Vasily stood in the middle of the living room, crushing a scrap of paper in his fist so hard his knuckles went white. A feverish, almost crazed shine burned in his eyes. This wasn’t merely a lottery ticket. It was his entry pass into a world he’d only ever watched through a phone screen: spotless white yachts, turquoise coastlines, and women whose smiles cost more than his annual salary as a factory engineer.
“Tanya,” his voice snapped—dry and sharp, like a lash. “Stop messing around with those cutlets. Come here.”
Tatyana wiped her hands on a grease-stained apron and stepped out of the kitchen. Her face, once bright and fresh, now carried the marks of constant exhaustion and everyday worries. She looked at her husband with the familiar anxiety she’d learned to live with.
“What happened, Vas? Another delay at work?”
“A miracle happened, Tanya. Actually—justice happened. I won. One. Million. Dollars.”
A heavy silence fell over the room. The only sound was oil sizzling in the pan. Tatyana slowly lowered herself onto the edge of the old armchair they’d been meaning to reupholster for three years.
“Vasya… is it true? Are you sure? Let me see…”
Vasily jerked his hand back and shoved the ticket into his jeans pocket.
“Don’t touch it! It’s not your concern anymore. You know what I’ve been thinking about for the past ten years while we counted pennies from paycheck to paycheck? I kept thinking how trapped I feel. Trapped in this apartment, trapped in this city—and, honestly, trapped with you.”
“What are you talking about?” she whispered, tears gathering in her eyes.
“Freedom!” Vasily all but shouted, pacing the room. “I already spoke to a realtor. We list the apartment tomorrow—cheap, so it sells within a week. There’s a buyer lined up—my developer friend will take it for an office. The money will come immediately. And now the main thing.”
He pulled out a stack of papers he’d printed in advance. The A4 sheets crackled ominously in his hands.
“Tanya, sign the divorce. Right here, right now. Mutual consent, no splitting property. I’ll leave you the car—the old Lada—and you can keep the TV. But everything else is mine. I need a model now, understand? A woman who’ll decorate the deck of my yacht, not someone who always smells like onions and cleaning chemicals. You’re a cook. You’re my past. And I’m walking into a new life.”
Tatyana stared at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. The man she’d shared bread and bed with—the man she’d supported after layoffs, whose mother she’d cared for after a stroke—had vanished. In front of her stood a stranger with a cold heart.
“Vasya, come to your senses…” Her voice trembled. “Money comes and goes. Don’t do something foolish. We were planning children—we wanted—”
“Shut up, you failure,” he cut her off, hurling the pen onto the table. “Your plans are a swamp. And I’m a lion now. Sign it, or I’ll walk out and you won’t even get that rusty car.”
Broken and unable to believe what was happening, Tatyana picked up the pen. Her hand produced a neat signature that crossed out twelve years of marriage. She didn’t sob. She simply stood, untied her apron, and went into the bedroom to pack a few things into an old suitcase.
Vasily didn’t even look after her. He’d already opened a website on his laptop with listings for motor yachts in Monaco. His finger slid greedily over the images of gleaming white vessels—“Princess,” “Aurora,” “Sea Wolf”… He could almost feel the salt spray on his face and taste the most expensive champagne.
Three hours later a taxi came for Tatyana. She walked out of the building without looking back. Vasily stood on the balcony, chin raised in victory. He felt like the king of the world. In his head, the schedule was already set: tomorrow—down payment from the apartment sale; the day after—fly to Moscow to cash the check; and then—an endless summer.
The entire next month passed in feverish anticipation. Vasily lived in a hotel because the new owners insisted on moving into the apartment immediately. He spent his last savings on expensive suits and restaurants, convinced that in a few days his bank account would explode with zeros. He ignored his mother-in-law’s calls, blocked Tatyana’s number, and didn’t even wonder where she was or how she was surviving.
Then April first arrived—the day Vasily had crowned as the date of his final triumph. Today, the lottery committee was supposed to confirm everything.
He sat in the lobby bar of an expensive hotel, sipping whiskey he couldn’t afford. The ticket lay on the table. His phone suddenly buzzed. The screen showed a name: “Sergey.” His best friend from the shop floor.
“Hello, Vasyan!” Sergey’s voice was choking with laughter. In the background came shouting and the roar of the rest of the crew. “So—did you fall for it? How does it feel, you fake millionaire?”
Vasily frowned, not understanding the tone. “What are you talking about, Sergey? I’m busy. I’m waiting for confirmation of the transfer…”
“Happy April Fools’, brother!” Sergey burst into another fit of wheezing laughter. “What transfer? We made that ticket in Photoshop! Printed it on fancy paper at the ad shop. Remember when you went to the bathroom and we slipped it in? You absolute sucker. We waited a whole month for you to crack, but you disappeared, stopped answering your phone. So—how are we celebrating? You owe us for the best prank in the history of the plant! Everyone died laughing— even Mikhálych approved!”
The world around Vasily began to spin. The bar’s walls, the leather chairs, the waiters—everything smeared into a blur. A rushing filled his ears, as if he really were on a yacht—only now in the middle of a wrecking storm.
“How… made it?” His voice came out as a rasp. “What do you mean ‘Photoshop’?”
“It’s a program, Vasyan! We copied a serial number from the news yesterday—just changed one digit. Looked legit, didn’t it? You were yelling you’d buy everyone!”
“Sergey…” Nausea surged up Vasily’s throat. “I already sold the apartment… I paid off debts I took out on ‘future capital’… I threw my wife out… I threw Tanya out…”
Dead silence hit the other end of the line. The laughter stopped instantly.
“Vas… are you serious?” Sergey’s voice turned sober and frightened. “We… we were just joking. Vas?”
Vasily let the phone slip onto the carpet. The ticket on the table no longer looked like a bar of gold. Now it was just a dirty piece of paper—worth the price of a life he’d destroyed with his own hands.
He sat motionless, staring at the lit screen of his phone in the dim lobby-bar glow. “Sergey” on the display no longer felt like a friend’s name, but like a hangman’s brand. Life flowed around him: businessmen discussing deals, a young couple laughing at the next table, a waiter straightening napkins. But for Vasily, time had frozen.
In his mind, the last few weeks replayed like a scratched film: the moment he tossed the keys onto the realtor’s desk; the way he shouted at Tatyana that she was “an anchor around his ankles”; the night he ordered a bottle of wine for twenty thousand rubles and tipped with the last money on his card, confident tomorrow it would all be nothing compared to his riches.
“Sir, are you all right?” the waiter’s voice sounded as if coming through water.
Vasily didn’t answer. Slowly, he reached out, took the fake ticket, and tore it. The paper was surprisingly thick—Sergey’s advertising guys had done a fine job. The pieces scattered across the expensive carpet like gray snow.
“I… I made a mistake,” he murmured as he stood. His legs felt like cotton.
Outside the hotel, a sharp April wind hit him. Spring had come cold and mean this year. He pulled his new coat tighter—one of those status purchases made on credit. Now it felt like a shroud.
He had to find Tanya. The only person who’d believed in him when he was nobody—he’d tossed her aside like trash. With trembling fingers he searched for her number in his blocked list. Unblock. Call.
“The subscriber’s phone is switched off or out of coverage.”
His heart skipped. He tried again. And again—the same result. Then he called his mother-in-law, Maria Stepanovna. He’d always hated her calls, thinking she invaded his privacy. Now her voice was his last hope.
“Hello, Maria Stepanovna? It’s Vasya…”
“You?” Her voice was ice. “You have the nerve to call after what you did? After you threw my daughter out like a stray dog?”
“Please… it was a misunderstanding. A horrible, terrifying misunderstanding. Where is Tanya? I need to see her.”
“There is no Tanya for you anymore, Vasily. She took her things and left. And I’m not telling you where. You’re a millionaire now—so live with your millions. Buy yourself a conscience if you can.”
The line went dead.
Vasily stood in the middle of the sidewalk while people brushed past him, muttering, bumping his shoulder. He was alone. No home. No money. Huge debts. And the crushing certainty that he was nothing.
He spent the rest of the day running through the city in a panic. He went back to their old building—there was a new lock on the apartment door, and the roar of a drill came from inside. The new owners were already ripping out the “grandma renovation” to turn it into a modern office. He stopped by the café where Tanya used to eat lunch with friends, checked bus and train stations, even went to the hospital, terrified her heart had given out.
By evening he was at his sister Oksana’s place. She was the only person who might know the truth.
“My God, Vasya, you look awful,” Oksana let him into the hallway, eyeing his expensive but now rumpled outfit. “So your millions didn’t make you happy?”
“There are no millions. The ticket was fake. An April Fools’ prank—Sergey and the guys.”
Oksana slowly sank onto the little bench.
“You’re joking. You sold the apartment… You… you did that to Tanya… Vasya, do you even understand what you’ve done?”
“I do!” he exploded, covering his face with his hands. “I understand everything! I’m an idiot, I’m a bastard! But I need to find her. Where is she?”
Oksana stayed silent for a long time, looking at her brother with a pity that was mixed with disgust.
“She went to her aunt’s place in a village—three hundred kilometers from here. She said she wanted to forget this city like a nightmare.”
“Give me the address. Please.”
“Why? So you can lie again? You don’t have a cent. How are you going to get there? Your ‘Lada’—she sold it a week ago. She needed money for a ticket and to survive at first. You left her nothing.”
Those words hit harder than the truth about the ticket. Tanya—his quiet, obedient Tanya—had sold the car just to escape him.
“I’ll get there,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll walk if I have to.”
He returned to the hotel only to grab his suitcase. He couldn’t pay for another night. The receptionist, noticing his condition, politely reminded him about checkout. Vasily left his new watch and gold cufflinks in the room—payment for the bar tab and his last meal—and walked out into the night.
At the bus station he bought a ticket on the last bus to that village, spending his final cash. The bus was old; the air smelled of diesel and stale bread. Vasily pressed his forehead to the cold window.
Lights of the outskirts flickered past in the dark. He remembered their wedding. There had been no limousines, no yachts—just a cheap cafeteria, a lot of laughter, and Tanya in a dress she’d sewn herself. She’d said then, “Vas, I don’t need anything, as long as we’re together.” And he’d believed her—until greed blurred his mind.
“One million dollars…” he thought bitterly. The dream felt so small now. For that money he’d been ready to sell his soul—and in the end he’d traded what mattered most for a painted piece of cardboard.
The bus rattled over potholes. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Sergey again. Vasily turned the phone off and pulled out the SIM card. His old life was over. Ahead was only the unknown.
When the bus stopped on a dusty roadside at three in the morning, Vasily stepped into complete darkness. Only distant barking and wind whispering through trees broke the silence. Using a map he’d downloaded before leaving the city, he walked toward a small house on the edge of the village.
Tanya’s aunt’s place looked worn but cozy. A faint light glowed in one window. Vasily reached the gate and froze. What could he say? “Sorry, I changed my mind about being a millionaire—because it turned out there’s no money”? Would she believe him? Would she even want to see him?
He raised his hand to knock—then the door creaked open. Tanya came out onto the porch. She wore an old sweater draped over her shoulders, holding a mug. She looked up at the stars, and in the moonlight her face seemed almost translucent.
Vasily wanted to call her name, but his voice stuck in his throat. He saw her touch her stomach—a light, almost unconscious gesture known only to women guarding a secret.
His world collapsed for the second time in a single day.
Tanya was pregnant. The child they’d dreamed of for years, the child they’d waited for so long… and the child he’d abandoned for a counterfeit scrap.
She didn’t see him in the shadow of the trees. She simply stood there breathing the night air, then sighed quietly and went back inside.
Vasily dropped to his knees in the mud by the gate. He understood his punishment was only beginning. He’d come to beg forgiveness—only now he realized: some things can’t be forgiven.
He stayed by the gate until dawn. April dew soaked his expensive coat, turning a “status” item into a wet, heavy rag. Mud clung to shoes he hadn’t even made the first loan payment on. When the first sunbeams touched the tops of the pines, he understood: barging in to confess would be selfish again. He had no right to crash into her fragile new life with his “I’m sorry” when he didn’t have even a shred of honor left.
He got up when the first roosters started crowing. His body ached, but his mind held a frightening clarity for the first time in ages. He didn’t knock. Instead he walked to the village store, where two local men in camouflage jackets were already smoking on the steps.
“Hey, guys,” Vasily said, trying not to look at their smirks as they took in his polished but battered appearance. “Is there any work? Anything. With a place to stay. Right away.”
One of them, older, spat and looked him up and down. “What are you—some slum millionaire? We’ve seen your type. Mikhálych needs a helper at the sawmill. The last one went on a bender. Housing’s a construction trailer. You in?”
“I’m in,” Vasily said simply.
The next two weeks became his personal hell. The man who’d been dreaming of white yachts and silk sheets now woke at six in a metal trailer that smelled of sawdust and cheap tobacco. His hands—used to blueprints and a computer mouse—quickly split into bloody blisters that hardened into rough calluses.
He hauled heavy timber, shoveled sawdust, helped repair ancient machines. In the evenings, when strength left him, he went to Tanya’s aunt’s house. He didn’t come close. He just stood in the shadow of an old willow at the far end of the street and watched her: stepping out onto the porch, hanging laundry, slowly walking through the garden. She looked pale, but there was a new, calm dignity in her movements—something he’d never noticed before when she was trapped in endless kitchen bustle.
A week later he worked up the courage. One evening, after Tanya went inside, he approached the gate and left a bag there. No diamonds. Just fresh cottage cheese, honey, and a bag of apples—everything he could buy with his first advance.
The next day the bag was gone. No note appeared. Vasily hadn’t expected one.
Ten more days passed. Vasily was becoming someone else. He grew thinner, windburned, his feverish gaze replaced by a heavy focus. He started saving money—not for a yacht, but to pay back debts and provide for Tanya and the baby. He already knew the apartment was gone for good, but he swore to himself: he would earn a new home. Even if it took ten years, he would earn it.
Then the quiet of his new life was shattered by an engine’s roar. An old BMW—the pride of Sergey—rolled up to the sawmill. Out tumbled the whole crew: Sergey, Pasha, and Dimon. The same “friends” whose prank had detonated his life.
“Look at that! Our oligarch!” Sergey put on a dramatic gasp, spotting Vasily in a greasy work jacket with a face smeared in oil. “Vasyan, what’s this? We’ve been looking for you all over the city! You’re skipping work, collectors are practically kicking down your hotel door, and you’re out here counting sawdust?”
Vasily slowly set a board onto the stack and turned to them. There was no anger in his eyes. Only endless exhaustion.
“Why are you here, Sergey?”
“Oh, come on, don’t sulk!” Sergey stepped closer, trying to throw an arm around him, but Vasily moved away. “Yeah, we overdid it. It happens. We didn’t know you’d actually sell your place. We talked it over… chipped in a little. Here—take five thousand. Enough for a ticket back to town. We’ll go to the boss, apologize, he’ll take you back. We’ll live again! Fridays at the sauna, beers…”
Vasily looked at the banknote Sergey held out. Once, it would have mattered. Now it looked like trash.
“Put it away,” Vasily said quietly. “And leave.”
“Vas, what, you’re offended?” Pasha cut in. “If you weren’t such a greedy jerk, you wouldn’t have thrown Tanya out. The second you saw that paper, you turned into a monster. We just showed you who you really are. So we even did you a favor—we ripped off the mask!”
Those words hit like a punch to the gut—because they were true. The friends hadn’t ruined his life. They’d simply held up a mirror to his soul, and what he’d seen there was his own choice.
“You’re right,” Vasily nodded. “I was a jerk. And you ripped off the mask. Thank you. Now go. There’s nothing left to say.”
“Then rot here in manure!” Sergey barked, throwing the bill into the dust. “Fake millionaire! We’ll see how long you last without your precious swagger.”
The car screeched around, blasting him with dust and exhaust. Vasily watched them go, picked up the banknote, smoothed it carefully, and put it in his pocket. He would give Tanya that money too. Every ruble mattered now.
That evening he went to her house again—but this time he didn’t hide. He sat on a bench by the fence and waited.
An hour later the door creaked. Tanya stepped onto the porch, pulling a shawl around her shoulders. She stared at him for a long time, then slowly came down the steps and stopped by the gate.
“They came,” she said. Not a question. In a village, news traveled fast.
“They did,” Vasily answered.
“And you didn’t leave with them. Why?”
Vasily lifted his eyes to her. There was no old smugness in them. “Because I’ve got nowhere to go, Tanya. And nothing to go back to. The Vasily who wanted yachts is gone. I strangled him myself at the sawmill.”
Tanya was silent, studying his cracked hands.
“Mom says you’ve lost your mind,” she said at last. “That you’re playing some new game so I’ll feel sorry for you and won’t file for child support.”
“Let her say it. She has every right to hate me.” He swallowed. “Tanya… I know about the baby.”
She flinched and covered her stomach by instinct. “This isn’t your baby, Vasily. You gave him up the day you signed those papers. You said you needed a model—so go find one. This child will only have a mother.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me now,” Vasily said, standing carefully. “I just want to work. So he’ll have everything he needs. I’ll leave money here, on the post. Burn it, throw it away—I don’t care. But I’ll bring it.”
He turned to leave, but her voice stopped him.
“Vas… was the ticket really fake?”
Vasily gave a bitter half-smile. “Worse. It was a real sentence for my conscience.”
He disappeared into the darkness, leaving her alone at the gate. Tanya watched him go, and for the first time in a long while her eyes held not only pain—but doubt.
Seven months passed. April mud gave way to scorching summer, then to golden autumn that smelled of damp leaves. In the village, no one called Vasily “the millionaire” anymore. Now he was simply “Vaska from the sawmill”—the quietest, hardest-working man around. He took any job: fixed roofs, chopped firewood for lonely old women, and on weekends rebuilt an abandoned shed at the edge of the sawmill—a place Mikhálych agreed to let him buy out of his wages.
Vasily changed beyond recognition. The polished engineer dreaming of azure shores was gone; in his place was a lean man with a steel gaze and knotted, sinewy hands. Every Friday evening, without fail, he left an envelope by Tanya’s gate. There were no huge sums inside, but the money was clean—earned with sweat and honest pain.
Tanya still didn’t come out to him. She took the envelopes, but they never spoke about them. She saw him from a distance: trudging home after shifts, shoulders heavy with fatigue; standing for long stretches by the river, staring at water where his white yacht would never glide. She knew he didn’t drink, didn’t chase women, and lived in his Spartan trailer plastered with drawings—no longer of ships, but of cribs and warm little houses.
Winter arrived early and cruel that year. In mid-November an ice storm slammed into the village. Power lines snapped within the first hour, turning everything into a black, frozen sea. The blizzard screamed so loudly you couldn’t hear your own voice.
Vasily sat in his trailer by the stub of a candle when someone pounded on the door. Tanya’s aunt stood on the threshold, wrapped in three scarves, covered in snow.
“Vaska! It’s bad!” she shouted over the wind. “Tanya… it’s not time yet, but she— it started! No phone service, and an ambulance won’t make it from the district in this mess. The roads are buried!”
Vasily jumped up so fast he knocked a chair over. The heart he thought had turned to stone hammered in his throat.
“Mikhálych has a tractor!” he yelled back. “Go home—I’ll be there!”
He ran through the drifts without feeling the cold. He knew the old Belarus tractor at the sawmill was the only machine that could break through to the highway where rescuers were stationed. There was one problem: in deep frost the engine wouldn’t start without warming, and there was no time.
Vasily moved like a madman. He hauled boiling water from the boiler house, lit torches, warmed the crankcase, begged every god he’d once mocked when he dreamed of millions. When the engine finally coughed and belched black smoke, he shouted in relief.
For two hours he carved a road through the storm—two hours that felt like forever. The tractor bucked, snow blinded him, but he saw only Tanya’s face—the one from the life before, when she smiled at him without knowing betrayal.
When he got her to the district maternity ward, carrying her into admissions with his own arms, he looked like a sculpture made of ice. His coat—the same “millionaire” coat he still wore as a reminder of his shame—was now shredded beyond saving.
“Wait in the corridor!” a nurse barked as the doors shut in his face.
He collapsed onto a hard plastic chair. His head was empty. In that moment he didn’t care about any money on earth. He would have given a hundred million—if he had it—just to hear one single cry.
Dawn found him in the same position. The doors opened, and an older doctor came out, wiping sweat from her brow.
“Are you the father?”
Vasily hesitated. The word burned. Did he have the right to it?
“I… yes. How is she?”
“A boy. Three point two kilos. Strong lungs, loud as anything. The mother’s resting—she had a hard time, but she did well. She kept whispering a name the whole time… I think it was yours. You can go in—just for a minute.”
He stepped into the room on tiptoe, afraid his heavy boots would shatter the fragile miracle. Tanya lay by the window, pale, but strangely beautiful in the cold winter sunlight. Beside her was a tiny bundle.
Vasily stopped a meter away. He didn’t dare come closer.
“Tanya…” he whispered. “Forgive me. Again. And forever.”
She slowly opened her eyes. There was no icy wall in them anymore—only a deep, hard-earned wisdom.
“You know, Vasya,” she said softly, “when the doctors told me I had to fight, I thought about that ticket. That fake. And I realized I’m… grateful to Sergey.”
Vasily flinched. “Why?”
“Because otherwise I would never have known who I was married to. And you would never have learned who you are. We needed that collapse to build something real. Not out of gold—but out of…” She nodded toward the baby. “Out of this.”
She reached out her hand—weak and thin. Vasily took it carefully in his rough palms and pressed his forehead to her fingers. He cried for the first time in thirty years—not tears of self-pity, but something clean, something that burned the poison out.
“I finished the house, Tanya,” he said, swallowing hard. “It’s small, on the edge of the forest. It’s warm. No yachts—just a stove, and the smell of pine. I… can I bring you home?”
Tanya looked at him for a long time, then gave the faintest smile.
“You can. But promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“Never gamble again. We already won our real prize.”
A year later, a light burned in a small house at the edge of the village. A wooden rocking horse stood on the porch, carved so well any city shop would have paid a fortune for it. Vasily sat at the table sketching plans for a new greenhouse for Tanya.
His work phone—which he now kept on only when necessary—pinged. A message from Sergey: “Vasyan, listen, I’ve got a deal! New scam—crypto, you can make a killing in a week… You in?”
Vasily glanced at his sleeping wife, at his son snuffling softly in the crib, and at his own battered hands. He didn’t reply. He simply deleted the number and blocked the contact forever.
He already had his million.
And this time, it was real.