Midnight had finished its dark ball outside the Khrushchevka when Veronika, literally dragging her feet, slid the key into the lock. Even the metal seemed to resist, unwilling to let this exhausted shadow of a woman back in. Not just “dead on her feet”—that would be too mild. She felt like a broken mechanism with all its gears worn down and every wire burned out. Hunger was vicious—sharp and nauseating at once—and rage was a thick, black tar flooding her from within.
“How much longer? — pounded in her temples. — Where’s the limit? When do I finally break for good?” She had asked herself this requiem of a question every night for exactly a year now, ever since her life had turned into hell under the sign “VinoMir.”
Veronika worked in that cursed shop—an aquarium of alcohol and human vices—from eight in the morning until eleven at night. Hard labor. Hopeless, soul-sapping. The owner, a greedy spider named Arkady Petrovich, had spun a web of surveillance cameras, and every look through a lens seared her back like hot iron. Sit down? That was a privilege punishable by a hefty fine. “If you’re sitting, you’re not working!”—that motto was branded into the brainstem of every saleswoman there. By evening her legs burned, swelled, throbbed—begging for mercy.
And those crates… heavy, clanging coffins of bottles the women were expected to unload themselves. Fifteen minutes to grab a bite—and then back to the front line, to the counter where customers, not always in their right mind, were waiting. She had to smile. Smile at drunks, at boorish, tipsy louts, at quarrelsome ladies. Smile when all she wanted was to cry in helplessness or scream in rage.
Her coworkers considered Veronika the model of patience, an iron lady no one could break. Few lasted more than six months there. Staff churned like a river—slipping off the hook of that hellish fishing net and disappearing who knows where. Veronika held on. Because behind her stood not empty air. Behind her stood the meaning of her existence—her seven-year-old son, Styopa. She desperately needed money. Those grubby bills, reeking of vodka and sweat, were the only thread binding them to anything like a normal life. Where else could she go? Their town, once noisy and industrial, was quietly dying. The sawmill and the hydrolysis plant—the former breadwinners of thousands—now stood like grim monuments to a vanished era, guarded by ghostly watchmen tending only to dust and memories.
Crossing the threshold, Veronika managed to shrug off her jacket and froze at the sound of muffled voices in the kitchen. Her heart lurched—ever alert for trouble. Only then did a scrap of the morning’s conversation with her mother bob up: “Veronichka, don’t forget—Aunt Irina is coming today.”
Aunt Irina. Her mother’s older sister. From Irkutsk. From another, bigger life. She hadn’t been here in five years.
The kitchen smelled of freshly brewed tea and homemade pie. Two sisters, both no longer young, gray threading their hair and fine lines at their eyes, sat at the table wrapped in the warm light of the lampshade. That light fell now on Veronika—on her gaunt, pale face and the bruised half-moons beneath her eyes.
“My dear girl!” Aunt Irina was the first to leap up—a woman with gentle features and bright, kind eyes. “Our beauty—you’re utterly worn out, poor thing!”
She hugged her niece, and for a moment Veronika was wrapped in a long-forgotten feeling of safety, of childhood warmth. They kissed her, sat her down, and made her eat her fill.
Then Aunt Irina took a sip of tea and looked straight at her, frank as only family can be:
“Verochka, my dear, how much longer? Look at yourself! You’re burning alive in that bondage. Drop it all and move to us. Irkutsk is a big city, there are more opportunities. We’ll find work—good work, human work. And…”—she paused—“life doesn’t end here. You’re only thirty. You’re a young, beautiful woman. You might find your happiness yet. Anything can happen!”
Her words fell into the silence like stones into a bog. Veronika felt everything inside her compress into a lump of bitter, compacted experience.
“No, auntie, I’ve had enough,” she breathed, her voice hoarse with fatigue. “I’ve already had two tries at ‘getting happy.’ Two loud, bright ones—and both failures. Enough. In two months I have a vacation—I promise—we’ll come to you, Styopa and I. Just for a week. I’ll take him to the circus, to the theater, to the amusement park. He dreams about it.”
She kissed her aunt on the cheek and, pleading bone-deep exhaustion, trudged to her room. Styopa was sleeping peacefully, his even breathing the only sound that soothed her. But despite her exhaustion, Veronika couldn’t sleep. Seeing her aunt had stirred up the silt of feelings long forgotten, buried at the bottom.
And her mind, like a malicious demon, began methodically hauling up scenes from the past she had spent years trying to forget.
…She was eighteen. With a gold medal from school and a burning desire to be a doctor, she entered a medical college in Irkutsk and lived with Aunt Irina. The studies came easily; she was on fire with her future profession. One day their group went on an excursion to the Anatomical Museum at the medical university. There, among exhibits frozen forever in stillness, her heart began to pound with life. She met Him. Artyom. A final-year dental student—charm and confidence incarnate. He saw her—this modest girl with a luxurious chestnut braid and huge eyes the color of summer sky—and he was done for.
He was perfect. Self-assured, brilliantly educated, dressed to the nines, witty, gallant. He seemed to her a knight from the pages of a novel, appearing one day to whisk her off into a fairy tale. They dated only a little over a month before he introduced her to his parents and proposed. Veronika floated somewhere on cloud nine.
Artyom’s parents—successful dentists, owners of their own clinic—threw a lavish, opulent wedding. On Veronika’s side there were only her mother, her aunt and uncle, their son and his wife, and one friend from college. The friend served as maid of honor. Her father was gone—he had died long ago—and her mother had never remarried, devoting herself to her daughter.
They bought the young couple a gorgeous apartment downtown and furnished it top to bottom. Artyom graduated with honors and joined the family business. Money came in at once and grew month by month. He traded up to a luxury foreign car. Their life seemed cloudless. At nineteen, Veronika gave birth to their son, Styopa. She had to quit college.
And then… something went wrong. At first Artyom started working late. Then he would disappear for a day. Then two. He always had airtight, irrefutable explanations. She believed him. Desperately, hysterically—she wanted to believe, blind as a moth to flame.
But one day, out walking with the stroller, she ducked into a little café to buy some water. And she saw him. Her husband, her knight. He sat at a table with a slender blonde, looking at her with the same adoration he had once reserved for Veronika. She froze, unable to move. Then he leaned in and kissed the girl on the lips. Gently. Passionately.
The scene at home was awful. He didn’t justify himself. He explained.
“Vera, just look at me!” he said, almost sincerely offended. “I’m a successful man! I have everything! And you think in our circle it’s normal to be faithful? Everyone lives like this. Everyone has a mistress. Being a faithful husband—it’s ridiculous, it’s low-status. Put up with it. You’re a smart girl.”
And she did put up with it. For five long, humiliating years. She was ashamed to go back to her mother defeated, broken, disgraced. She kept waiting for him to come to his senses, for that mask of the successful macho to fall away so she could see the museum Artyom again.
But everything has its limit. Her patience too.
She left. She packed up her son and her few belongings and went back to her mother. She returned with nothing. Their luxury apartment had—by some clever legal trick—been registered in her mother-in-law’s name, and the car and garage in her father-in-law’s. Aunt Irina begged her to sue, but Veronika was in a profound depression. She knew they would hire the best lawyers, grind her to dust, and leave her with astronomical legal costs. Artyom didn’t refuse alimony—small mercies. Though to her, the sums were paltry. No doubt Daddy’s accounting showed only a sliver of his real income.
“So that’s it? It’s all over?” her mother asked, looking at a daughter grown gaunt and ten years older, with blue shadows under her eyes.
She got Styopa into kindergarten and Veronika went to work. At that same “VinoMir.”
But youth has its say. A heart, though wounded and deceived, still yearned for love, a body for tenderness. A year later she met Him—the second one. Grigory. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a charming hooligan’s smirk. He had a small bar of his own he grandly called a “café-restaurant.” The town’s noisy young crowd hung out there. He worked until three in the morning and smelled of expensive tobacco, alcohol, and the spirit of easy money.
“Here he is—the real thing,” naïve Veronika thought then. “A simple, down-to-earth guy. Not like that lying ‘aristocrat’ Artyom. Now I’ve truly found a faithful partner.”
And… she was cruelly mistaken. The rose-colored glasses cracked quickly. The honeymoon didn’t last. Almost every night Grisha came home drunk—reeking of cheap perfume and other women. If nothing else, Veronika had learned to recognize the specific “scent of betrayal” from a mile away.
The fights began—shouting, slammed doors, broken dishes, tears. They split and reunited, as if tied by some toxic thread. It went on for two years. Two years of humiliation, empty promises, and too-late remorse. And then one day, after yet another night of his carousing, she looked at sleeping Styopa and understood—enough. The end. Final and irrevocable.
She left. Again. Disillusioned with life, with love, with men, with herself. Her soul felt scorched and hollow. She put a thick cross over her personal life. No dates, no meetings, no hopes. Only work. Home. Her son. And a quiet, gray hopelessness. And today Aunt Irina, with her talk of moving and new happiness, had painfully prodded wounds that had barely begun to heal.
…Her aunt left, but made Veronika give her firm word that she would come in the summer with her son, just as she’d promised.
And Veronika kept her word. In the summer the three of them—she, her mother, and Styopa—went to Irkutsk. Aunt Irina threw a real celebration, laid out a lavish spread, beaming with joy.
At the table, besides family, there was one more guest: a man of about thirty-five, short, stocky, with kind, slightly sad eyes and a wide, honest bald spot he didn’t bother to hide. He was introduced: “Nikolai Petrovich, the son of my dear late friend. Works at the city administration. And by the way—unmarried.”
Veronika understood at once. Auntie had decided to play matchmaker. She tensed inside, bracing for defense. Nikolai Petrovich turned out to be pleasant and incredibly courteous. All evening he paid her gentle attention—pouring tea, offering pie, joking lightly and cleverly. But… she didn’t like him. Not at all. Not her type. Not her hero. Next to the ghost of stately Artyom and the rugged Grigory, he seemed simple, ordinary, too down-to-earth.
At parting, a bit embarrassed, he invited her to a café the next day. Refusing would have been rude, so Veronika agreed, reluctantly.
The meeting went surprisingly well. He arrived with a modest but very beautiful bouquet of irises (how had he guessed they were her favorite?). He was gallant, a good listener; his jokes were subtle and kind. He didn’t boast, didn’t show off—he was… genuine. Walking her home, he suddenly stopped, looked straight into her eyes, and said softly but very clearly:
“Veronika, I know we’ve only just met. But I’ve seen a lot of people in my time. And I can see you’re an extraordinary, strong, and beautiful woman. I like you very much. I won’t promise storms and passions. But I am ready to love you—and your son. Seriously and for the long haul. Think about it. Give me a chance.”
He gave her three days to decide. As she walked home, Veronika thought: “I already married for great, tempestuous love. How did that end? I tried infatuation and passion—how did that end? Maybe it’s time to try something else. Something sensible. Peaceful.”
She said yes. A month later they had a very small wedding with only the closest family. Veronika and Styopa moved into Nikolai’s cozy three-room apartment that smelled of books and coffee.
And then the most amazing thing began. Seemingly calm, even a little phlegmatic, Nikolai proved to be a man of iron will and remarkable organizational talent. First, he tracked down Artyom and had a man-to-man talk. He didn’t threaten, didn’t demand. He persuaded. And he obtained Artyom’s official consent for the adoption of Styopa.
“We’re one family now. And we should share one last name,” he told Veronika gently but in a tone that allowed no argument.
He didn’t keep her like an expensive toy. He did something greater. Nikolai handled all the paperwork, rented a small but cozy space in a good neighborhood, and bought the first batch of merchandise—quality, fashionable women’s clothing. Overnight, Veronika became the owner of her own little boutique and its sole salesperson.
“A woman should be independent, Verochka,” he said. “Not just ‘attached to a husband,’ but self-sufficient. That’s when real self-confidence appears, and respect from others—and happiness of a different, truer kind.”
He was absolutely right. In just a year and a half, the browbeaten, perpetually exhausted, unsure woman began to change into someone else. Straight back, steady gaze, a business suit, the knack for negotiating with suppliers. Her business grew. She no longer rented—she bought the space. Then she opened a second location. Then a third.
Nikolai turned out to be not just a kind man. He was her rock, her quiet harbor, her most reliable rear guard and partner. He didn’t resent her success; he was sincerely proud of it. He got along wonderfully with Styopa, helped with homework, went to parent-teacher meetings. And three years later their daughter, little Masha, was born.
They’ve now been together seven years. Seven years of quiet, solid, absolute happiness. No storms or scandals, no suspicions or betrayals. Mutual respect, support, and a deep gratitude to each other—painfully earned.
Veronika loves her husband. She loves him with a quiet, calm, but incredibly deep love. The kind that is stronger than any passion. She learned a simple, brilliant truth: happiness isn’t a blinding flash that leaves your eyes aching and nothing but ashes behind. Happiness is a steady, warm, gentle sun that shines every day. It’s the quiet harbor after a long and terrifying voyage across a raging ocean. And it is worth it.