“I’m sick of all of you! Your father, you… your whole clan!”
Roman burst into the apartment like a gust of foul wind, bringing with him the smell of alcohol and cheap, showy rebellion. He didn’t take off his shoes, dragging a dirty streak across the light parquet, and began pacing the living room in circles like a wound-up animal in a cramped cage. His hands had a life of their own—shooting toward the ceiling, then slashing the air with full force, underscoring every word.
“I can’t live like this! I’m not some errand boy! Your father is butting in again. He called three times today! Three! Asked why I hadn’t approved the estimate for the contractor Ivanov. Because I’m thinking! Me, not him! It’s my business, for God’s sake! Mine!”
Daria watched him in silence from deep in a massive armchair. She didn’t move, only slowly rotated a glass of water in her hand, the crystal’s glints dancing over her calm, unreadable face. Her gaze was attentive, almost clinical, as if she were observing a familiar—no less exhausting for being familiar—episode. She let him talk himself out, to spill all the bile he’d accumulated in the bar. She knew that arguing with him now would be like trying to douse a fire with gasoline. She had to wait for him to burn himself out.
“I’m a man! I want to make my own decisions, I want freedom! Do you understand? Free-dom! I don’t want to report to him every day for every step I take, every ruble I spend! I’m suffocating in your gilded cage!”
He stopped in the middle of the room, breathing hard, and stared at his wife with defiance, waiting for a reaction. He expected tears, pleading, shouting—anything that would confirm his importance, his right to this scene.
Daria set her glass on the small table. Her movements were smooth, deliberate, devoid of any fuss. She rose from the armchair without a word. Her composure hit his drunken rage like a bucket of ice water.
“Freedom?” Her voice was even, without the slightest hint of emotion. “All right.”
She went to the chest of drawers where a heavy ceramic catchall sat. Picking it up with both hands, she returned to the coffee table and, turning it over, emptied the contents onto the polished surface with a dry, sharp click. Two sets of keys. One—to the logistics company’s office. The other—bulky, with an Audi fob—to his car.
Roman froze, staring at the little pile of metal that only yesterday had been the symbol of his success.
“You don’t like the business my father gave you?” Daria spoke just as calmly, methodically indicating the first set of keys. “Does the car he gave you so you wouldn’t embarrass yourself arriving at meetings by taxi get in your way?” Her finger shifted to the second set. “Does the apartment you live in, the one that makes you feel so stifled, irritate you? No problem.”
She let her gaze travel around the room, then looked him squarely in the eye. Her eyes were cold and perfectly clear.
“Here,” she made a light gesture toward the table. “The keys to your freedom. Put the keys to this apartment right here and walk out. Right now. Go to your wonderful relatives, to your mother who never asks anything of you and is always dazzled by you. And enjoy your life. Go on. I’m waiting.”
His drunken swagger, his righteous fury, all that affected manliness evaporated at once. It receded like dirty water, leaving only a confused, shamed man caught by his own words. The drunken flush drained from his cheeks, exposing an unhealthy pallor. He stood in the middle of a living room furnished with other people’s money, in an apartment bought thanks to someone else’s savvy, and stared in silence at the keys that had just ceased to be his property. They had become an ultimatum.
The silence that followed her words was thicker and heavier than the loudest scream. It didn’t ring; it pressed down, filling the space and squeezing the last traces of drunken air out of Roman’s lungs. He looked at the keys lying on the dark wood of the table, and they seemed like shards of a shattered world. His world. A world he had just, in a spasm of drunken vanity, derailed with his own hands. The word “freedom,” so heady and heroic in his monologue, now sounded like a sentence. Freedom from money, from status, from comfort. Freedom to sleep on a couch at his mother’s two-room flat; freedom to look for a job where no one knew him as Stepan Gennadyevich’s son-in-law.
“Are… are you serious?” he croaked, his voice pathetic. It wasn’t a question but a plea—a hope that this was just a cruel joke, another scene he could somehow smooth over afterward.
Daria didn’t answer. She just stood there, looking at him, and there was no anger or hurt in her gaze. Only a cold, weary statement of fact. That look was more frightening than any hysterics. It told him the point of no return had been passed. He had crossed a line beyond which there was no way back. Slowly, like an old man, he lowered himself onto the edge of the couch, avoiding looking at her, at the keys, at the room that had suddenly become foreign.
Time passed. It didn’t race or drag; it simply existed, counting out the minutes of his humiliation. Daria took her glass to the kitchen, and he could hear the steady flow of water from the tap. She didn’t fuss, didn’t slam drawers, didn’t perform her superiority. She simply lived, as if he—flailing and crushed—were no longer in the apartment. She returned to the living room, sat in her armchair, and took a book from the shelf. She didn’t even open it, just set it on her knees; her fingers lay calmly on the hard cover. It was a measured, almost sadistic calm.
Roman realized she wouldn’t back down. This wasn’t a game. This was the end. And in this end he was the loser across the board. He could have jumped up now, grabbed the apartment keys, dropped them on the table, and walked out with his head high. But where to? Pride wouldn’t pay for a hotel room or buy him dinner. He sat there, pressed into the couch, feeling wretched and small.
Then Daria made her next move. She reached out, took her phone from the table, and, without looking at Roman, dialed.
“Dad, good evening. Is this a good time?” Her voice was absolutely even, businesslike, as if she were calling to discuss a quarterly report. “I’ll be brief. I just wanted to inform you that Roman no longer wishes to participate in our family project. Yes, that’s right. He says he wants freedom and independence. He believes your oversight is holding him back.”
Roman raised his head. The blood drained from his face. He stared at his wife in horror, like a rabbit at a boa constrictor. She was doing it right in front of him—coolly, methodically burning the last bridges.
“No, nothing happened. A person has simply made a decision,” Daria continued, gazing at the wall ahead. “He thinks we and our demands are bad. And his relatives, who demand nothing, are good. I think he wants to go back to them. No, I don’t need anything from you. I’m just letting you know so you’re current on the situation with the assets. Yes, I understand. All right. We’ll wait.”
She hung up. The soft click of the phone’s lock sounded like a gunshot. She set it on the table beside the keys to his former life. And now the polished surface held a complete set: business, car, and the phone that had just delivered the final verdict.
“What have you done?” Roman whispered, but there was no anger left in his voice—only animal fear.
For the first time in a long while, Daria looked straight at him.
“Me? Nothing. I simply granted your request, Roma. You wanted freedom. My father is on his way to formally grant it to you.”
The half hour between her call and the sound of a key turning in the lock was a form of exquisite torture for Roman. He no longer tried to speak to Daria. She had become part of the décor—a beautiful, cold statue seated with a book on her knees. All his drunken heroics had evaporated, leaving a sticky, nauseating fear. He ran scenarios through his head: apologize, fall to his knees, blame it all on the alcohol. But one glance at her detached profile told him it was useless. She had already passed judgment, and now the executioner was on his way.
The key in the lock didn’t click; it turned smoothly and with authority. It was the sound of an owner entering his home.
Stepan Gennadyevich didn’t just come in—he filled the entryway. A large, gray-haired man in a costly cashmere coat he didn’t even bother to remove. He smelled not of cologne but of confidence and money—the very substance Roman loved to spend and hated to earn. He didn’t look around; his eyes immediately found his daughter.
“Dasha,” he nodded to her. In that single word there was neither question nor concern—only the confirmation of their unseen alliance.
Then his heavy, appraising gaze shifted to Roman, who instinctively shrank into the couch. Stepan Gennadyevich inspected him from head to toe the way one examines a cheap knockoff; not a muscle twitched on his lips. He didn’t offer a greeting. He didn’t think it necessary.
“Stepan Gennadyevich, Dasha misunderstood… I just… We had a little quarrel, it happens,” Roman babbled, jumping to his feet. His voice wavered as he tried to feel out an escape hatch.
“Sit down, Roman,” his father-in-law ordered in a calm, even voice that left no room for objections. “Let’s not waste time on your pitiful excuses. Let’s talk facts. You wanted freedom. Let’s discuss what you’ll do with it.”
He walked over to the coffee table and looked down at the scattered keys with distaste, as if they were trash.
“Let’s start with the main thing. The business. Today you shouted at my daughter that it’s ‘your’ business. It is not. It’s my business, in which I generously allowed you to play the role of director,” Stepan Gennadyevich spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “In the last three months of your ‘independent’ management, the company has lost two key clients. Do you know why? Because you didn’t answer their calls. You were busy. Enjoying life. The contract with ‘Logist-Trans’ that I prepared for six months—you managed to blow it in one meeting because you showed up hungover and mixed up the figures.”
Roman wanted to protest, to say it wasn’t true, that the clients were at fault, but Stepan Gennadyevich raised a hand, cutting off any attempt.
“Be quiet and listen. Your entertainment expenses last month exceeded the expenses of the entire sales department. You called it ‘networking.’ I pulled the receipts. Three quarters of that ‘networking’ were dinners with your buddies at the most expensive restaurants in the city. You weren’t building relationships, Roman. You were eating through my money.”
Each word was a hammer blow on an anvil. He didn’t yell, didn’t accuse. He stated. And that cold, emotionless recital was a thousand times more humiliating than any scandal. Roman felt his skin being stripped off, leaving him naked and defenseless before two pairs of cold eyes.
“I thought I could make something of you,” Stepan Gennadyevich went on, now looking past Roman. “That if you give a man an opportunity, he’ll seize it. I was wrong. You’re not a builder. You’re a consumer. A parasite. You are my worst investment. I invested money, time, and my family’s reputation in you. And what’s the result? A drunken revolt and a demand for freedom.”
He paused, letting his words soak into the air, the walls, the mind of the crushed son-in-law. Then he turned to Daria; his face softened for the first time that evening, but it was not paternal tenderness—rather the professional solidarity of a partner.
“Well, daughter? Shall we shut down this loss-making project?”
The question, cast into the emptiness of the living room, hung like an executioner’s axe. “Shall we shut down this loss-making project?” It was addressed to Daria, but it struck Roman across the face. Something snapped in him. A final instinct for self-preservation, mixed with animal fear, drove him into a counterattack—senseless and pathetic. He whirled and fixed his gaze—full of despair and malice—on his wife.
“This is you! It’s all you and your daddy!” he screamed, jabbing a finger at her. The hysteria he hadn’t wrung from her now erupted in him. “You drove me to this! The two of you! Always demanding something, never satisfied! I always owe you something! I tried, I tried to meet your standards, and it was never enough! Do you think it was easy living under that pressure? I… I loved you, and you turned me into your lapdog!”
Daria rose slowly from her chair. Her composure cracked, but from that crack poured not the heat of hysteria—only the arctic cold of contempt. She took a step toward him, and Roman instinctively recoiled. Her previously unreadable face became a mask of such icy fury it seemed she could freeze with a look.
“We drove you? We?” she said quietly, but her whisper scraped louder than his shout. “My father, who pulled you out of the hole where you sat with no job and no prospects? Who opened a company in your name because you whined that you wanted to ‘be somebody’? Me, who covered for your benders with partners, your no-shows, your ‘creative crises’ when you disappeared from the office for weeks? We gave you a life you couldn’t have dreamed of. A car so you wouldn’t be ashamed of your reflection. A business so you could feel like a man. We gave you everything, Roma. And you turned out to be a hollow shell. A black hole that only consumes.”
She came almost right up to him, looking up from below; her eyes burned with a dark, merciless fire. The humiliation inflicted by his father-in-law’s words was nothing compared to what he felt now.
“If I and my parents—who gave you the business and the car—are so bad, then leave it all and go live with those who are ‘good’! I’m sure your dear mommy will be thrilled!”
That line, delivered with icy, concentrated scorn, was the last nail in his coffin. She didn’t shout. She handed down a sentence.
Stepan Gennadyevich, who had been silently observing, seemed to have been waiting for exactly those words. It was the signal—the confirmation that the amputation could be completed. He stepped forward, placing himself between Roman and his daughter.
“So, Roman,” his voice was level and businesslike, as if summing up a meeting. “The emotional part is over. Now—the procedure. As of this moment, you have no connection to the company ‘Logist-Prime.’ Your access to accounts—both personal and corporate—has already been blocked. You’ll leave the car downstairs in the garage. Hand the keys and documents to the concierge. I’ve alerted him.”
Roman stared from his father-in-law to Daria in shock. His brain refused to process information at that speed.
“You have ten minutes,” Stepan Gennadyevich continued, checking his expensive Swiss watch. “To collect your personal belongings. Only what you brought into this home yourself. Clothes, razor, laptop. Anything bought with my money stays here.”
“But… where am I supposed to go?” Roman murmured—the last, most pitiful question he could ask.
His father-in-law looked at him without the slightest trace of sympathy.
“A taxi is waiting downstairs. I called it on my way here. It will take you to your mother’s. I think she’ll be happy to welcome her free and independent son.”
It was a complete rout—planned and executed with icy precision. Roman stood in the middle of a room that was no longer his home, beside a woman who was no longer his wife. He felt gutted. Slowly, as if in a dream, he walked to the table where the apartment keys lay. His hand trembled, but he picked them up. Then, without looking at anyone, he tossed them onto the table with the rest. The dry knock of metal on wood was the final chord of their family life. He turned without a word and went to the bedroom, feeling two glacial gazes on his back. He didn’t pack. He just grabbed a backpack with some old papers in it and left.
He didn’t lift his head as he passed them. He was crushed. Completely and irrevocably. The front door closed softly behind him.
Stepan Gennadyevich looked at his daughter.
“Tea?” he asked, as if nothing had happened.
“Yes,” Daria answered softly, staring at the keys lying forlornly on the table. “Strong. And no sugar.”