“Blocked my card again?! That’s it, I’m filing for divorce!” Kirill stormed into the kitchen so hard the cabinet door slammed against the wall.
I stood at the stove, stirring the stew. I did not even turn around.
Seven years ago, he had been different. Or maybe I had only imagined it. Handsome, cheerful, full of plans for his own business. I bought into those plans the same way I bought into his smile. Later I realized the smile was the only business he had ever built.
“Are you even listening to me?!” He came closer. He smelled of expensive cologne — the same one I had paid for last month. Four thousand seven hundred rubles. I remembered every number. Occupational hazard of being an accountant.
Kirill had lost his job five years earlier. Sales manager at a construction company. The company really had shut down, that part was true. But in five years, a person could find something. Anything. He never looked. Not a single interview in the past year. I had checked — his “updated” résumé on the job site had not even been opened since the November before last.
“I blocked the card because you withdrew forty-seven thousand in one week,” I said, still staring at the pan. “For what?”
“That’s none of your business!”
“It’s my salary. That makes it my business.”
He sat down on a stool and crossed his arms. His Swiss watch caught the light — the one I had given him for his last birthday. Eighty-two thousand rubles. At the time he had said, “Finally, a decent gift.”
I took out my phone and opened the banking app.
“The twelfth. Restaurant Veranda — seven thousand two hundred. The thirteenth — Bear Bar, four thousand. The fourteenth — Veranda again, nine thousand. And so on, every day. Forty-seven thousand three hundred in a single week.”
Kirill jerked his chin up.
“I was meeting friends. Building connections. For business.”
“What business, Kirill? You’ve been telling me about this business for five years. Where is it?”
“You ruin everything! How am I supposed to think about work when you keep choking the air out of me?!”
I turned off the stove and faced him.
“I make one hundred twenty thousand a month. Eighty goes to groceries, utilities, and gas. That leaves forty. And in one week you spent more than I can save in a month.”
He stood up so fast the stool screeched across the floor.
“Then earn more!”
I gripped the spatula until my fingers turned white. I wanted to throw it at the wall. I did not.
“The card stays blocked,” I said. “If you want money, get a job.”
Kirill grabbed his jacket and slammed the front door behind him. Something crashed in the hallway — probably the coat rack.
I stood alone in the kitchen. The stew had already started to burn. The smell of scorched food drifted through the apartment, and I simply stared at the pan without moving. My hands were still shaking. But inside, everything was clear: I had done the right thing.
That evening he came back. Ate in silence. Lay down on the couch in silence. I was in the bedroom scrolling through my feed. The quiet felt so complete it was as if no one else lived in the apartment. And for the first time in a long while, that silence felt good. I slept more peacefully that night than I had in years.
Two days later, my mother-in-law called.
Valentina — Kirill’s mother — showed up without warning. I had just gotten home from work, changed clothes, and put the kettle on when the doorbell rang.
“Marinochka, hello,” she said, walking in with a bag of cutlets. “I brought these for Kiryuša. Since you don’t feed him.”
Kirill came out of the room wearing only shorts. Tanned, freshly shaved. He hugged his mother.
“Mom, tell her. She blocked my card. I can’t even buy coffee.”
Valentina turned to me. Her eyes went hard.
“Marina, what exactly is this supposed to mean? The husband is the head of the household. You are supposed to make his life comfortable.”
I poured myself tea. My hands were no longer trembling.
“Valentina Petrovna, he spent forty-seven thousand of my money in bars in a single week.”
“A man needs social life! He can’t just sit at home all day.”
“He can. He’s been doing it for five years. Not one interview.”
Kirill flushed.
“Mom, she’s lying! I sent out résumés!”
Without a word, I pulled out my phone and opened the screenshot I had taken from the job site the day before. The date of his last login was right there: November 2024. A year and a half ago.
I held the screen out to Valentina. She put on her glasses, looked at it, and immediately looked away.
“That proves nothing. Maybe he’s searching on other sites.”
“Which ones? Name just one.”
Valentina lifted her chin.
“You’re humiliating your husband. In front of his mother. Aren’t you ashamed?”
“I’m ashamed that I’ve been supporting a healthy grown man for five years and keeping my mouth shut.”
Kirill slapped his palm on the table.
“That’s enough! Mom, this is what she always does — starts counting money and throwing it in my face!”
Valentina patted his shoulder.
“Kiryuša, I’ll transfer you some. Don’t worry.”
I froze and looked at her.
“You’ve been sending him money before too?”
Silence. Valentina looked away.
“How much?” I asked.
“That’s our business,” she answered.
Kirill smirked. A smug, triumphant smirk, as if his mother had just won his case in court.
I set down my cup. I had not even taken a sip.
“Valentina Petrovna. You’re retired. Your pension is twenty-four thousand — you complained about it yourself. And out of that pension, you’re supporting a forty-four-year-old son who is fully capable of working but simply does not want to. And at the same time you’re calling me a bad wife.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“You’re rude,” she finally said. “Kiryuša, come with me. You don’t need to stay here.”
Kirill looked at me, waiting. Waiting for me to say stay. Waiting for me to apologize. Waiting for me to back down.
I said nothing.
He did not leave with her. His mother left alone. She closed the door behind her — not as violently as Kirill usually did, but hard enough.
When her footsteps faded on the stairs, I stood by the window and watched her get into a taxi. Her shoulders were slumped. She had forgotten the bag of cutlets in my kitchen.
I ate one. It was actually good — garlic and dill. And I caught myself thinking how strange it was that she cooked for her son better than he could ever cook so much as a single meal for himself.
But the silence did not last long. On Saturday, Kirill invited friends over.
He had not warned me. I came back from the store and found four pairs of shoes in the hallway. Men’s laughter from the living room. The clink of glasses.
I walked in. There was whiskey on the table. Good whiskey, twelve years old. Three thousand eight hundred a bottle. Two bottles. I knew the price because I had seen the receipt in his jacket pocket the week before. So his mother had transferred money. Or he had found some hidden cash.
“Oh, Marina!” shouted Styopa, his bearded friend. “Come sit with us! Kirill’s treating!”
Kirill’s treating. With my money or his mother’s — either way, not his.
I set the grocery bags down on the floor.
“Kirill, can I talk to you for a second?”
He waved me off.
“Later. I’m busy.”
I stepped closer and lowered my voice so only he could hear.
“Where did the whiskey come from?”
“Mom gave me money,” he hissed. “Don’t start in front of people.”
I nodded, went back to the kitchen, and unpacked the groceries. My hands did what they always did. My mind worked much faster.
Half an hour later, a burst of laughter exploded from the living room. I stepped out to see what was happening. Kirill was holding my tablet, showing something to his friends.
“Look at this,” he cackled. “She keeps a spreadsheet of expenses! Every single purchase! Toothpaste — one hundred eighty-nine rubles!”
Styopa snorted. The other friend, Lyosha, looked away.
“Kir, that’s a bit…” Lyosha began.
“What? Let everyone know! My wife’s a miser! She blocked my card, I don’t even have money to go to the store!”
Then his phone lit up on the table. It was lying faceup. I was standing in the doorway — I saw it clearly. A message in a chat app. A woman’s name. And the first line:
“Baby, what time today?..”
The screen went dark again. Kirill did not notice. He was still laughing.
But I noticed.
A wave of cold ran through me. In the middle of a warm apartment, in the middle of May, I felt as if winter had suddenly moved inside my chest.
I went back to the kitchen, took out my phone, opened the banking app, and started calculating.
Over the past year, I had spent eight hundred thousand rubles on Kirill. His share of the utility bills. Food. Clothes bought with my card. Restaurants. Bars. A barbershop every three weeks for two thousand each visit. A gym membership for four thousand a month — which he had abandoned after two months, though the membership itself had been paid for in full for the year. Forty-eight thousand.
I walked back into the living room and stopped in the doorway.
“Kirill,” I said. My voice was so calm it surprised me. “You just showed my expense spreadsheet to your friends. Let me show them something too.”
He looked at me, still half smiling.
“In the last year,” I said evenly, “I spent eight hundred thousand rubles on you. That includes your food, your clothes, your bars, your barbershop, your gym. Every bit of it came from me. You did not earn one ruble. Not one. And now you’re laughing because I keep track of where my money goes. My money — not ours. Because there is no ours. There is only mine.”
Silence.
Styopa stared at the floor. Lyosha picked up his glass and then set it back down without drinking.
Kirill went pale.
“What are you doing? In front of people?”
“You started it. In front of people.”
I walked out. Behind me the silence hung in the room like a concrete slab.
Fifteen minutes later, the guests left. Quietly. No goodbyes. Kirill stayed in the living room. I heard him pour himself more whiskey.
I closed the bedroom door and lay down. The pillow was cool and I pressed my cheek against it.
But instead of feeling better, I felt worse. Because I could not stop thinking about that notification. A woman’s name. “Baby, what time today?..”
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe a coworker. An ex. Some random acquaintance.
Or maybe it was not nothing at all. And then those eight hundred thousand were not just the cost of supporting a freeloader. They were the cost of supporting a freeloader who was also betraying me.
The next morning, Kirill behaved as if nothing had happened.
For three days I said nothing. I simply watched. He had started hiding his phone. Before, he used to toss it down anywhere, faceup. Now he kept it in his pocket. Plugged it in face down. Even took it to the shower.
I did not snoop. I did not check anything. I only saw.
On the fourth day, he forgot the phone on the kitchen table and went into the bathroom. The screen lit up. The same name. I did not open the messages. I did not need to. Eight new notifications in one hour. Hearts visible in the preview.
Eight messages. Hearts.
I put the phone back exactly where it had been.
That evening Kirill came into the bedroom. Sat down on the edge of the bed. Took my hand.
“Marin,” he said in a soft, warm voice — the old voice, the one he used when he wanted something. “Let’s stop fighting. I’ll go to an interview tomorrow. A serious opportunity came up.”
I looked at his hand over mine. Tanned. Well groomed. The watch on his wrist ticking almost soundlessly.
“What opportunity?” I asked.
“Well… some company. Sales. I’ll tell you later, okay?”
He was lying. I knew it. After five years, you learn to hear the lie in the voice. Whenever he lied, he started with well and avoided eye contact. He would look slightly to the left instead — at your ear, your hair, anywhere but your eyes.
“Okay,” I said.
He smiled, kissed me on the forehead, and left.
The next day, of course, there was no interview. He slept until eleven. Then he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and scrolling through his phone. Later he left to “meet a friend.”
I came home from work to an empty apartment. Quiet. In the kitchen there was a dirty mug and cookie crumbs. He had not even washed his cup.
I stood over that cup and thought: seven years. Five of them like this. Every single day. A dirty cup. Lies. Other women’s messages lighting up his phone. My money vanishing in bars that were never mine.
I am forty-seven. I manage a department of twelve people. I pay the mortgage on an apartment I bought before him. I drive the car I paid for myself. And for five years I have been feeding a grown man who cannot even put a cup in the sink after using it.
For what?
I opened the closet in the hallway and looked at his shoes. Six pairs. All bought with my money. Sneakers for fourteen thousand. Dress shoes for twenty-two. Winter boots for thirty-one.
I closed the closet without touching anything.
But that night I could not sleep. I lay there counting. Not money this time — days. How many more days like this was I willing to live? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
The answer came the next morning.
It was an ordinary morning. Alarm at six-thirty. Coffee. Shower. Work blouse, heels, handbag.
Kirill was asleep on the couch in the living room, sprawled out, blanket on the floor. An empty glass from the night before sat on the coffee table. His phone was next to it, face down.
I went to work. Spent the whole day in meetings. Signed documents, answered emails, solved other people’s problems. As usual.
At lunch, Sveta — my friend and colleague from the neighboring department — called.
“You look pale today,” she said.
“Didn’t sleep well.”
“Him again?”
I said nothing. Sveta knew. She was the only one who knew everything — the money, the way he lived, the messages.
“Marin, you do realize this isn’t going to change.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“And I still don’t know.”
She sighed, but said nothing more. That was what I valued about her — she knew when to stop.
I came home at six in the evening and opened the door.
Kirill was standing in the hallway, red-faced, phone in hand.
“You blocked my card again?!” he shouted so loudly the neighbors next door must have heard every word.
I had not blocked it. Not that day. The last time had been a week earlier, after those forty-seven thousand. Since then I had not touched it.
“I didn’t block anything,” I said, slipping off my shoes.
“You’re lying! I was standing at the checkout and the card got declined! I had to walk out in front of the cashier like some bum!”
I took out my phone and opened the app. The card was active. The limit was zero. He had simply spent everything.
“Kirill, look. The card isn’t blocked. There’s just nothing left on it. You spent it all.”
He snatched my phone, stared at the screen, then threw it back at me. I barely caught it.
“Then you’re putting too little on it! You make one hundred twenty and toss me scraps!”
And then he said the sentence that stopped something inside me cold.
“That’s it. I’m filing for divorce! I’m sick of living with a stingy woman!”
He said it with such confidence, as if he were reading out a court decision. As if he were the wronged party. As if he had spent five years working, building, contributing — and I had been the one wasting his money.
I stood there in the hallway, still in my stockings, my shoes in my hand. And suddenly I felt something click. Not in my head — in my chest. A small, dry click, like a switch being flipped.
“Good,” I said.
He stopped.
“What do you mean, good?”
“Divorce. Good. Let’s do it.”
He blinked. He had not expected that.
“You… what? You’re serious?”
“More serious than ever. Only I’ll be the one filing, not you. And I’m doing it today.”
I walked past him into the bedroom, opened the closet, took out his large black gym bag — the one he had bought for his “workouts” for seven thousand and used exactly twice.
Then I started packing his things. Shirts. Jeans. Underwear.
Kirill stood in the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Packing your things. This apartment is mine. I bought it before the marriage. You know that.”
“You can’t throw me out!”
“I can. You’re not registered here. You’re a guest. A guest who stayed for five years.”
I packed methodically. Sweater. T-shirts. Socks. He stood there staring at me like someone watching the floor being pulled out from under him.
“Marina, wait. Let’s talk.”
“We have talked for seven years. You have promised for five. Enough.”
“I’ll find a job! Tomorrow!”
“You said that three years ago. And two years ago. And last year. Want me to quote you? February twenty-third last year, you said, ‘I swear, next week I’ll go to an interview.’ Which week, Kirill? Week seventy-two?”
He opened his mouth. Then shut it. For the first time in seven years, he had nothing to say.
I walked up to him and took his hand. He flinched — thought I was going to hug him. Instead, I unfastened his watch and slipped it off his wrist. I set it down on the nightstand.
“That was my gift,” he said.
“That was my money. Eighty-two thousand. If you want another one like it, earn it.”
He went white. His jaw tightened. I thought he would yell. Maybe hit me. But he just stood there.
I carried the bag into the hallway and placed it by the door. Came back for his shoes — all six pairs — and stuffed them into shopping bags. Then his jackets. His coat.
Kirill drifted behind me through the apartment like a ghost, muttering things under his breath. “You’ll regret this.” “You can’t make it without me.” “You’re forty-seven, who would even want you?”
I stopped and turned to him.
“I’m forty-seven. I run a department. I have an apartment, a car, and a stable income. You’re forty-four. What you have is a gym bag full of gifts I bought you and your mother’s pension. So tell me — which one of us should really be worried?”
He pulled on his boots, grabbed the bag, and paused at the door.
“You’ll regret this,” he said again, his voice shaking.
“Maybe,” I answered. “But not today.”
The door shut. The lock clicked.
I leaned back against the wall. My legs turned to water. I slid down to the floor and sat there. My tights snagged on the baseboard — I did not care.
Silence.
The kind of silence that had not existed in that apartment for five years. No television blaring from the living room. No clinking glasses. No sound of his voice. Nothing.
I sat on the floor for ten minutes. Then I got up, went to the kitchen, made tea, took cheese out of the fridge, sliced some bread.
I ate slowly, chewing and staring out the window. May. Green leaves. Children in the courtyard kicking a ball around. An ordinary evening. Just without him.
My phone rang. Mother-in-law. I did not answer.
It rang again. I did not answer.
The third time, I silenced it.
Three weeks have passed. Kirill is living with his mother now. He calls every day — sometimes threatening to sue me over “marital property,” sometimes crying into the phone, saying, “Marin, I was an idiot, give me one more chance.” I filed for divorce the very next day. The apartment is mine, bought before the marriage, so there is nothing to divide. The lawyer said the most he could possibly claim was household appliances bought during the marriage. The refrigerator and the washing machine. He can have them.
My mother-in-law sent me a long message saying I had “ruined her son” and “destroyed the family.” I read it. I did not reply.
At work, Sveta asked me:
“So how are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said. And for once that was the truth. Not wonderful. Not happy. Just okay. Like someone who has finally taken off a heavy backpack after a long road — your back still aches, but walking is easier.
My friends split into two camps. Natasha said, “Good for you. It was long overdue.” Irka called and spent two hours explaining that “a man needs time,” that “maybe he would have changed,” that “you acted too fast, threw him out like a dog.”
And I do not know. Maybe I did move too fast. Maybe I should have talked more. Given him another chance. Another year. Washed one more cup after him.
But the watch is still sitting on the nightstand. It keeps ticking. And every time I look at it, I think: eighty-two thousand. Forty-seven thousand in one week. Eight hundred thousand in one year. “Baby, what time today?..”
Was I right to put his things out that very hour? Or should I have given him another chance — talked, waited, tried again? What would you have done in my place?