The neighbor from the next property caught Alina by the gate just as she was setting a bag of seedlings down on the ground. The woman glanced around as though she were afraid even the fence might overhear her, then started speaking quickly and quietly, swallowing half her words.
“Alinochka, you know I’m not one to gossip. But every Wednesday, your car is parked here.”
“Well, it is our car, Nina Pavlovna. It’s not exactly a ghost.”
“Of course it’s yours. Only Roman is the one driving it. And there’s a young woman beside him. A brunette. And believe me, they’re not coming here to tend the garden.”
Alina laughed.
It was a short, dry laugh, like a twig snapping.
“Nina Pavlovna, you’re adorable. According to Roman, Wednesdays are when he goes off to save the world.”
“Well, he is saving someone. One very specific woman. Third week in a row.”
 
Alina picked up the bag, thanked her, and walked toward the house.
Something inside her quietly sank, like dust settling after a door has slammed.
She sat down on the front step and began counting.
Not affairs.
Payments.
Five years of marriage.
They hadn’t had children. First there was university, then, “Let’s enjoy ourselves for at least a year,” followed by, “Maybe two.”
And enjoy themselves they had.
Mountains, beaches, friends, easy money, no serious responsibilities.
The apartment had belonged to Alina’s grandfather, so they didn’t have rent to worry about. The furniture was sturdy and expensive too. Her grandfather had furnished the place like a man convinced he would live forever.
Then his health declined after surgery. He ended up in a wheelchair, and Alina’s mother took him in.
Nobody officially transferred ownership of the apartment. They simply allowed Alina and Roman to live there.
That was when Roman’s wounded pride started bothering him.
“I feel like some kind of dependent living in your apartment,” he used to complain. “My friends joke that I should divorce you so they can marry you instead. You already have everything.”
“Your friends are rich in jokes,” Alina would reply. “Poor in everything else.”
“Alya, I’m serious. We should have something of our own. Let’s buy a country house with a mortgage. Grass, fresh air, a swing in the yard. Then we can finally have kids.”
That last word was what hooked her.
Kids.
The mortgage was taken out in his mother’s name because she had a spotless credit history.
Roman’s credit history, on the other hand, was so bad that nobody would have trusted him with a computer monitor on installments. He had borrowed money before and repaid it whenever he could.
Unfortunately, “whenever he could” usually meant late.
“The plan is simple,” Roman explained at the time, drawing imaginary lines in the air with his finger. “My parents sell their garage and their car and use the money for the down payment. Then we pay off the mortgage.”
“We is an interesting pronoun,” Alina said. “I already have a car loan.”
“You’re not alone! I’ll contribute too!”
 
“Roma, you contribute enthusiasm. Banks don’t accept that at the cash desk.”
He became dramatically offended, marched into the other room, turned on the expensive gaming computer he had supposedly bought “for work,” and spent half the night shooting monsters from a gaming chair that had cost half of Alina’s monthly salary.
The next morning, he brought her breakfast.
Then he said the magic word again.
“Children.”
She agreed.
For six months, everything went smoothly.
The mortgage payment left the account on the first day of every month.
And if Alina was being honest, it mostly left her account.
Then one Wednesday came when she decided not to go where she had originally planned.
The gate at the country house was slightly open.
Their car was parked near the shed.
Inside the cottage, the air smelled of unfamiliar perfume—sweet, cheap, and aggressively strong.
Alina took out her phone, turned on the camera, and pushed open the bedroom door.
The blanket jerked.
Two heads appeared from underneath.
His first, with a strand of hair plastered to his forehead.
Then hers.
 
A brunette, staring at Alina with eyes as round as coins.
“Alya! Alya, you’ve got it all wrong!” Roman sat up and pulled the blanket to his chest like an offended young maiden.
“I haven’t thought anything yet,” Alina said calmly. “I literally just walked in. Please, carry on. Don’t mind me.”
“Stop filming! Put that phone away! What are you doing?!”
“Creating an archive. Your memory isn’t very reliable. Later you’ll probably claim nothing happened.”
The brunette struggled out of the sheet and began snatching her clothes from the floor, breathing quickly and loudly.
Roman started bleating.
There was really no better word for the sound.
“This means nothing! Alya, it was an accident! A mistake!”
“Three Wednesdays in a row isn’t a mistake. That’s a subscription.”
“Who told you?! That old neighbor? She’s lying!”
“She lies with impressive accuracy. Thanks to her testimony, I even found your socks under the table.”
Alina never raised her voice.
She simply stood in the doorway, calm and steady.
That was somehow worse than screaming.
While the other two scrambled to get dressed, Alina opened a government services app on her phone and tapped the screen several times.
“No rush,” she said, finally looking up. “Take your time getting dressed. I’m leaving now. Oh, and I’ve already filed for divorce.”
The brunette gasped, swayed, and slowly collapsed onto the floor.
“She’s fainting! Alya, help her!”
“She has you. You’re the rescuer, remember? Wednesdays are your specialty.”
 
Alina walked to the car, sat behind the wheel for a minute, and rested both hands on it.
Then she called Roman’s mother.
Her voice didn’t tremble once.
“Hello, Tamara Sergeyevna. I’m about to send you a video. Watch it until the end. The most interesting part starts around the second minute.”
“Alechka, what video? What happened?”
“Your son is under a blanket. He isn’t alone. I’ve filed for divorce already. You might want to prepare the sofa for him.”
“Oh God… Alya, wait. Where am I supposed to put him? We only have two rooms, and Dina is in the second one.”
“You and Dina can work that out. She’ll defend her room bravely. I believe in her.”
After that, Alina called no one.
Except a locksmith.
 
He arrived an hour later and replaced the lock in twenty minutes.
While he worked, he casually mentioned that this was already his fourth lock-change request that week under similar circumstances.
Alina paid him, locked the door, and went into the bedroom.
Then she started counting aloud.
Six mortgage payments.
Insurance.
And all the extra money that had come from her card whenever Roman said he was “going through a rough patch.”
She looked at his computer.
Then the gaming chair.
Then the monitor.
“Compensation,” she told the empty room. “Seems fair.”
After that, she began dragging his belongings into the middle of the room.
No folding.
No careful packing.
Trousers, T-shirts, books, chargers, cables, shoes, sneakers, deodorants, certificates from random gaming tournaments, an old helmet, boxes.
The pile eventually reached almost to her waist.
Then Alina called Kirill, Roman’s former friend.
 
Years earlier the two men had fallen out badly over a joint business project. Nobody had ever figured out who had stolen what from whom, but they had stopped speaking completely.
“Alina?” Kirill sounded genuinely surprised. “Is that really you?”
“It is. Kirill, I need an extra pair of hands and a car trunk. I need Roman’s belongings taken to the country house.”
“Where’s Roman?”
“Currently explaining himself to the international community. If he isn’t at the cottage, throw the bags over the fence.”
There was a brief and unmistakably delighted pause.
“Over the fence,” Kirill repeated tenderly. “I’ll even take photos. For documentation purposes.”
He arrived twenty minutes later and worked with such enthusiasm that Alina found herself silently admiring him.
Bags were stuffed.
Knots were tied.
Two bags per trip.
An hour later, the room was empty.
Only the computer, chair, and monitor remained, along with a clean rectangle in the dust where Roman’s boxes had stood.
Kirill drove away.
Almost immediately, another car door slammed outside.
Alina heard footsteps on the stairs.
 
Then came the scrape of a key in the lock.
The key didn’t turn.
The scraping became more aggressive.
“Alya! Alya, open the door! My key isn’t working!”
“The key is fine. The lock is different.”
“You changed the lock?! Are you serious?! In four hours?!”
“Two. The locksmith happened to be available.”
“Open this door right now!” Roman slammed his palm against it. “This is my home too!”
“This is my grandfather’s apartment. You were a guest here. A guest with a very long stay and a very short memory.”
She opened the door with the security chain still attached.
Roman stood outside, pale and sweating, with scratches on his neck. Apparently, his parents had already had their own conversation with him.
He looked like a beaten dog.
A dog that still wanted to bite.
“Why did you drag my mother into this?! Why did you send her that video? Are you insane?!”
“She’s basically the guarantor of your life choices, Roma. She deserves to know what she’s financing.”
“You humiliated me! In front of everyone!”
“Everyone is three people. You humiliated yourself in front of everyone else. Personally. Every Wednesday.”
“Where are my things?” He tried to peer through the narrow opening. “Where are my things, Alya?!”
“At the cottage. You loved that place so much. Now you can be together.”
“Who took them?”
 
“Kirill.”
Roman stopped breathing for a moment.
His face turned blotchy red, and his voice rose into a squeak.
“Kirill?! You called Kirill?! You did that on purpose! You’re vindictive! You’re… you’re…”
“Careful. Your vocabulary is limited and the evening is long. Save some words.”
“Alya, listen.” His tone changed instantly. He lowered his voice and leaned closer to the gap. “It happened, okay? So what? Once. Maybe twice. Nothing collapsed! The apartment is still here. The car is still here. Everything is still here! Alya, don’t do anything stupid.”
“Everything is still here. Except you’re standing outside now. Tiny detail. Big difference.”
“You don’t have the right to throw me out!”
“I do. More importantly, I already did.”
He fell silent.
He breathed heavily.
Then something new appeared in his eyes.
Not guilt.
Not pain.
Calculation.
He licked his lips and asked the one question that made the entire five years of marriage worth enduring just so Alina could hear it.
“So you’ve decided to leave? Then who’s going to pay my parents’ mortgage?”
Alina removed the chain.
Opened the door.
And slapped him.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
 
Not particularly hard.
Just clearly.
Like placing three full stops at the end of a sentence.
“Back with us?”
“You… you’ve lost your mind.”
“I was bringing you back to reality. You asked about the mortgage, not your wife. Just to clarify: I was the wife.”
“Alya, the payment is due on the first!” He grabbed the doorframe. “Mom is panicking! Dad sold his garage! He sold the car! They put everything into that house!”
“How touching. They invested, I made the payments, and you enjoyed the property. Beautiful system. There was just one unnecessary link in the chain—you.”
“We took that mortgage together!”
“It’s in your mother’s name. Who made the payments? Say it out loud. I’ll record it. My phone is already used to working today.”
He said nothing.
“From now on, those are your problems, Roma. All three of them: the cottage, the mortgage payment, and the brunette.”
“You can’t do this! You’re leaving me with nothing!”
“I’m leaving you with exactly what you chose on Wednesday. Don’t complain. It was your decision. I wasn’t even invited to vote.”
“And my computer? The gaming chair? The monitor?”
“Payment for six months of mortgage installments. Think of it as your first contribution to the family budget. Late, but better than never.”
“I’ll take them back!”
“You can try. It’ll be your most interesting project since the one you and Kirill fought over.”
 
He opened his mouth to shout.
But there was nowhere left to shout.
The door closed.
Alina turned the new lock twice.
She stood there listening as Roman talked angrily to the empty stairwell for another couple of minutes.
Then she heard him walking downstairs, his bag striking the railing on the way.
The cottage was quiet and disgusting.
The bags sat in a neat row beside the porch.
Kirill had arranged them almost like an exhibition.
One bag, however, had been thrown over the fence.
On principle.
Roman carried everything inside and sat down on the sofa.
The crumpled bedsheet was still there.
So was the brunette’s hairpin.
Mosquitoes drifted in from the lake.
Half a kilometer away was a fur farm, and whenever the wind changed, the smell reached the house.
Fat, shameless flies crawled into the room and landed on his face.
Roman hated the cottage.
He always had.
 
You couldn’t really relax there.
It smelled.
It buzzed.
He had insisted on buying it because he didn’t want to feel like a dependent living in Alina’s apartment.
And now he had the cottage entirely to himself.
Mortgage payment included.
His phone vibrated.
His mother.
“Roma, where are you?”
“Here. At the cottage. Apparently this is my address now.”
“Dina says she won’t give you her room. She was screaming, Roma. She moved all her things against the door.”
“Mom, I’m not asking for her room.”
“What are we going to do on the first? Do you understand what happens on the first?”
“I understand,” he said quietly. “I understand.”
He ended the call and stared at the bags.
Then the crumpled sheet.
Then the bags again.
And that was when a second realization hit him.
One even more frightening than the mortgage payment.
The brunette was married.
She had a husband.
An ordinary, calm husband who suspected nothing.
And Alina had the video.
Roman called the brunette.
Her phone was switched off.
He tried again.
Then again.
Then several more times.
His hand began to shake.
He sat there in the darkness, waving flies away from his face and praying for one thing only.
That Alina would leave it alone.
 
That she wouldn’t call anyone.
That the brunette’s husband would never, ever see those two minutes of video.
He had had an apartment.
A wife.
Her car.
Her patience.
Her money arriving faithfully on the first day of every month.
Everything had stood firmly around him like walls.
Then something had possessed him on a Wednesday.
And in a single day, all the walls folded inward.
Meanwhile, Alina was sitting on the floor of the newly emptied room, her back against the wall, talking to her mother on speakerphone.
“Alya, how are you?”
“Strange. I feel like I can breathe deeper.”
“Grandpa wants to know whether you did the right thing.”
“Tell him the new lock is German. Good quality. He’ll approve.”
Her mother was silent for a moment.
Then she sniffled, briefly and angrily.
“And what about their mortgage? They’re going to drive you crazy with phone calls.”
“If they do, I’ll block them. Mom, I’ve been paying for somebody else’s conscience for six months. That’s enough. A conscience isn’t a mortgage. You can’t pay it off for someone else.”
“He’ll come back begging.”
“Of course he will. With flowers in one hand and a list of mortgage payments in the other.”
“And what will you tell him?”
“I’ll say, ‘Roma, you got confused. I was your wife, not your guarantor.’”
Alina smiled.
“He still won’t understand. He’s allergic to the word ‘love,’ but mention ‘the first of the month’ and he develops an instant reflex.”
She stood up, walked across the apartment, and opened the window.
Warm evening air entered the room.
 
Somewhere outside, someone was laughing.
“Mom, do you know what the funniest part is? He didn’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t ask why. He didn’t ask how I was. His first question was, ‘Who’s going to pay the mortgage?’”
“Oh, Lord…”
“So I answered him. The person who took it out can pay it. Every Wednesday.”
She looked at the empty space where Roman’s boxes used to stand.
And for the first time, she wasn’t thinking about the next payment.
She was thinking about repainting the room.
Something light.
Maybe adding a shelf.
Her phone chimed.
Kirill had sent the promised photos.
The bags were lined up neatly beside the cottage porch.
And one sat beyond the fence in the grass.
Alina stared at the picture.
Then she laughed.
This time, the laughter was alive.