He stopped drinking coffee with cinnamon. It may seem like a small thing — but that’s when I realized something had broken. Maksim always laughed at my love for “dessert add-ins,” but every morning he’d slide his cup toward me: “Try it, today I put twice as much.” But now he quietly brewed instant coffee, not even asking if I wanted some. As if I had become air in my own home.
It all started after that ill-fated Sunday lunch. My mother-in-law, Irina Vladimirovna, came over with a pie that smelled not of apples, but of anxiety. Her gaze skimmed over our apartment as if checking whether I had stolen the silver spoons given to us at the wedding.
“Maksim, you’ve lost weight,” she pinched his cheek like he was ten years old. “They must be feeding you poorly here.”
I forced a smile, remembering how three days ago he had praised my stew. But he stayed silent, staring at his plate.
After dessert, they went “out to the balcony for a smoke” — a ritual that hadn’t existed before. From the slightly open door, fragments of phrases floated through: “…can’t postpone…”, “…she will never agree…”, “…your duty…”
When Irina Vladimirovna left, Maksim locked himself in his study. The next morning, he stopped putting sugar in my tea.
A week later, I found hidden bills. He had neatly folded them into a box from my perfume — the very one I kept as a symbol of our honeymoon. “Payment for legal services,” “Psychologist consultation,” “Real estate agency.” The dates matched her visits.
“What’s this?” I threw the papers on the table when he came home from work.
He flinched like a caught thief.
“Mom… She thinks we need to move. Closer to her.”
“To her three-room prison with a cuckoo clock?” I laughed hysterically. “We chose this apartment together! You said the balcony reminded you of Paris…”
“Paris was a mistake,” he snapped, turning sharply to the window. “We have to think about the future.”
His voice carried foreign intonations. As if Irina Vladimirovna was dictating text over the phone.
That night, I hacked into his email. The password was unchanged — the date of our wedding. Bitter irony.
My mother-in-law’s letters were full of demands:
“Dr. Kovalyov will confirm that her stress harms conception”
“We’ll sell the apartment, split the money”
“After the move, she’ll come to her senses or leave”
Maksim replied briefly: “Will think about it,” “Agreed,” “As you say.”
The last letter made me choke:
“On Tuesday we’ll sign the contract. Don’t tell her until you quit. And change your password.”
I printed everything, put it in a folder with our wedding photos, and left it on the kitchen table.
He came back early in the morning, smelling of someone else’s cologne — the one Irina Vladimirovna gave him every New Year.
“Explain,” I jabbed a finger at the printout.
He went pale seeing the photo on the cover. There we were laughing, doused in champagne at Charles de Gaulle airport.
“Mom thinks…”
“Enough about Mom!” I slammed my palm on the table. His cup of bland coffee fell, spilling brown stains over the papers. “You were going to quit? Sell our home? Without telling me?”
He was silent. His lips trembled like the day he proposed.
“She found…” he swallowed. “Your pills.”
I recoiled as if he had hit me. Antidepressants I had stopped taking three months ago after he promised to be “my support.”
“Mom says you’re… unstable. That I must…”
“Must?” I laughed, feeling something crack inside. “Are you a grown man or a puppet?”
He left, slamming the door. I sat on the floor, gathering the shards of our cup. The glass bit into my palms, but the pain was welcome. Real.
In the morning, I put on the red dress — the one we danced in on the hotel rooftop. I wrote a resignation letter. His, not mine.
“What’s this?” He paled seeing the paper on the table.
“You were going to quit your job, right?” I smiled sweetly. “I don’t want to get in the way of your plans with Mom.”
“You’re crazy!” He crumpled the letter. “How will I…”
“Live off her money?” I finished. “I think she’s already thought it through.”
I pulled the apartment keys from my bag and placed them next to his half-drunk coffee.
“I’m moving out.”
“Where?” Panic finally sounded in his voice.
“To a friend’s. Or a hotel. Or Paris,” I turned toward the door. “Anywhere far from your puppet theater.”
On the stair landing, I heard him call her: “Mom, she knows everything…”
Now I’m writing this in a café across from his office. In an hour he has a meeting with investors. And in my bag — a flash drive with the messages I didn’t print. Among other things, his confession to the boss: “Wife is against moving, but Mom will find a way.”
I ordered a double espresso. With cinnamon.
Games Without Rules
The meeting started at 11:00. I entered his office conference room a minute early, wearing the dress he called “the color of victory.” Maksim dropped his folder of documents when he saw me. Papers scattered across the floor like white doves released at a wedding.
“Sorry I’m late,” I smiled at the investors, holding up the flash drive. “I have some additions to the presentation.”
He froze, as if he recognized in my eyes the very girl who once beat him at poker on our first date.
“These are private data!” he hissed, but I was already inserting the flash drive into the projector.
The correspondence appeared on the screen. Line by line: Irina Vladimirovna’s advice on “correcting” our marriage, her plans to sell the apartment, her comment on my pills: “With such diagnoses, children aren’t born.”
The room fell silent. Then the senior investor, Boris Ilyich, spoke up:
“We invest in people, not in family dramas.”
Maksim went pale. His phone blinked — a call from “Mom.” He ran out without looking at me.
I waited two hours at the café. When he entered, his tie was crooked, and he was trembling, holding an envelope.
“You destroyed my career!” he threw the envelope on the table. Inside was a letter denying funding.
“No,” I took a sip of latte. “You destroyed it yourself by letting your mother play puppeteer.”
He sank into a chair, pressing his temples.
“She… She always knew best. After Dad…”
“Your father died when you were seven,” I recalled old photos from the album. Maksim as a child in a suit standing next to his mother in black. “But you don’t have to replace him for her.”
He flinched as if I had hit him. For the first time in months, his gaze became what it used to be — alive, confused.
“She’s afraid to be alone,” he whispered.
“And you?” I leaned in. “Are you more afraid to lose her approval than me?”
He didn’t answer. But when I stood to leave, he grabbed my hand:
“Forgive me.”
That night, I returned to the apartment. Irina Vladimirovna sat on our sofa like a queen on her throne. Her fingers gripped my wedding album.
“Thought you’d scare me with a kindergarten stunt?” She nodded at the flash drive on the table.
“No,” I took off my shoes like it was a normal evening. “I want to understand. Why?”
She laughed. The sound reminded me of rusty swings.
“You were never his equal. Maksim is a genius, and you…”
“I’m the one who believed in his genius when you called his projects ‘delusions,’” I sat opposite her. “Remember the ‘smart home’? You said it was a waste of money. I pawned my grandmother’s earrings so he could buy the equipment.”
Her eyelids twitched. She didn’t know that.
“He changed because of you,” I opened the album to a photo from Paris. “But I love that Maksim. If he’s dead, I have no place here.”
She stared long at the photo where her son laughed holding me at the Eiffel Tower. Then suddenly said:
“His father left for another woman. A month before he died.”
An icy lump rose in my throat.
“I won’t let him follow that path,” she stood, straightening up. “Even if I have to break you both.”
In the morning, Maksim found me on the balcony. I wrapped myself in his old sweater I’d kept “for memory.”
“Mom left,” he sat next to me, not daring to touch. “She said I’m a traitor.”
The city buzzed below, and we were silent, listening to the ice cracking between us.
“Remember how we hid here from the rain?” He pointed to a worn spot on the floor. “You said the raindrops were applause for the brave.”
I nodded, swallowing tears.
“I filed a patent application,” he pulled papers from his pocket. Blueprints for a new “smart city” system he’d worked on for years. “Without Mom’s connections. Without her money.”
Sunlight sprinkled gold over the documents. In the “Co-author” field was my name.
“You…” I couldn’t finish.
“Come back,” he hugged me, hiding his face in my hair. “Help me remember who I am.”
Now I’m typing this at the table we bought on an IKEA sale. Maksim is arguing on the phone with suppliers, and I’m fixing his notes. Sometimes he catches my eye and smiles — like before, with a spark.
Irina Vladimirovna calls every day. He puts her on speaker while we cook dinner.
“You’ll ruin yourself with that adventurer!”
“Then I’ll die happy,” he retorts, and I toss an olive at him.
Today, a letter came from Boris Ilyich: “Your project is interesting. Shall we discuss?”
Maksim is typing a reply, and I’m watching the sunset outside the window. We’re drinking coffee with cinnamon again. And I know: this is just the beginning of the war.
Freedom Within the Bounds of Love
Irina Vladimirovna came to the presentation in a black suit, like for a funeral. Maksim and I stood at the entrance to the conference hall, where in ten minutes we were to present the “smart city” project. His fingers squeezed my hand as if I were an anchor in the storm.
“Are you sure?” I whispered, fixing his tie.
“No,” he smiled, admitting fear for the first time. “But I’m sure about us.”
Boris Ilyich nodded to us from the hall. His presence meant more than money — trust. But when the spotlights lit up, I saw Irina Vladimirovna take out her phone. Her fingers quickly ran over the screen.
The presentation began with a failure. Maksim had just stepped up to the microphone when the lights went out. The room murmured in confusion. Personal photos appeared on the projector screen: our arguments, printouts of messages, even a photo of my pills.
“Is this part of the show?” someone laughed nervously.
Irina Vladimirovna sat in the front row, unflinching. I realized she hacked our cloud account. Maksim froze as if he had become that boy afraid to leave his mother’s skirt.
“Sorry, technical difficulties,” I grabbed the microphone and stepped forward. “While the team fixes this, I’ll tell a story.”
I spoke about us. How Maksim drew schemes on napkins at night while I slept. How we argued about interface design, forgetting to eat. How his ideas were born not in investor offices, but in our kitchen, over coffee with cinnamon.
“This project isn’t technology,” I looked at my husband. “It’s a story about how two people learn to be free. Even if the world tries to stop them.”
The hall applauded. Boris Ilyich stood, clapping the loudest. The lights came back on, but no slides were needed anymore.
After the presentation, Irina Vladimirovna waited for us by the elevator. Her face looked like a cracked mask.
“You betrayed me,” she jabbed her finger at Maksim’s chest. “Like your father.”
He took her hand, slowly lowering it.
“Dad didn’t betray you. He just stopped being your possession.”
She breathed faster, as if the air suddenly became liquid. I stepped forward, unexpectedly for myself:
“You’re afraid he’s happy without your control. Because then your sacrifice — this whole lie about ‘saving’ — was in vain.”
Her lips trembled. She turned, but Maksim held her by the shoulders:
“Stay. Listen to what the future could be like.”
He showed her blueprints of a children’s education center — part of the project we hadn’t told anyone about. Where her son once dreamed of becoming a scientist.
“This…” she touched the tablet screen. “You wanted to build such places?”
“Always,” he hugged her carefully, like a child. “But you said it wouldn’t bring money.”
Tears ran down her cheeks, washing away perfect makeup.
“I… didn’t know.”
Now the three of us sit in the kitchen. Irina Vladimirovna drinks tea with mint I specially bought. Maksim sketches a plan for a new play area on a napkin.
“You could add touch panels here,” he mutters.
“Useless,” she snorts, then corrects herself: “I mean… kids will break everything.”
“Then we’ll make it stronger,” I wink.
She looks away, but I see the corners of her mouth twitch.
The project was approved. Boris Ilyich called our presentation “a breath of honesty.” Irina Vladimirovna still hasn’t said “sorry,” but every Friday she sends pie recipes. Without comments.
And this morning Maksim put two cups on the table. In his — a pinch of cinnamon.
“So we don’t forget,” he said, kissing me on the crown of my head.
On the balcony where our voices once broke, now stands a jasmine plant. Its scent mingles with the smell of coffee and freedom.