Alina came home late, but her heart felt light. Kirill met her in the hallway, taking the shopping bags from her hands and helping her out of her coat. She gave him a tired smile.
“You’re practically glowing tonight,” Kirill observed. “Did you arrange something for your parents again?”
“I paid for a vacation for them. Two weeks by the sea,” Alina admitted as she slipped off her shoes. “Dad has dreamed about going for years, but Mom always refused. She kept saying it was too expensive.”
“You did the right thing,” he said with a nod. “It’s your money and your decision. I have no reason to interfere.”
“Thank you for never once giving me a hard time about it,” she replied quietly. “Some couples would start a war over something like this.”
Kirill laughed and carried the bags into the kitchen. He had always known how to soften a difficult evening with a few casual jokes. Alina followed him, feeling the tension of the entire day gradually leave her body.
“You earn three times as much as I do, by the way,” he said as he unpacked the groceries. “And you’ve never used it against me. You deserve a monument for that alone.”
“I don’t need a monument,” she scoffed. “I need a decent dinner and a husband who doesn’t burn the frying pan.”
“That hurts. I’m practically a professional.” He winked at her. “Assuming turning fried eggs into charcoal counts as a profession.”
They sat down to eat, and the conversation flowed as easily as it always did. Alina told him about her parents and how emotional her father had become when he found out about the trip. Kirill listened with his cheek resting against one hand, inserting jokes at the most unexpected moments.
“You know,” she said, “I have never taken a single coin from our shared budget for my parents. Everything I give them comes from my own earnings.”
“I never doubted that,” he replied with a shrug. “You’re honest to the point of being irritating. Sometimes excessively so.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s perfect. It just makes arguing with you boring because you’re always right.”
She threw a napkin at him, but he dodged it with ease.
The evening ended in laughter. Neither of them could have imagined that the seaside vacation would soon become the spark that set off a much larger fire.
A few days later, Kirill came home looking unusually gloomy. He wandered around the kitchen for several minutes, clearly rehearsing something in his head, until Alina finally called him out.
“Tell me what happened,” she said. “You look like someone who swallowed a lemon and is pretending it was candy.”
“My mother called,” Kirill said with a sigh. “Your parents told her about the vacation.”
“And?” Alina raised an eyebrow. “Is she jealous?”
“Worse.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “She expects me to arrange the same kind of trip for her. And she isn’t asking politely. She says that because we share a household budget, support for our parents should be divided equally.”
Alina slowly placed her cup on the table. She remained silent for several seconds before answering calmly, without anger.
“Kirill, I support my parents with my own money. Not yours and not ours. I use what I personally earn.”
“I know,” he replied quickly. “That’s exactly what I told her.”
“And what did she say?”
“She started screaming that I had betrayed her. She said I had ‘sold myself to another family.’ Those were her exact words.”
Alina gave a humorless smile. Her eyes remained cold. She stood, walked over to the window and rested against the sill without looking outside.
“Listen, I don’t mind helping people,” she said at last. “But I never agreed to finance someone else’s whims. If your mother wants to go to the seaside, she is free to do so. Just not with my money.”
“I’m not asking you to pay,” Kirill said, raising both hands. “Do you really think that little of me?”
“I think you’re a decent man,” Alina replied sharply. “A man who knows the difference between loving his mother and giving in to blatant extortion.”
Despite himself, he smiled at her choice of words. Even when she was annoyed, she had a way of saying things that made him want to write them down.
“Greed impoverishes the person who gives in to it,” Alina continued. “Your mother is robbing herself right now. She simply hasn’t realized it yet.”
“That’s beautifully put,” Kirill said. “And unfortunately accurate.”
“So here is my position,” she continued. “If you want to send her to a health resort, you can find the money yourself. I won’t stand in your way, but I won’t contribute either.”
“That’s fair,” he agreed. “More than fair.”
The conversation ended without an argument, but the unpleasant feeling remained. Kirill knew his mother would not let the matter go easily.
He was proven right much sooner than he would have liked.
Valentina Petrovna began calling constantly. She phoned in the morning, during the day and late at night. Every conversation became an interrogation filled with accusations.
“Well?” she would demand without so much as saying hello. “Have you found the money yet, or are you still lying around on the sofa doing nothing?”
“Hello to you too,” Kirill would answer. “I’m looking for extra work, but decent opportunities don’t appear overnight.”
“Looking, he says!” her voice would rise through the phone. “Your mother ruined her health raising you, and you can’t even scrape together enough for a miserable boarding house!”
“I’m trying,” he would say. “But I don’t have a magic button that prints money.”
“Your precious wife certainly seems to have one!” his mother would shriek. “Her parents get vacations, new clothes and groceries, while your own mother is expected to sit on a bench outside and rot!”
“She spends her own money,” Kirill repeated patiently. “She has every right to do that.”
“Her right!” Valentina Petrovna nearly choked on the words. “So I have no rights at all? Now some outsider gets to decide who receives money and how much?”
“Do not speak about my wife that way,” Kirill warned, his voice hardening.
“How else am I supposed to speak about her?” his mother shouted. “She has you wrapped around her finger! You’re living under her thumb and enjoying it. Disgusting!”
Kirill listened as she became tangled in her own fury. Anger rose inside him, but he forced himself to remain calm. A part of him still believed he might be able to reason with her.
At the very least, he felt he had to try.
“Mom,” he said more quietly, “let me come over. We can sit down and talk calmly.”
“I don’t need your conversations!” she snapped. “I need money! The same money your in-laws have! They’re living it up at resorts while I’m stuck here suffering!”
“No one is living it up,” he objected. “You’re making yourself angry over something that has nothing to do with you.”
“Drive a taxi at night!” his mother barked. “Get behind the wheel and earn something instead of giving me lectures! Are you a man or a doormat?”
Kirill said nothing. Through the phone, he could hear her breathing heavily, filled with what she considered righteous anger.
“Nothing to say?” she asked triumphantly. “That’s what I thought. You’re weak, just like your father.”
Kirill ended the call without saying goodbye.
His hands had tightened into fists, but he forced his fingers to relax.
For several weeks, he genuinely searched for additional work. He accepted temporary jobs, took assignments he had never considered before and came home completely exhausted. Alina watched all of it in silence, but her concern grew with every passing day.
“You’re going to destroy yourself,” she told him one evening. “And for what? So she will finally be satisfied? She won’t be.”
“I know,” Kirill replied heavily. “But I needed to try. Otherwise, I would always wonder whether I could have done more.”
“You tried,” Alina said gently. “Now stop.”
Before he could answer, his phone rang again. His mother’s name appeared on the screen. Without quite knowing why, Kirill put the call on speaker.
“Well?” came the familiar shriek. “How much have you collected? Or did your wife spend everything on another pair of boots?”
“Mom, I’ve been working almost every day,” Kirill said. “And do you know what? I’m tired of this circus.”
“Circus?” she gasped. “You think I’m putting on a circus, you ungrateful parasite? I gave birth to you, and now you’re putting on a performance for me!”
“You did not give birth to me so I could spend the rest of my life financing every whim you have,” Kirill answered firmly. “I am not your personal cash machine.”
“You vile little bastard!” Valentina Petrovna exploded. “So strangers get everything, while your own mother gets nothing? I swear I’ll curse you!”
“Go ahead,” he replied coldly. “Just speak louder. I can barely hear you.”
Alina stood nearby and watched without interfering. This was not her battle, and she understood that.
“You’ve become exactly like that wife of yours!” his mother screamed, stumbling over her own words. “She turned you into a spineless fool! If you had married a decent woman, you would know how to respect your mother!”
“I did marry a decent woman,” Kirill said clearly. “The best woman I could have asked for. Apparently, I wasn’t quite as fortunate when it came to my mother.”
For one brief second, the line went silent.
Then another stream of insults poured through the speaker, bitter and sticky with resentment and greed.
“How dare you!” she yelled. “I sacrificed my whole life for you! And now you’re hiding behind your wife’s skirt! Coward! Weakling! You should be driving a taxi instead of complaining!”
“That’s enough,” Kirill said quietly.
“What do you mean, enough?” she continued. “You haven’t heard the end of this! I’ll tell everyone what kind of son I raised!”
He did not listen any longer.
He ended the call and muted his phone. The screen kept lighting up with his mother’s name, but Kirill looked at it with complete calm.
“That’s it,” he told Alina. “I’m done looking for ways to please her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely.” He nodded. “There comes a point when patience stops being a virtue. I’ve reached it.”
From that evening onward, Kirill made a cold and deliberate decision.
He continued paying for his mother’s medication and basic seasonal clothing, but he refused to cover anything else. There would be no health resorts, seaside vacations or gifts purchased merely so she would not feel inferior to Alina’s parents.
Valentina Petrovna kept calling for a long time, but he stopped answering.
She sent furious messages and received only silence in return. She tried passing complaints through relatives and mutual acquaintances, claiming she was “dying from heartbreak,” but even that failed to produce a response.
“Has he completely lost his mind?” she complained to a neighbor. “He abandoned his own mother because of that woman!”
“Perhaps you were too hard on him,” the neighbor suggested carefully. “He did help you.”
“Helped me?” Valentina Petrovna scoffed. “He gave me scraps! I deserve a proper vacation like everyone else!”
But even those so-called scraps stopped exactly where she herself had drawn the line.
The money for medicine arrived on time. Kirill helped her buy necessary clothing when the seasons changed. Everything else remained nothing more than an angry fantasy.
Months passed.
Valentina Petrovna sat alone in her kitchen, replaying the telephone arguments in her mind. She called her son again and again, only to hear endless ringing disappear into silence.
“Please answer,” she muttered as she pressed the call button once more. “What would it cost you just to answer?”
The ringing ended with voicemail.
She threw the phone aside, then picked it up again moments later. She kept imagining that if Kirill heard her voice, everything would return to the way it had been.
“Maybe he’ll call,” she told herself. “He’ll calm down, forgive me and call. He’s my son.”
But he did not call.
And the in-laws she had despised for receiving expensive vacations continued traveling, paid for by a daughter who loved them without keeping score and without demanding repayment.
“I was such a fool,” Valentina Petrovna whispered one day, staring at the dark screen of her phone. “Why did I behave like that? Why did I demand and scream?”
She remembered how gentle her son had been at the beginning. He had offered to visit her, talk everything through and find a reasonable solution.
She had driven him away.
She had insulted him, called him weak and compared him to a doormat. Now those words returned to her as echoes in the empty kitchen.
“I already had everything,” she said to no one. “He helped me. He cared about me. Whenever I called, he came. And I ruined it myself with my own mouth.”
She gripped the phone as though it could somehow return what she had thrown away for the sake of greed and wounded pride.
But the screen remained silent, and there was no trace of pity in that silence.
“How did this happen?” Valentina Petrovna whispered, pressing her son’s name over and over again, even though he would never answer her calls again. “I had everything. I lost it all myself. How did I let this happen? How?”