“Sign it, Kseniya Arkadyevna, and let’s be done with this farce.”
Rodion carelessly slid a folder of documents toward me. His well-groomed fingers drummed on the mahogany desk, and on his lips played that very smirk I’d come to hate over the years.
The smirk of a predator driving its prey into a corner.
“What is it?” I didn’t touch the papers, feeling everything inside me clench into an icy knot.
“My parting gift. Six hundred square meters in some hole called Verkhnie Klyuchi. A plot overgrown with weeds, a crooked shed, and a collapsed well. Everything you deserve.”
He leaned back in an embossed leather chair, savoring the moment. Savoring the humiliation he had staged with special cynicism.
“And this…”—he nodded at the documents—“consider it compensation for your best years. You can plant radishes.
If anything grows in that clay, of course.”
Undisguised contempt colored his voice. He was waiting for tears, a tantrum, a scene.
Waiting for me to start contesting, haggling for his handouts, clinging to the familiar life he was taking away from me with a single stroke of the pen.
I simply picked up the pen. He hadn’t expected that.
“The children stay with me,” I said, my voice steady, without a tremor. It was my only condition. My red line.
For a moment his face twisted. The children were the only thing that could pierce his armor—but not out of love.
They were his status, his continuation, a pretty picture for society. And they despised him, and he knew it.
“As you wish. The village is perfect for them. Fresh air and an outhouse out back. Good for their development.”
Silently, I signed my name. Voronova, Kseniya Arkadyevna. Soon just Voronova.
I took the folder and stood. Not another word. Not a single glance in his direction.
The door of his office slammed behind me, cutting off fifteen years of my life.
That evening, as I sorted through the papers, the children peeked into the room—my thirteen-year-old twins, Lyova and Polina, my little defenders.
“Mom, is that from him?” Polina nodded at the documents with their embossed seals.
“Yes. This is our new home.”
I unfolded the plot plan: a skewed rectangle marked “agricultural land.” In the center—a blue circle labeled “well.”
Lyova frowned.
“Are we really going there? Far away from… him?”
“We are,” I said firmly. “We’ll start from scratch.”
On my laptop I opened a satellite map. A small green speck amid fields and forests. Verkhnie Klyuchi.
Zooming in, you could make out a dark void in the middle of the overgrown plot. The old well.
Rodion thought he was exiling me—to exile itself, to poverty. He’d left me that “useless” dacha plot with a smirk.
He had no idea what secret that abandoned land might hold. And for some reason I felt that right there, in that wilderness, my real winning ticket was hidden.
Not in an apartment with a view of central Moscow, but there, at the bottom of an old, abandoned well.
Reality proved harsher than any satellite image. Verkhnie Klyuchi greeted us with sagging fences and deserted streets.
Our plot was the last one, right by the forest. The weeds were as tall as a person, hiding everything but the shed’s rusty roof.
“Whoa,” Lyova breathed, surveying our new domain. “We’re gonna need a machete.”
Polina swallowed, then gave a resolute shake of her head.
“It’s fine, Mom. We’ll manage. The main thing is we’re together and he’s not around.”
We rented a small house on the next street for the time being. The owner, a frail old woman, swept us with a sharp, appraising look.
“Going to the sixth plot, are you? To Prokhorov’s?” she asked. “Bad place. He dug and dug something there. He was a geologist, a strange one. Left about ten years ago, then died, they say. Since then the land’s stood ownerless.”
In the evening the phone rang. Rodion.
“Well, plantation queen? How do you like your estates? Have the kids met the local fauna yet? No vipers out there?”
His voice oozed poisonous honey.
“We’re doing great, Rodion. The air is wonderful.”
I tried to speak calmly, evenly, giving him no fuel for further mockery. But he was a master of psychological pressure.
“I worry, Ksyusha. You understand the children need normal conditions. Internet, school, peers. Not this… primitive backwater. It’s irresponsible of you.”
I closed my eyes. He hit the mark—my maternal fear.
“I can fix everything. One call from you,” he lowered his voice to a confidential purr. “Admit you were wrong, that this was a mistake. I’ll send a car.”
It was his favorite trick: paint me as a scatterbrain, incapable of sound decisions, and then show up as savior.
“We don’t need your car. Or your help.”
“As you wish. Just don’t come crying to child services when they show up to check the conditions you’re keeping my children in.”
He hung up.
My hands trembled. I stepped out onto the porch. The air was clean and cool, smelling of herbs and forest. But Rodion’s words poisoned everything around like sticky venom.
The next day we began clearing the plot. The work was hellish: thorny thickets, nettles, roots like snakes. By noon we’d reached the shed.
Inside, among old junk, I found a rotted box. In it lay yellowed papers—a plan of the plot, far more detailed than the official documents—and several notebooks filled in tight handwriting.
They were the diaries of Prokhorov—the geologist himself.
And in the very center of the plot, freed from the weeds, stood the well.
It wasn’t collapsed, as Rodion had said. A sturdy log crib of oak darkened by time, a massive windlass, a heavy wooden lid.
Lyova and I could barely lift it. A black, damp void fell away below.
“Mom, it’s deep,” Lyova said, dropping a pebble.
We never heard it hit.
Right then, staring into that bottomless darkness, I understood that Rodion had miscalculated. He thought he’d thrown me into a pit.
He’d given me a key. And I was ready to turn it—whatever it cost me.
Night after night I sat over Prokhorov’s diaries by the light of a dim lamp. The notebooks smelled of dust and musty earth.
Through geological terms, layer diagrams and calculations, something else showed through—an obsession.
Prokhorov wasn’t searching for water. He had built not a well, but a hidden shaft. On one page I stumbled on a phrase circled in red: “Depth 17. False casing. Main load below.”
And next to it a note: “Ownership of the land is ownership of its subsoil. I specifically checked with lawyers; the legal opinion is enclosed. Notary certified. What’s mine is mine. Forever.”
In the morning an unfamiliar car drove onto the plot. Right behind it—a gleaming black SUV belonging to Rodion.
He hadn’t lied.
Two women in strict suits got out of the first car. From the second—him. Smug, certain of victory.
“Kseniya Arkadyevna? Child protective services,” one of the women introduced herself. “We received a report of inadequate living conditions for minors.”
Lyova and Polina, streaked with dirt, froze behind me. I saw fear settle in their eyes.
“Here, look,” Rodion swept his arm over our cleared patch of land. “A shed about to collapse. An overgrown field. The facilities, as I understand it, are in the woods. Is this a life for the children of a successful man?”
He reveled in his rightness, in his power. He hadn’t come just to humiliate me. He’d come to take the children, to break me completely.
At that very moment something happened. Years of humiliation, fear, the attempts to be “good” and “convenient” compressed into a single point—and burst.
Enough. That’s it.
I looked at frightened Polina, at Lyova with his fists clenched. And for the first time in fifteen years, I looked at Rodion without a trace of fear.
“Ladies,” I turned to the women, my voice calm and businesslike. “You’re not looking at a neglected plot, but at a capital investment project. I am putting in order property that passed to me under an agreement.”
Rodion snorted.
“What property? This is a dump!”
“This is land with a unique geological feature,” I ignored him. “The former owner, geologist Prokhorov, conducted surveys here. The ‘well,’ as you call it, is in fact a reinforced shaft.”
I walked over to the cribbing and rapped it.
“This is bog oak. Practically eternal.”
The child-services workers exchanged glances. My confident tone threw them off balance.
“I have a request. I need help from two men—literally ten minutes—to demonstrate the value of this asset.”
I looked at our neighbor Stepan, who happened to be fussing with his fence and watching the scene with interest. He nodded. The second was Rodion’s driver, whom Rodion beckoned over with an irritable wave.
We secured a powerful flashlight and a long rope with a hook to the windlass—both things I’d found in the shed.
“Seventeen meters,” I instructed Stepan, who took hold of the handle.
The rope began to unspool with a creak, down into the dark. The light washed over wet, moss-covered walls.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Now a little to the left. There should be a niche there.”
Stepan turned the windlass slightly. A dull thud sounded.
“Got it!” he yelled. “Hooked something!”
“Pull! Carefully!”
The two of them began to crank. Slowly, with effort. From the well’s dark maw there emerged something rectangular, clad in darkened copper—a small chest, banded with metal.
I took a crowbar and knocked off the rusted lock. Lifted the lid.
Everyone nearby gasped.
Inside, on a bed of decayed velvet, dull gleams flickered off gold bars.
Rodion was the first to come to. His face went from smug to scarlet, then to ashen gray.
“Th—that’s mine!” he croaked, stepping toward the chest. “You got the land from me, which means all of this is mine!”
Instinctively, Lyova stepped between him and the chest.
I looked calmly at my ex-husband—the man who had considered me his possession, and now was trying to claim what he himself had thrown away.
“You’re mistaken, Rodion. This is mine.”
I pulled from my pocket a document folded in quarters—the very property division agreement.
“Here’s your signature. You voluntarily transferred full and undivided ownership of this plot to me. With all structures and”—I paused, looking straight into his eyes—“with all its contents.”
The child-services women were silent, reduced to spectators.
“And here,” I raised Prokhorov’s old notebook, “the previous owner’s diary. There’s an entry here notarized thirty years ago: ‘Ownership of the land is ownership of its subsoil; part already paid to the state.’ The law is on my side, Rodion. Your greed and your contempt have backfired.”
His face contorted in a grimace of helpless rage. He had wanted so badly to destroy me, to be rid of his “dead weight,” that he had handed me a fortune.
“I’ll sue!” he squealed. “I’ll prove you tricked me!”
“Go ahead,” I shrugged. “Tell the court how you tried to dump your ex-wife and children into poverty and accidentally made us rich. I think they’ll enjoy the story.”
I turned to the child-services workers.
“As you can see, the conditions for the children here are more than promising. We plan to build a large house. Your tip was false. Good day.”
Muttering something, they hurried back to their car and drove off.
Rodion was left alone. Humiliated. Crushed. His driver and our neighbor Stepan looked at him without a shred of pity. He was a laughingstock.
He turned and, without another word, slunk to his car like a beaten dog.
When his SUV disappeared around the bend, Polina ran up and hugged me tight.
“Mom, you’re so strong!”
I looked at my children, at the overgrown plot, at the old well that had guarded a treasure, and I realized the real treasure wasn’t in that chest. It was that on this day I finally found myself.
A year passed. Where the weeds had been, a big, sunlit house stood. We restored the old well, sealed it with strong glass, and made it the centerpiece of the landscaping—a monument to the start of our new life.
The children went to the local school and made friends. Lyova got into geology; Polina into horseback riding. They were happy.
Sometimes calls came to my phone from unknown numbers. I knew who it was. I never answered. The past belongs in the past—especially the part that tried to bury you.
Three years went by. Our house in Verkhnie Klyuchi became the coziest place on earth. The apple trees we planted that first spring had already borne fruit.
I invested part of the find in the village itself—we renovated the old community hall, turning it into a children’s recreation center, and helped restore the farm, giving neighbors jobs.
They stopped seeing me as the eccentric dacha lady. I became one of them: Kseniya Arkadyevna, who could help pull a tractor out of the mud and give solid business advice.
The kids grew up. Inspired by Prokhorov’s story, Lyova was seriously preparing to apply to the geology faculty. He’d tramped all the surrounding forests and collected a whole set of minerals.
Polina found herself in veterinary work, helping at the farm and treating every village cat and dog.
They no longer remembered our old life; their father’s barked orders and perpetual dissatisfaction were somewhere far away, like a bad dream.
One autumn evening an old, rattling taxi pulled up to our gate. Rodion got out.
I didn’t recognize him at first. The expensive suit had been replaced by a worn jacket; his face had hollowed; gray threaded his hair. The polished self-assurance was gone without a trace. He stood shifting from foot to foot, not daring to come in.
I stepped onto the porch. We looked at each other in silence.
“I… Ksyusha, I’ve lost everything,” he managed. “Partners screwed me, the business collapsed. The apartment was repossessed for debts. I’ve got nowhere to live.”
He looked at me with hope—the way you look at a life preserver. He hadn’t come to ask forgiveness. He’d come to demand help, as always, only now—from a position of weakness.
“What do you want from me, Rodion?”
“Let me stay. For a while. I’m the father of your children, after all.”
At that moment Lyova and Polina came out of the house. They stopped behind me. In their eyes there was neither hatred nor gloating—only a cool, detached curiosity with which you look at a stranger.
“You weren’t a father to us,” Lyova said evenly. “You were an owner. And when a thing breaks, you throw it out. You taught us that yourself.”
Rodion flinched. He looked to me for support.
“There’s nothing of yours here,” I said calmly. “You gave it all away yourself. You chose to be left with nothing.”
I took a few bills from my pocket and held them out.
“This is for a taxi back. And don’t ever come here again. You’re not welcome.”
He took the money; his fingers trembled. He turned and walked to the car in silence.
I watched him go and felt nothing. No pity, no satisfaction. Emptiness. He simply ceased to exist for me.
I hugged the children and looked at our well under glass. Its dark depth no longer seemed frightening.
It had become a symbol that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to push off and soar higher than you ever imagined. And the treasure it guarded wasn’t the gold.
It was the chance to build a life on my own terms.