“The salad turned out delicious. This new sauce suits it perfectly.”
Artyom spoke with his mouth full, but even that couldn’t hide his smug smile. He was generally pleased today. With himself, life, dinner. Marina only smiled slightly in response, picking up a leaf of arugula and a piece of sun-dried tomato with her fork. The evening was quiet—one of those rare moments when work receded, and they could just be together in the warm light of their small, cozy kitchen. Outside, twilight thickened, and inside it smelled of garlic bread and basil. An idyll honed by years of living together.
“By the way, Lenka quit her job,” Artyom casually dropped the news, pushing away his empty plate.
Marina nodded sympathetically. Her husband’s sister, Lena, was a creative type, always searching and never quite finding. Office work from nine to six was torture for her, everyone knew that.
“That routine just wore her out completely. She says she’s mentally exhausted, burnt out to the core. No inspiration left.”
“Poor thing. That’s tough,” Marina said sincerely. She really did sympathize. Everyone at least once in their life wanted to drop everything and start anew.
“That’s what I think too,” Artyom perked up, feeling supported. He leaned closer; his voice took on a conspiratorial yet solemn tone. “I’ve decided to help her.”
“Good idea. Maybe we can give her some money for the beginning? So she can calmly look for what she loves,” Marina suggested, already calculating in her head how much they could comfortably allocate from the family budget.
Artyom shook his head, a condescending smile playing on his face as if she’d suggested some trivial solution unworthy of his noble initiative.
“No, Marin, that’s all half-measures. I’ve decided to solve it radically. While she’s searching for herself, I’ll pay her mortgage, and she can focus on what she loves.”
Marina froze. The fork with a shrimp hung halfway to her mouth. She didn’t quite understand what he said. The words were Russian, familiar, but put together in such a sentence, they lost all meaning.
“What do you mean… you’ll help? You’ll lend her one payment?” she clarified, slowly lowering her fork onto the plate. The clink of metal on porcelain sounded deafening.
“No. Why borrow? I’ll just give her my entire salary,” he explained with disarming simplicity, looking at her as if sharing a brilliant and obvious plan. “So what? We’ll live off yours for now. You just got a nice quarterly bonus. It all adds up.”
The air in the kitchen suddenly stopped being warm and cozy. It became dense, heavy, hard to breathe. Marina slowly, with some detached precision, placed her plate on the table next to his empty one. Her calmness was unnatural, like the calm before a hurricane. She looked at her husband but saw not her loved one but some strange, mad dreamer who had just suggested shooting himself in the foot so he could give his crutches to his sister.
Artyom noticed the change and frowned. He expected admiration for his generosity, not this cold, scrutinizing gaze.
“Why are you looking at me like that? It’s Lena, my sister. A family member in trouble. Family should be a support. Am I wrong?”
He said the right words, which in any other situation would sound noble. But now they were just a cover for a monstrously audacious act. He wasn’t just helping his sister. He was shifting the responsibility for her life, her mortgage, her infantile ‘exhaustion’ onto his wife’s shoulders. He was taking her bonus, her work, her fatigue, and without asking, sacrificing all this at the altar of his sister’s whims.
Marina leaned forward a little, resting her hands on the table. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and devoid of any emotion. But it was precisely this lifelessness that stung the ears.
“What are you saying?! I’m supposed to support our family, and you’re going to spend all your salaries on your sister’s mortgage? Seriously?!”
The question hit like a whip. There was no hysteria, only concentrated, icy rage. Artyom flinched.
“Stop it! It’s not ‘spending,’ it’s helping! You can’t be like that…”
“Fine,” she interrupted him, not letting him finish. A strange, angry smirk appeared on her lips. She straightened up, and her gaze became clear and harsh. “I get it now. Your plan is brilliant. Then starting tomorrow, I’m also searching for myself. My work has exhausted me too. Find a third job, genius. To feed me, yourself, and the dependent Lena.”
In the morning, Artyom woke up feeling like it had all been a bad dream. Marina’s outburst yesterday seemed ridiculous, a woman’s whim, a reaction to fatigue. Now, in the light of the new day, she surely would have thought better of it, realized the absurdity of her words. He was ready to forgive her magnanimously and maybe even discuss some symbolic help for his sister to save face. He left the bedroom, anticipating the smell of coffee and the usual morning bustle.
But the kitchen greeted him with silence. Marina sat at the table in a silk robe he had seen her wear only a couple of times, fully focused on reading a thick book in an expensive binding. Next to her was a wine glass and an open bottle of some complicated-looking Chianti. The stove was empty.
“Good morning,” he cautiously began. “Where’s breakfast?”
Marina looked up from reading, stared at him as if he were a waiter who had forgotten his order, and smiled politely.
“Good morning, dear. Breakfast? I don’t know. I’m not dealing with such mundane things today. I have my first class. Theoretical part.”
She tapped the cover of the book. “Encyclopedia of Wine. From Vine to Glass.” Artyom looked at the bottle in disbelief.
“You’re drinking wine… at nine in the morning?”
“I’m not drinking, I’m tasting,” she corrected him with the air of a connoisseur. “Trying to catch notes of leather and tobacco in the aftertaste. Very fascinating. It’s part of my search. I decided to become a sommelier.”
She said it as if announcing she’d bought a new yogurt. Artyom stood in the middle of the kitchen, and his world—so clear and right just yesterday—began to crack. He expected anything: silent boycott, tears, scandal. But not this calm madness.
The day got worse. When Artyom, having hastily eaten yesterday’s bread for breakfast, returned home for lunch, he didn’t recognize the living room. In the middle of the room, covered by a plastic sheet over the expensive parquet, stood a huge wooden easel. Nearby were piles of canvases, boxes of oil paints, whose smell mingled with turpentine, and a stack of books on Impressionism. Marina, dressed in an old shirt of her husband’s, stained with blue paint, was applying chaotic strokes to the canvas with an inspired look.
“What… is this?” he could only say, looking at the battlefield their living room had become.
“This is my creative impulse,” she replied without turning. “I realized being a sommelier is too narrow for my nature. I need to pour my emotions onto canvas. What do you think? Does it look like Munch’s ‘The Scream,’ but with a more optimistic palette?”
She stepped back from the easel, critically eyeing her mess. Artyom looked at the ruined canvas, at the tubes of paint, which he was sure cost as much as a week’s worth of groceries, and felt a dull irritation boiling inside.
“Marina, can we talk seriously?”
“Of course,” she agreed lightly, wiping her hands with a rag. “Just a bit later. Rodrigo is coming in an hour. We have our first Argentine tango lesson. I decided to combine painting with body plasticity. It helps to loosen up.”
Rodrigo. The name hit like a slap. He imagined some handsome Latin American who would spin his wife around their living room to passionate music. His wife, with his money, in his house.
“Are you mocking me?” His voice cracked.
Marina finally looked him straight in the eyes. Her gaze was absolutely serious.
“Not at all. I’m searching for myself, Artyom. Wasn’t that what you wanted? For a close person, without thinking about household chores and money, to devote herself to finding her true path and purpose? You set that trend in our family yourself. I’m just following your example. You won’t stop me, will you? That would be selfish of you.”
A week passed. A week during which their apartment turned from a cozy nest into a branch of a bohemian den and at the same time a battlefield. The smell of turpentine and oil paints seeped into the wallpaper, furniture, and, it seemed, into Artyom’s very skin. The living room now resembled a mad artist’s workshop: in the center, like a totem, stood an easel with a started but clearly failed canvas on which the riot of purple and yellow spots was supposed, by the author’s design, to symbolize “finding harmony in chaos.” Tubes, stained rags, and expensive squirrel-hair brushes were scattered everywhere. Artyom stumbled every day over piles of books on art and choreography. He stopped eating properly, living on instant noodles and sandwiches because the kitchen had become for Marina a place exclusively for “tastings” and “inspiring conversations with Rodrigo via video call.”
His bank account melted before his eyes. Notifications of withdrawals came with frightening regularity: “Sommelier Courses. Advanced level,” “Art Supplies Shop ‘Art-Quarter’,” “Private lesson. Rodrigo Esteban.” The last withdrawal was the most painful. He pictured Rodrigo—a muscular man with a languid gaze—and felt how his own generosity toward his sister turned against him in the most humiliating way.
Phone calls from Lena became a daily ritual. Her voice, at first full of gratitude and stories about “spiritual growth,” grew more nervous and demanding every day. Today it reached a crescendo.
“Artyom, the payment is in three days! You promised! I’ve already received a notice from the bank! Where’s the money?”
“Len, I’m working on it,” he mumbled, standing in the middle of the trashed living room. “There are… some technical difficulties.”
“What difficulties? You said you’d solved everything! You said Marina was okay with it! Artyom, they can evict me! I’ll be homeless because your wife decided to be selfish?”
Her panic rubbed off on him. He felt cornered. His noble plan was falling apart, and he himself looked not like a savior but an idiot. Desperation gave birth to what he thought was a last brilliant idea.
“Come. Come tonight,” he said firmly. “We’ll talk to her together. When she sees you, hears you… she won’t be able to refuse. She must understand.”
In the evening, there was a knock at the door. Artyom rushed to open it as if waiting for reinforcements. Lena stood on the threshold. She was a true tragic actress. She wore a baggy gray sweater, her hair tied in a careless bun, and her face, bare of makeup, looked pale and exhausted. She played the victim of circumstances with such skill that for a second Artyom himself felt boundless pity for her. They exchanged looks full of determination and shared cause. This was their fight.
They entered the living room. Marina, paying no attention to them, stood with her back to them by the easel. She was in her “work” shirt, stained with paint, and mixed emerald and white paint on the palette with full concentration. There was neither fuss nor nervousness in her movements. She was in her world.
“Marina,” Artyom began, his voice trembling with righteous anger. “Look. Look who’s here. This is Lena. My sister, whose life you are ruining.”
Lena stepped forward, taking a position in the center of the room. She surveyed the creative mess, and a look of disgusted sorrow appeared on her face.
“Marina, I don’t understand…” Her voice was quiet, full of restrained suffering. “I thought we were family. I’ve always treated you well. Can’t you see my situation? This job was killing me. I was on the verge of a breakdown. I just need some time to recover, find my way. Your husband, my brother, just wants to help. Is your heart really that hard?”
Artyom immediately took up her words, and they spoke in unison, creating a dense wall of accusations.
“We must support each other! It’s elementary!”
“You got a huge bonus; for you it’s peanuts! But for me, it’s a roof over my head!”
“What happened to you? Where did this cruelty come from? You were always different!”
“You spend our money on this nonsense and some passing dancers while a family member is in trouble!”
They pressed on, their voices getting louder, their words meaner. They waited for a reaction: shouts, tears, pleas for forgiveness. Anything to show their words hit the mark. But Marina was silent. She didn’t turn around. She took a clean brush, dipped it into the mixed paint, and made one long, confident stroke on the canvas. This calm, creative gesture against their hysteria looked like the highest form of contempt.
They ran out of steam. Words ended. In the ensuing silence, thick with the smell of paint, only one sound was heard—the quiet, methodical brushing of the brush across the canvas. Artyom and Lena stood in the middle of the living room, confused and empty. They had fired all their artillery at her but hit nothing. And she, not even granting them a glance, kept creating. At that moment, Artyom realized with horror that she wasn’t playing. She really found herself. And this new “I” was unfamiliar and frightening to him.
The silence that followed their double accusatory monologue wasn’t empty but viscous, soaked with the smell of turpentine and unfulfilled expectations. Artyom and Lena stood, breathing heavily like runners after the finish line, staring at Marina’s unmoving back. Their arsenal was empty, all words fired, and the target remained unharmed. It was humiliating. It seemed she was simply ignoring them, but Artyom, who had known her for many years, felt she was absorbing every word, calibrating it, weighing it, preparing her answer.
Finally, she slowly, with some ritual precision, put the palette down on the table. Then she took a rag and began methodically, stroke after stroke, wiping the brush—not from paint, but from them. From their words, their presence, their very essence. When the brush became perfectly clean, she placed it beside the palette and only then turned around. There was neither anger nor offense on her face. Only calm, almost scientific interest, like an entomologist examining under a microscope two particularly ugly bugs.
“I’m done,” she said. Her voice was even and cold as glass. She first looked at Lena.
“Your ‘search for yourself’ is not a search for a vocation, Lena. It’s a casting. Casting for the role of kept woman. You’ve spent your whole life not looking for a calling but for a stronger neck. Your ‘moral exhaustion’ always coincides so conveniently with the need to pay bills. First it was mom, now you decided my husband would fit perfectly for this role. Your suffering is just a commodity you try to sell at a higher price. But I’m not buying.”
Lena opened her mouth to argue, but Marina turned her merciless gaze to Artyom, and Lena shut it as if hitting an invisible wall. Now Marina spoke only to him.
“And you… You, my dear husband. You’re not a savior. You’re not a noble knight. You’re just an eternal son. A professional brother. You never cut the umbilical cord that binds you to your first family. You married me not to create a new, your own cell. You just expanded the old one by adding a convenient functional element. Me. I was your best acquisition: self-sufficient, working, requiring no special investments, creating comfort and cooking a delicious salad. I was the perfect background for your life, on which you could continue playing your favorite role—the good boy for mom and sister.”
She stepped forward. Their living room, their common territory, suddenly became her stage, and they the pathetic audience.
“You thought I’d buy that cheap drama? ‘A family member in trouble’? You decided to sacrifice not your comfort, but mine. You took my bonus, my work, my nerves, and without asking, decided to give it all to her. Because her approval is still more important to you than my respect. You weren’t saving the family, Artyom. You were saving your self-esteem.”
She looked around the room: the easel, paints, books. A faint, bitter smile appeared on her lips.
“You thought I’m living off fat? No. I really was searching for myself. And I found myself. I found a woman who invested ten years in a relationship, built a household, and believed she had a partner. But it turned out she was just a convenient cohabitant for a man who never grew up. My search is over.”
She looked both of them in the eyes again, and in her gaze remained nothing but a cold statement of fact.
“You’re truly selfish! Petty, greedy selfish!” her husband’s sister said to her. “As a good wife, you should support the family, not just yours but everyone’s, including me!”
“What are you saying?!” she repeated her question from yesterday, but now it sounded not like indignation but a verdict. “I’m supposed to support your family? No. Not anymore. From this moment on, you are strangers to me. Two relatives who, by some ridiculous chance, live in my apartment. You will pay Lena’s mortgage yourselves. Find a third job, sell her apartment, take out loans—decide. That’s your family problem. It doesn’t concern me anymore.”
Artyom looked at her, his face going from confused to crimson. The mask of nobility fell, revealing a malicious, wounded core.
“You can’t do that! This is our shared home!”
“No,” Marina cut him off. “These are just walls. The home is gone. You destroyed it yourself yesterday at dinner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish the painting.”
She turned and, without looking at them, picked up the brush again. This gesture was final and irrevocable. She didn’t throw them out. She simply erased them from her life, leaving them to flounder in the consequences of their own decisions. Lena shouted something at her back about heartlessness, Artyom growled in powerless rage, but for Marina their voices merged into one indistinct background noise. She looked at her canvas. The chaos of purple and yellow strokes. And right in its center, she began to draw one single, perfectly straight, calm green stem…