Our housewarming felt more like a coronation ceremony. My mother-in-law, Svetlana Petrovna, marched into our new two-bedroom apartment like a tax inspector arriving for an audit—grand, intimidating, and clearly ready to count my remaining nerves one by one. Behind her trailed my husband, Ilya, wearing the blissful expression of a cheerful spaniel, while my sister-in-law Yulia and her husband Vitya brought up the rear. Vitya carried a box with such exaggerated care that you’d think it held not a household appliance, but the ashes of his shattered dreams.
“Well then!” Svetlana Petrovna declared, pointing dramatically at the table. “This is for you. So you can capture every moment of your family happiness!”
Inside the box was a camera. Not some cheap little point-and-shoot, but a serious professional DSLR worth as much as a small airplane part. Ilya and I exchanged a stunned look. It was shockingly generous. Usually, presents from his family consisted of towel sets that faded at the mere sight of water or salad bowls that looked like they’d been designed in prehistoric times.
“Thanks, Mom,” Ilya said, genuinely touched. “This is… wow.”
“Use it properly,” Vitya said in the tone of a benevolent aristocrat, adjusting a tie that seemed to be choking him like a mortgage payment. “This is serious equipment. Japanese. Don’t mix up the buttons, and don’t go touching the lens with your fingers.”
For a month, life was blissful. I learned the settings, took endless pictures of the cat—who, I must say, looked absolutely magnificent—and Ilya was proud of it all. Then the phone rang.
It was Yulia. Her voice was so sugary sweet I nearly got diabetes through the speaker.
“Olechka, hi! Listen, we’ve got a little situation… Mishutka has a kindergarten performance. He’s playing the Noble Mushroom. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime memory! Could we borrow the camera for just one day? Vitya will snap a few pictures and return it in the evening.”
Something inside me instantly tightened. My intuition, that old street-smart rat, began throwing itself into hysterics. But the moment Ilya heard the request, he lit up.
“Of course! He’s our nephew! What are they supposed to do, photograph the Noble Mushroom on a phone? That’s hardly respectable.”
So the camera went off with the relatives.
It did not come back that evening.
It did not come back a week later either.
When I called Vitya, he answered in the tone of a busy executive who had been interrupted during something important.
“Olya, you don’t understand. The files are in RAW format. They weigh as much as a cast-iron bridge. My computer is old, it digests them slowly. I need to convert them, process them, do color correction… I’m trying to make everything beautiful!”
“Vitya,” I said calmly while stirring soup, “this was a kindergarten performance, not a magazine photo shoot. Return the camera. I’ll transfer the files myself.”
“Olya, your understanding of technology is as shallow as a water strider,” Vitya replied smugly. “This requires depth. Be patient.”
Then he hung up.
I looked at Ilya. My husband sat there staring into his plate, doing an excellent impression of an old rag.
“He just wants to do it right,” he mumbled.
Another month passed. Every attempt I made to get our property back slammed into a reinforced concrete wall of absurd excuses. First, Vitya claimed his Windows had “crashed.” Then he said he had “run out of space on the hard drive,” and apparently the whole family was saving up for an external one.
“Vitya,” I said the next time they came over—without the camera, naturally, though not without an appetite for pie—“tell me honestly, are you redrawing the pixels by hand over there?”
Vitya puffed himself up like a Thanksgiving turkey, sipped his tea with great importance, and announced:
“Olya, you’re a humanities person. You can’t understand the complexities of digital existence. The clipboard is overloaded from metadata caching. It requires delicacy.”
“Vitya,” I said, smiling at him the way a psychiatric nurse smiles at a difficult patient, “the clipboard clears with a restart, and cache is not the place where you hide your emergency cash from Yulia. Don’t confuse the terms, or your processor might overheat.”
Vitya nearly choked on his bun, turned red, and snapped:
“You’re mean. You never let creativity blossom.”
As if his “creativity” amounted to anything more than smeared photos of a child dressed like a mushroom.
The ending came suddenly. The next time I demanded the camera back, Svetlana Petrovna—who until then had stayed officially neutral—suddenly went on the attack.
“Olya, honestly, how long is this going to go on?!” she barked over the phone. “We gave you the camera back two weeks ago! When we stopped by to pick up those jars!”
I froze.
“Svetlana Petrovna, you brought nothing back.”
“Ilyusha!” my mother-in-law shouted into the phone. “Has your wife completely lost her mind? Forgotten already? We gave it back in a blue bag! Olya, go take some glycine—your memory is like a guppy’s!”
Ilya blinked in confusion.
“Olya… maybe they did? Maybe I put it somewhere and forgot?”
Then they began gaslighting me with professional precision, all three of them in harmony. Yulia chimed in, insisting she saw Vitya set the bag down in the hallway. Vitya, with the injured dignity of an offended nobleman, claimed his honesty was purer than tears themselves. I tore the entire apartment apart.
There was no bag.
There was no camera.
There was only the growing feeling that they all thought I was an idiot—and I hated that feeling.
The truth surfaced from the most unexpected place. I was browsing Avito for a humidifier—heating season was drying out my skin—and suddenly there it was.
“DSLR camera for sale. Excellent condition. Used only a couple of times. Urgent sale. Open to negotiation.”
It was our camera.
I didn’t recognize it by the serial number. No. I recognized it by the strap. I had attached a tiny cat-paw charm to it myself, and in the photo someone was awkwardly trying to cover it with their finger. But the biggest clue was the background. The camera was lying on a rug.
That rug.
The legendary rug with deer on it.
A wave of cold fury washed over me. Not the hot kind that makes you want to smash plates. The icy, controlled kind a sniper feels while adjusting for the wind.
“Ilya, come here,” I called.
He came over and looked at the screen.
“Oh. One just like ours…”
“Ilya, look at the charm. And look at the deer. See that broken antler? Who burned that antler with a cigarette on New Year’s in 2018?”
He went pale. The puzzle pieces clicked together in his head with brutal clarity. His family had not merely taken the gift. They had blamed me for losing it so they could sell it.
“I’m calling Mom,” he said, reaching for his phone.
“No,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “We’re going to do something smarter. We’re going to buy it.”
I created a fake account. I wrote to the seller under the name “Viktor.” We arranged to meet an hour later outside a shopping mall. “Viktor” wrote that the item was personal, that it broke his heart to part with it, and that he urgently needed money for treatment… for a bad back.
Naturally.
Carrying around that much dishonesty must be murder on the spine.
We drove to the mall. I put on a baseball cap and dark glasses, feeling like the heroine of a spy thriller. Ilya was a nervous wreck, trembling like a leaf in the wind.
“Olya, maybe we don’t need the police? Maybe we can sort this out ourselves?”
“Oh, we need them, Ilyusha. We absolutely need them. Otherwise next month they’ll put your kidney on Avito and claim you misplaced it yourself.”
Vitya arrived at the meeting spot, glancing nervously around while clutching the bag to his chest. At first he didn’t recognize us—my cap had done its job—but the moment I took off my sunglasses, his face stretched so long I thought his chin might scrape the pavement.
“Hello there, ‘bad back,’” I said sweetly. “Show me the merchandise.”
Vitya began backing away.
“Olya? Ilya? I… I was just… bringing it to you! I thought I’d surprise you! I cleaned the sensor and was on my way!”
“On Avito? For fifty thousand?” Ilya asked. His voice sounded different—cold, metallic. Apparently the deer with the burned antler had finally broken something inside him.
That was when the police officers stepped in. We had called them ahead of time, explained the situation, and shown them the documents for the camera. Thank goodness we had kept the box and the receipt.
What followed was pure circus.
Vitya tried to run.
“It’s a mistake!” he screeched. “It’s mine! Someone set me up!”
At the station, the performance continued. Svetlana Petrovna came storming in like a fury ready to burn everything in sight.
“Let my son-in-law go!” she screamed at the desk officer. “This is a family matter! My son gave it, my son-in-law is selling it, it’s nobody else’s business!”
“Ma’am, lower your voice,” the captain said tiredly.
“Do you even know who I am?!” she shouted. “I’ll file a complaint! You’ll lose your badges!”
“Mom, shut up,” Ilya said quietly.
For the first time in his life.
Svetlana Petrovna practically choked on her own saliva and fell silent.
The outcome was exactly what you’d expect. Vitya was sentenced to community service. Now he clears snow in an orange safety vest, and honestly, that color does wonders for his complexion. Svetlana Petrovna was fined for insulting a police officer while on duty—her rant about “crooks in uniform” cost her a third of her pension.
Not long ago, she called Ilya. She cried, played on his sympathy, and said we were ungrateful, that we had destroyed the family over “a piece of plastic.” Ilya listened in silence, then finally said:
“Mom, the plastic has nothing to do with it. The problem is that some people think family ties are a license to steal. Turns out that license has expired.”
And then he hung up.
As for the camera, we decided to sell it after all and use the money to buy ourselves a vacation. Somewhere far away from this circus. Somewhere with no deer on the rugs and no relatives with sticky fingers.