“Katya, where’s my blue tie?” Dmitry shouted from the bedroom.
Ekaterina stood over the stove, stirring oatmeal that had already turned thick and listless. Seven years of marriage, and every morning played like a looped reel: he sprinted toward money and importance; she hovered between the kettle and the washing machine.
“In the closet, second shelf!” she called.
“I don’t see it! Katya, where is it?”
She exhaled, wiped her hands on a towel, and went to rescue him from the second shelf. As she reached for his suit, her fingers slipped into the pocket of yesterday’s jacket and brushed something cold. A key. Ordinary, stamped metal—only it wasn’t theirs.
“Dim, what’s this from?” She held it up.
He turned, hesitated a heartbeat, then recovered with a bark. “Go back to the kitchen! Don’t dig through my things. It’s for the new archive at the office.”
He didn’t expect what would follow.
At breakfast he never left his phone alone. He pecked out messages, smirked at the screen, even stifled a couple of giggles.
“Who’s texting?” Katya asked, mild as milk.
“Colleagues. Project chatter,” he said without looking up.
But on the glass she glimpsed blush-pink hearts and fluttering emojis, none of which had ever belonged to the Progress corporate style guide.
“I’ll be late tonight. Presentation, then dinner with partners. Don’t wait up.”
“Dinner with partners on a Saturday?”
“Business never sleeps, dear.”
He brushed a perfunctory kiss against her cheek and left a trail of an unfamiliar, expensive cologne.
Katya stacked plates into the sink and sat with a cup of coffee gone cold. Seven years earlier, she’d graduated top of her class in economics, started at a bank, and was climbing rung by rung. Then she married.
“Why do you need that job?” Dmitry had coaxed. “I’ll provide. Take care of the home. We’ll have kids soon—you won’t have time for a career.”
There were still no children. Meanwhile, Katya knew every TV schedule and every neighborhood discount by heart.
Today something clicked. A stranger’s key. Doodled hearts. New perfume. “Business” dinners on weekends. She needed the truth—and she knew how to find it.
She opened her laptop and typed: Horizont Business Center vacancies. That was Dmitry’s tower—seventh floor—Progress, the IT firm with the brisk logo and even brisker deadlines.
Listings flickered by. There: “Clean Office” hiring evening staff for Horizont.
Her pulse leaped. Cleaners came in when the day crowd left. But someone always stayed—managers who “worked late,” who “had meetings,” who smelled like someone else’s perfume.
Katya dialed.
“Hello, I’m calling about the cleaning job at Horizont…”
The next morning, she sat across from the team lead, Nina Vasilyevna, in a cramped office that smelled of bleach and bureaucracy.
“Do you have cleaning experience?” Nina asked.
“I’ve been cleaning at home for seven years,” Katya said truthfully.
“Why Horizont? We’ve got posts closer to your building.”
Katya was ready. “The schedule suits. I’m… getting divorced. My husband will be home with the child at that time.”
Nina’s face softened. “I understand, dear. Divorce is hard. We’ll take you. Just register the paperwork under… what did we have free? Valentina. Valentina Petrova.”
Three days later, Ekaterina Kovalyova became Valentina Petrova, cleaner at the Horizont Business Center. She received a gray uniform, a caddy of supplies, and the first rule:
“We are invisible,” Nina said. “If employees are working late, don’t distract them. Quiet. Careful. Unseen. Seventh floor: Progress. Office plaque reads, ‘D. A. Kovalyov, Development Manager.’”
“Nina Vasilyevna, could I take the seventh?” Katya asked evenly. “Fewer offices. I’m still learning.”
“Of course, dear. Lyuda’s drowning up there.”
That evening, at eight, mop in hand, Katya stood outside her husband’s door. The workday was long over. Voices murmured inside.
The game began.
Two weeks of “invisibility” stripped the varnish from everything. Dmitry wasn’t staying late for deliverables; he was staying for Alina Kramer, a marketer with a perfect blowout and a laugh that rang down the hall.
The key in his jacket wasn’t for an archive. It opened Alina’s one-room flat in a brand-new building with mirrored elevators.
“Dim, I’m tired of this secrecy,” Alina sighed while Katya mopped in the neighboring office, eyes on the metal’s dull shine as if it were a mirror. “When can we be together openly?”
“Soon, sweetheart. My lawyer says we have to prepare the paperwork right. Otherwise I lose half the apartment in the divorce.”
Katya clenched her jaw. So it wasn’t just cheating—he was plotting to carve up her life on the way out.
And then it got worse. One night she knocked a stack of reports off Dmitry’s desk. Papers skittered over the floor like startled fish. She crouched to gather them and saw notes in the margins—numbers, adjustments, arrows. With her economics brain, the pattern snapped into focus: internal reports, plans, budgets, road maps.
A second phone—the work one—lit up. “Irina S.”
No one was around. Katya opened the chat.
“Dima, I need data on the Northern project. I’ll transfer the usual amount.”
“Ira, the info’s gone up. 50k per package.”
“Agreed. Hurry. Presentation Tuesday.”
Her hands went ice-cold. Irina Somova—deputy director at Vector, Progress’s main competitor. Dmitry was selling trade secrets like they were grocery coupons.
Katya photographed the messages, the annotated documents, everything. At home, she spread the evidence on the table. The scope staggered her: half a million rubles’ worth of leaks, at least.
“How’s work?” she asked at dinner.
“Fine. Promising new project,” Dmitry said, not lifting his eyes. Promising—already priced and delivered to Vector.
She could have gone straight to HR, straight to a lawyer. But Katya wanted the whole ledger balanced: truth, consequences, and closure. Tomorrow was Progress’s corporate celebration. Dmitry had preened all week—new suit, rehearsed toast, big plans to shine.
“Dim, what will you tell colleagues about me?” Alina had asked yesterday.
“What’s there to say? I’m getting divorced. We’ll be official soon.”
“What if your wife shows up?”
“She won’t. She’s shy at these things. Says she feels awkward around my colleagues.”
Katya smiled in the dark of the corridor where she stood, anonymous in her gray uniform. He had no idea his “shy” wife had been haunting his hallways for days.
On party day, she reported to work as usual. But the uniform stayed folded in her bag beside a black cocktail dress. In her folder—every receipt of his double betrayal.
At seven sharp, while the conference hall filled with applause and canapés, she changed in the staff washroom, freshened her makeup, shook her hair free.
Through the glass doors she spotted Dmitry in his new suit, tilting flirtation like champagne toward Alina. On stage, General Director Pavel Romanovich praised quarterly achievements.
Time.
“Excuse me,” Katya said as she stepped into the room. “May I have a moment?”
Conversations stalled mid-sparkle. Dmitry turned and turned to stone.
“I’m Ekaterina Kovalyova, your employee’s wife,” she said, voice steady. “For the last two weeks, I’ve worked here as a cleaner under the name Valentina Petrova.”
“What are you doing here?!” Dmitry hissed, lunging.
“I was gathering proof—of your affairs, and of something worse.” The room held its breath.
“Pavel Romanovich,” she continued, offering the folder, “your manager is selling confidential information to Vector.”
“That’s slander!” Dmitry shouted. “She’s just angry about the affair!”
“Transfer amounts. Screenshots of chats. Photos of documents with your handwriting,” Katya said, not raising her voice. “Everything’s documented.”
The director paged through the evidence. With each sheet, his face cooled by one degree.
“And these,” Katya added, sliding out another set, “are photos of… extracurricular use of office premises.”
Alina’s hand flew to her mouth. She emitted a strangled sound and fled.
“Dmitry Kovalyov,” the director said at last, voice like a closed door, “you’re fired. And you will answer to the law. Security.”
As they escorted Dmitry out, silence settled like ash. Pavel Romanovich approached Katya.
“Thank you. We’ve been chasing this leak for six months.”
“I only wanted the truth about my husband,” she said. “I found more than I planned.”
“Do you have a degree?”
“Economics. I haven’t worked in the field for seven years.”
“We need a security analyst—someone who can see what others miss,” he said, considering her. “Interested?”
Katya smiled. “Very.”
A month after the scandal, her life had new edges and light. She was a security analyst at Progress now, earning triple what Dmitry had made. She came home tired in the clean way—mind stretched, hands steady.
Dmitry vanished from her orbit. After his dismissal, recruitment agencies blacklisted him. Alina lasted a week before disappearing from his life as well.
At the hearing, Katya felt composed. Dmitry hunched in a corner, unshaven, shirt crumpled, gaze sliding away from hers.
“The court rules,” the judge intoned, “to dissolve the marriage. By mutual settlement, the apartment is divided equally.”
Two months later, Katya celebrated a housewarming in her own two-room place. She sold her half of the old three-room and bought a bright, sane apartment in a good district where the windows opened on trees instead of excuses.
Work felt like oxygen. She designed a new info-security protocol and shut down several espionage attempts before they took their first breath.
Six months on, Progress hired a new IT director—Andrey Volkov, freshly moved from Moscow. Divorced. Raising a school-age son. They kept landing on the same projects. He treated her like a professional—no condescension, no doubt.
“Katya, do you know any good schools for my boy?” he asked one evening.
“Sure. Walk after work? I’ll show you a few.” That’s how their friendship began—two adults who valued honesty and understood the price of betrayal.
A year later, in a cold, bright metro station, she ran into Dmitry. He’d lost weight, and not the healthy kind. He worked at a car wash, lived in a rented room.
“Katya… how are you?” he started.
“Good. And you?”
“Hard. I can’t find anything better. Maybe we could try again? I’ve really changed…”
She studied him. He had changed—into someone small and sorry.
“No,” she said gently. “I have a different life now. And the main rule in it is to respect myself.”
That evening, over tea, she told Andrey about the meeting.
“Do you feel sorry for him?” he asked.
“I feel sorry for the woman who spent seven years thinking she was just a housewife,” Katya said. “He got what he earned.”
Andrey took her hand. “Good thing that woman found the strength to change everything.”
Outside, snow made the world quiet. Inside, warmth climbed the walls of a room where laughter came easily and no one lied. Katya was finally home—somewhere she was valued, and where she valued herself.