The champagne was icy and prickly, burning her throat with a thousand tiny needles. Olga drank it slowly—not like a festive drink, but like medicine. They brought her a huge platter on ice, strewn with oysters, shrimp, and halved crab claws. She ate methodically, without visible pleasure, as if performing an important but unpleasant task. Every oyster shell pried open, every piece of juicy lobster meat pulled from a claw was a small act of destruction. She wasn’t celebrating her promotion. She was burying her marriage—and it was the most expensive, exquisite wake one could imagine.
She felt the eyes on her. Sympathetic, curious, judgmental. But she didn’t care. She had turned into an ice sculpture in the center of the room, and no one else’s warmth could melt her anymore. She finished the last oyster, washed it down with champagne, and leaned back in her chair, looking at the city lights. For the first time in these three hours she felt not humiliation but a strange, ringing calm. She had made her decision. There would be no more fights, no reproaches, no sleepless nights. There would only be cleanliness. Surgical cleanliness.
And at that moment he appeared. Viktor burst into the quiet, respectable atmosphere of the restaurant like a gust of wind from a garbage dump. Loud, rumpled, his face flushed, his jacket slung over one shoulder. From a meter away he reeked of stale booze, cheap beer, and someone else’s rowdy fun. He saw her and broke into a wide, self-satisfied grin of a man convinced that his charm could atone for any sin.
“My sunshine! Here I am! Don’t sulk, babe, I came, didn’t I?” he boomed, flopping into the chair opposite and trying to grab her hand.
Olga slowly, with fastidious precision, withdrew her palm. She looked at him the way an entomologist looks at a rare but revolting insect. There was not a drop of the resentment or anger he knew so well in her gaze. There was only a cold, detached assessment.
“You’re late,” she said. Her voice was even and quiet, but in that quiet there was more threat than in any shout.
“Oh, come on, baby, I told you—I ran into Seryoga! That’s sacred! We had a beer, chatted… You know Seryoga!” he snickered, eyeing the empty plates on the table. “Wow, you didn’t waste any time here! Feasting? Good for you! On my tab, of course!”
He winked at her, still not realizing he was dancing on the edge of a cliff. He thought it was the same old game: he’s at fault, she gets offended, then he hugs her, says a few sweet words, and everything goes back to normal. But he was playing on an old field that Olga had long since burned to the ground.
She leaned toward him slightly over the table. Her face was unreadable.
“I waited for you in this restaurant for three hours. THREE. HOURS. And you, it turns out, met a friend and decided to have a drink with him. Well then, you can move in with him now, so you’ll have more time to spend together.”
Viktor froze; the drunken smile slid off his face. He finally began to understand something.
“What’s this? You mad or what? Ol, cut it out…”
But she wasn’t listening anymore. She raised her hand and signaled to the waiter. He materialized at the table immediately, check folder in hand. Olga took it without even glancing at the total. She took from her purse Viktor’s friend’s business card—Seryoga’s—scribbled an address on the back, and handed it to her husband along with the bill.
“Here’s your friend’s address. In case, in your drunken haze, you forgot where he lives. And this—this is payment for a lesson. A lesson that my time is expensive.”
She stood. Perfect posture, calm face. She smoothed her dress, picked up her handbag, and, without granting him another glance, headed for the exit. She walked between the rows of tables, and it seemed to her that every gaze followed her—not a discarded woman, but a queen who had just delivered justice.
Viktor was left sitting alone in the middle of the room, clutching a heavy rectangle of card. He opened it. The numbers, neatly printed, danced before his eyes, refusing to add up to a real sum. It wasn’t just the price of dinner. It was the price of his betrayal, presented to him for payment in full—no discounts, no possibility of appeal.
Viktor burst into the apartment, sobered by rage and humiliation. The cold night air hadn’t cooled him; it had only honed his anger to razor sharpness. He was ready for battle. He anticipated screaming, accusations, maybe even dishes smashing against the wall. He was ready to yell back, to accuse her of wastefulness, of hysteria, of not valuing male friendship. He flung the door open—and stopped on the threshold.
The apartment greeted him not with chaos but with a ringing, demonstrative order. No scattered things, no signs of hasty packing. Only a floor lamp glowing in the corner of the living room, illuminating the armchair where Olga sat. She didn’t jump up, didn’t rush at him with reproaches. She sat absolutely still, holding a glass of red wine, and looked at him as if he were a door-to-door salesman who’d gotten the wrong address. Her calm was more frightening than any scandal.
“What the hell was that?” he barked, yanking the jacket off his shoulder and throwing it on the floor. His voice detonated the silence.
Olga took a small sip of wine without taking her eyes off him. “That was the finale, Vitia. A beautiful, expensive finale. The kind our story deserved.”
“Are you crazy? That bill! Did you even see how much it was?! You blew a fortune just because I was an hour late?” He advanced on her, waving his arms, trying to fill the space with his anger, with his usual manly force.
“Not an hour. Three,” she corrected him in a calm, colorless voice. “And no, it wasn’t your money. Consider it my parting gift to myself. Severance pay for years of wasted time.”
Her composure infuriated him. He wanted her to scream, to turn it into a fight he could win. But she wasn’t fighting. She was delivering a verdict.
“I just met a friend! A friend, Olya! A person I haven’t seen in five years! What’s so terrible about that?!”
Olga allowed herself the faintest smirk, set the glass on the side table, and looked straight into his eyes. And at that moment Viktor felt, for the first time, a real, animal fear.
“I know. I called him.”
Viktor froze. The air left his lungs.
“What? Why? To complain about me?”
“No,” she rose slowly from the chair. Now they were standing face-to-face. “I was handling a logistics issue. I called Sergei about an hour ago. I told him you’d had unforeseen circumstances and had absolutely nowhere to live. I asked him to prepare a couch for you. Said you’d be at his place tonight. He wasn’t thrilled, by the way, but he promised to think of something.”
A roaring filled Viktor’s ears. He looked at her—this beautiful, cold, utterly foreign woman—and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. She hadn’t just kicked him out. She had destroyed his alibi, his refuge. She had recast him not as a cool guy who chose his friend, but as a pathetic, homeless loser palmed off on that very friend like an unwanted suitcase. She had struck not at him, but at his reputation, at his masculine ego—and she’d done it with someone else’s hands.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. Without looking, he knew who it was. Seryoga. Calling to ask what the hell was going on. Viktor pictured the conversation with horror. He would have to mumble something, make excuses, look like a complete idiot in his best friend’s eyes.
“Bitch,” he breathed. It was the only word he could force out.
“Your things are in the hallway,” Olga said evenly, ignoring the slur. She walked to the door, indicating two neatly packed suitcases he hadn’t even noticed when he came in. “I didn’t take everything, just the basics for the first little while. You can leave the keys on the side table. And don’t forget to turn off the light when you go.”
She turned and went to the bedroom. Without looking back. Without slamming the door. She just left, abandoning him in the middle of a living room that, a minute ago, had been his home. The phone kept vibrating in his pocket, insisting he answer for the evening he had so fecklessly lost. But there was nothing left to say. The war was over before it began. He had been erased—cleanly, without any dust. And on the scorched earth of their past he stood alone, in complete, deafening solitude…