“Andrey, for God’s sake, look at me. I can barely stand,” Nadezhda said quietly, almost in a whisper, trying to keep her voice soft and homely. She sat down on the edge of the sofa, awkwardly tucking her legs beneath her, as if she were afraid to take up too much space in her own living room. “Maybe this weekend you could go to your parents yourself? Just take them the groceries and medicine?”
Her husband, without lifting his eyes from his tablet, lazily shrugged one shoulder. His face carried the absolute calm of a man who was certain the storm would pass him by.
“Nadya, why are you starting again? You know I can’t stand the smell in their apartment. And Mom is waiting for you. She wanted you to wash her curtains. You’re the handy one in the family, and I’ll only get in the way there.”
Nadezhda took a deep breath, gathering the last scraps of her patience. Inside her, a thin string of irritation had already begun to vibrate, but she was still trying to silence it with reason.
“Andrey, listen to me. I’m really asking you. My project is on fire, I’ve slept four hours in two days. I physically won’t be able to climb a ladder there and hang curtains. Why don’t you hire a cleaning service? I’ll give you the contacts. They’ll do everything perfectly. I hope you understand: I just need one day of silence.”
Andrey finally deigned to turn his head. His eyes showed sincere surprise mixed with faint disgust, as if she had suggested he swallow a whole lemon.
“A cleaning service? Strangers in my parents’ home? Are you out of your mind? My mother will go crazy with suspicion. No, Nadya. It’s your duty as a woman to create comfort. Sveta left, so now it’s on you. I thought you understood such simple things. You’re strong, aren’t you? You’re a ‘deputy director,’” he emphasized her position with mockery, “so organize the process. With your own hands.”
Nadezhda felt something snap inside her. The disappointment was bitter as wormwood. She looked at her husband — his relaxed posture, his well-fed face, that eternal tablet — and realized she was speaking to a wall. For twenty years she had been talking to a wall, one she herself had plastered, painted, and decorated.
“So you don’t care that I’m falling apart from exhaustion?” Nadezhda’s voice grew harder, and in it appeared the tone that usually made her subordinates on construction sites stand at attention. “You don’t care that I’m asking for help for the first time in six months? Do you really think I’m made of iron?”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Andrey waved her off, burying himself in the screen again. “Hysterical woman. You’ll rest in the garden. Fresh air is good for you. You can water the beds while you’re there. Father complained everything’s dry.”
Rage struck her head like a hot wave. Nadezhda sprang up from the sofa. In two steps, she crossed the distance to the coffee table.
“Oh, fresh air is good for me?!” she screamed so loudly that the crystal vase on the shelf gave a pitiful ring. “The garden beds?!”
She grabbed the heavy TV remote. Andrey flinched, fearfully hunching his shoulders, expecting a blow, but Nadezhda hurled the remote onto the floor with all her strength. The plastic cracked and scattered into pieces, batteries rolling across the parquet.
“I am not your tractor, Andrey! I am not your maid and not your hired labor!” She loomed over him, grabbed the collar of his house T-shirt, and shook him hard. “You’re a healthy grown man! You have two arms and two legs! You want your parents’ curtains washed? Get up and wash them! You want garden beds? Take a shovel and dig!”
“What… what’s wrong with you?” he stammered, trying to pry her fingers loose, but Nadezhda’s grip was iron. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Yes! I have!” She shoved him away so sharply that he collapsed sideways onto the cushions. “I’ve made a decision. From this moment on, Andrey, every problem of your precious, completely spoiled relatives is your problem. Yours personally. I won’t lift a finger anymore. Not with money, not with my hands, not with advice. Handle it yourself.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” he hissed, straightening his T-shirt, his face blotching with humiliation. “That’s betrayal of the family.”
“Family?” Nadezhda smiled coldly, and that coldness was more frightening than her shouting. “There hasn’t been a family here for a long time. There’s me — a workhorse — and there’s all of you, passengers in the cart. End of the line, Andrey. Get out.”
Nadezhda went into the bedroom, where perfect order reigned — order she maintained at the cost of her own sleep. She was shaking. This was not just a quarrel. It was a mutiny on a ship she had personally built, tarred, and dragged through every reef for years. For twenty years she had been “that Nadya” — the one who would solve it, arrange it, pay for it, bring it.
She worked as a project manager for the relocation of super-heavy cargo. She transported factory machines, museum exhibits, and once even supervised the moving of an entire wooden church. She knew how to calculate loads, understood strength of materials and logistics. Yet somehow, she had never calculated the load on her own soul.
Ten minutes later, her son Mikhail appeared in the doorway. He was a copy of his father — just as relaxed, just as used to the idea that bread rolls grew on trees already sliced.
“Mom, Dad’s yelling that you broke the remote,” he yawned. “Can you send me some money? Lenka and I are going to a festival. Tickets are almost sold out.”
Nadezhda looked at her son. A grown man, twenty-one years old. Studying on paid tuition, living here, eating from the fridge she filled.
“No,” she cut him off.
Mikhail stopped yawning.
“What do you mean? You promised last week.”
“The situation has changed, Misha. The source of funding has been shut off. Want to go to a festival? Go work. As a mover, courier, anything.”
“Mom, why are you starting? Dad said it’s just menopause.”
Nadezhda did not bother explaining. She walked up to her son, turned him by the shoulders — even though he was a head taller than her — and pushed him out into the hallway.
“Out of my room. And tell your father that if he says the word ‘menopause’ one more time, I’ll cancel his authorization to use the car.”
That evening, she did not cook dinner. She sat down at her computer and bought a train ticket. Karelia. A tourist lodge somewhere in the wilderness, where pine trees creaked in the wind and the internet only worked if you climbed the tallest spruce.
Andrey stomped around the apartment, loudly slamming doors for effect. Then her mother-in-law called.
“Nadenka, Andryusha told me you’re tired?” Tamara Ilyinichna’s voice was soaked in poison sweetened with flattery. “Well, rest for an hour, dear, and then come over. Father’s sciatica is acting up. The potatoes need hilling. It’s only three hundred square meters.”
“Tamara Ilyinichna, write down this number,” Nadezhda said, dictating the phone number of a local handyman service. “Their rate is five hundred rubles an hour. Andrey will pay. All the best.”
She hung up and blocked the number. Then she blocked her father-in-law’s number. After thinking for a moment, she temporarily added her husband’s number to the blacklist as well.
The next morning, while the whole household was asleep, she took a sports bag, threw in a warm sweater, comfortable boots, and a book she had been unable to finish for three years. On the kitchen table, she left a note:
“Food is in the store. Money is in the bank. Instructions for the washing machine are on the internet. I’ll be back in two weeks. Or I won’t.”
Karelia greeted her with a piercing wind and a low gray sky. Nadezhda stood on the shore of a lake, looking at the lead-colored water, and for the first time in many years, she did not feel a concrete slab pressing down on her shoulders.
The first three days were withdrawal. Her hand kept reaching for the phone — to check work emails, to find out how those helpless “domestic invalids” were doing. She imagined apocalyptic scenes: Andrey burning down the kitchen while trying to boil dumplings; Mikhail dying of hunger in front of a full refrigerator; her husband’s parents cursing her entire bloodline to the seventh generation.
But the phone was silent because she simply did not turn it on.
She walked through the forest, breathing in the smell of wet moss and damp pine needles. She remembered who she had been before marriage. Cheerful, bold, ambitious. She had not been afraid to take risks. Back then, Andrey had won her over with his calmness. She had mistaken it for reliability. In reality, it was inertia — heavy and sticky like a swamp.
In the forest, she screamed a lot. She walked far away, where there were only rocks, and shouted at the top of her lungs, releasing twenty years of unspoken resentment, twenty years of “you must,” “you should,” and “be patient.”
By the end of the second week, she understood the most important thing. She was not just tired. She had lost respect. For Andrey, yes — but more frighteningly, for herself. For allowing others to ride on her back.
The decision came by itself, cold and clear as lake water. She could not return to her old life. The mechanism she had created worked only on her fuel. Remove her, and everything would collapse. So let it collapse. Sometimes the most beautiful flowers grow on ruins.
She turned on her phone only on the train. Two hundred missed calls. Messages ranging from threats to pleas. The last one was from her husband:
“Nadya, we’re out of toilet paper. Where do you usually buy it?”
Nadezhda burst out laughing. Loudly, across the whole carriage. People turned to look, but she did not care. It was the laughter of freedom.
The apartment greeted her with the smell of stale garbage and unwashed dishes. A mountain of plates with dried food scraps had grown in the sink. Socks were scattered on the floor.
Andrey was sitting in front of the television, thinner and angry. When he saw his wife, he did not stand up. He only threw her a venomous look.
“So you’ve shown up? Our little vacationer. Do you even understand what you’ve done? My mother was bedridden with high blood pressure, and my father almost died in the garden!”
Without taking off her coat, Nadezhda walked into the room. She did not shout. She went to the television and pulled the plug from the socket.
“Stand up,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Stand up, I said!” she barked, and Andrey jumped.
“We’re getting divorced, Andrey.”
“What? Because of some garden beds? Are you sick? Who’s going to need you at forty-five?”
“I need myself,” she said. “That’s enough.”
She walked to the table and took out a folder with documents.
“The apartment was bought with my money, but I’m generous enough to give you one week to move out. You can stay with your parents. They need help, after all.”
“You won’t do this. We were married in church!”
“God may forgive. I won’t.”
At that moment, Mikhail walked in. He looked different. There were traces of paint on his hands, and his clothes were rumpled.
“Oh, Mom, hi. You’re back? Listen, there’s something…” He hesitated. “I found a job.”
Nadezhda froze. Andrey opened his mouth.
“What kind of job?” she asked carefully.
“At a workshop. We make decorations out of foam and plastic. It’s actually pretty cool. They even paid me for the trial week.”
Nadezhda looked at her son. For the first time in a long while, there was interest in his eyes instead of the dull boredom of a consumer.
“I’m glad,” she nodded. “Because your father and I are getting divorced, and the free ride is officially over.”
Andrey turned crimson, clenched his fists, and stepped toward her.
“You bitch… You think I’ll disappear? I… I’ve been due for a promotion at work for ages. They value me there! I just didn’t want to upset you, so you wouldn’t feel inferior!”
“Excellent,” Nadezhda said with an icy smile. “Then show us what you can do. Pack your things. Right now.”
She practically threw him out the door. She did not listen to his shouting and did not react to his threats. She simply grabbed his belongings by the armful and tossed them onto the landing. When Andrey tried to grab her arm, she used an aikido move she had learned about ten years earlier, and he flopped clumsily onto his backside.
“Leave, Andrey. Or I’ll call security.”
The door slammed shut. The lock clicked. What remained was only a hollow, ringing emptiness — one that now had to be filled with something real.
Three months passed. October painted the boulevard lindens gold. Nadezhda walked home from work, savoring every step. She no longer rushed to the store, no longer counted seconds to make dinner for a crowd. She was heading to a café to drink coffee and eat an éclair, simply because she wanted to.
At the metro entrance, she came face-to-face with Alyona, her son’s girlfriend. The girl was carrying a huge bag of groceries.
“Nadezhda Viktorovna!” Alyona said happily. “Hello!”
“Hi, Alyona. Why are you carrying so much? Isn’t Misha helping?”
“He’s on shift. They’re swamped at work, some Halloween order,” the girl waved it off. “And I’m just coming from your relatives. From Tamara Ilyinichna.”
“What do you mean?” Nadezhda raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“Well… I work for them now. As a household helper. I come twice a week, clean, cook, bring groceries.”
“They pay you?!” Nadezhda’s amazement was sincere. Tamara Ilyinichna would have strangled herself over a single coin.
“They pay. What choice do they have?” Alyona chuckled cheerfully. “At first they screamed and demanded that Misha help for free. But Misha said, ‘Grandma, I have a job, and Lenka’s time costs money.’ They fought about it and then agreed. Andrey Nikolaevich is very busy now, you know. He can’t come often.”
“Oh? And how is he?”
“Oh, it’s a whole circus,” Alyona lowered her voice. “He became head of department, just like he said he would. He got the position after all.”
Nadezhda nodded. So he had not lied. He really had forced his way into the promotion.
“And is he happy?”
“Not at all!” Alyona laughed. “Now he has responsibility over his head. Before, he just sat around doing nothing, but now he gets fined for mistakes. He visits his parents once a month, all twitchy, yelling at everyone. Complains that everyone around him is an idiot, that his subordinates are stupid, that the reports don’t balance. He says he used to think managing was easy — just sit in a chair and give orders. But now he has a stress ulcer. He swallows pills by the handful and whines and whines…”
Nadezhda listened and felt a strange satisfaction.
“And one more thing,” Alyona added, narrowing her eyes mischievously. “Once, while I was there, he said, ‘If only Nadya were here, she’d balance this estimate for me in five minutes.’ And Tamara Ilyinichna told him, ‘You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, fool. You lost a woman like that.’ Can you imagine? Your mother-in-law took your side! Though only after she realized a caregiver costs more than a daughter-in-law.”
Nadezhda laughed.
“Give Misha my regards. Tell him to keep his chin up.”
“I will! Come visit us sometime. We rented an apartment. Housewarming soon.”
Nadezhda continued down the alley. The wind tore yellow leaves from the trees.
Andrey had received everything he wanted — status, power, freedom from his wife’s “tyranny.” But it had turned out to be a trap. He thought a position meant a comfortable chair. Instead, it was a burden. The very burden Nadezhda had carried for so many years without bending. He had broken under it in three months.
Now he was alone: with demanding parents, with a job he could not handle, and with an empty apartment where no one was waiting for him. He had not been punished by fate or by anyone else, but by his own greed and stupidity.
And Nadezhda… Nadezhda adjusted her scarf and smiled at her reflection in the shop window. Her burden was light now — only a handbag with a book inside and her own happy life.