sold our car. It was just enough to pay everything off.”
On the other end of the line, a heavy silence.
“How… sold it? You had no right!”
“I had every right to protect myself and my future,” I cut in. “And your future is in your hands now. Live with it.”
And I ended the call.
One year later.
I was sitting in a small café on a narrow street in Florence, sketching in my notebook.
Over the past year I’d traveled through almost all of Italy, and my old, forgotten love of drawing had become something bigger. I started selling my watercolors online.
That day, I absentmindedly opened social media and saw a message from my cousin.
“Nastya, hi! I saw your paintings—absolutely unreal! Listen, something happened… remember your Dima? His mother, Tamara Igorevna, called my mom recently—crying.”
I smirked and kept reading.
“Turns out your Dima fell apart after the divorce. He lived with her for a month, and then she kicked him out herself. Supposedly he went away to earn money and then just disappeared.
And your Ira—total circus. She tried to come back to her parents, but Uncle Slava wouldn’t even let her in. Said until she apologizes to you, he doesn’t want to know her.
She bounced around, found some guy, moved in with him, and he threw her out after two months. People say she tried to scam him for money.
Now she works as a cashier at a 24-hour shop. And the funniest part,” the message ended, “is that Tamara Igorevna now tells everyone what a wonderful daughter-in-law she lost.”
I closed the message.
There was no gloating. No satisfaction. Just… nothing.
Their life. Their choices. Their consequences. They wrote their own script.
I looked back at my sketch—a sun-drenched square, pigeons drinking from a fountain.
I remembered how Dima used to laugh at my hobby, calling it “childish scribbling.” How Ira used to say artists were poor.
Both of them tried to squeeze me into the narrow world they believed in.
I set my pencil down and took a sip of espresso. The bitterness tasted good.
Victory isn’t when your enemies are humiliated.
Victory is when their lives—and their opinions—mean absolutely nothing to you anymore.
And right then, under the warm Italian sun, I realized I’d finally won for good.