— “Could you keep it down a little? My head is splitting.”
Roman’s voice from the living room wasn’t loud, but it carried that particular, icy note that made something in Anna’s stomach unpleasantly clench. She froze for a moment with the knife poised above the cutting board, listening. The kitchen smelled of fried onions and coziness. From the children’s room came cheerful clattering—her seven-year-old son Misha was building some grand castle out of blocks, periodically toppling the towers so he could raise them again. An ordinary evening. Or rather, what she had thought of as an ordinary evening.
Roman walked into the kitchen. Tall, lean, in a home T-shirt that was perfectly clean. He wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, though they were already dry. That gesture was his calling card—an urge for order in everything.
— “Anya, he’s scattered everything again. The whole room is covered in that plastic. And that racket… It’s impossible to concentrate.”
— “Rom, he’s playing,” Anna tried to keep her voice calm and conciliatory. She turned to him with a faint smile. “He’s seven. Kids play. Sometimes loudly.”
— “There are different ways to play,” he went to the fridge and took out a bottle of water. “Play shouldn’t turn into chaos. A man needs order in his things from childhood, so he’ll have order in his head later.”
A cold ripple of irritation ran down Anna’s back. “A man.” He was talking about her little boy as if he were a cadet on parade. Over the past couple of months she’d been hearing these lectures from Roman more and more often. At first they had seemed like care, an attempt to take part in upbringing. But now something alien, steely, showed through them.
— “He’s not in the army. He’s at home. And he’s just building a castle.”
— “And that castle collapses every five minutes with a noise like the neighbors are doing renovations,” Roman took a sip of water, never taking his attentive, scrutinizing gaze off her. “I’m simply saying he needs to be taught neatness. Finished playing—put your things away. Want to build—build so you don’t bother others. Those are the basic rules of living together. We’re the ones who have to teach him that.”
The key word was “we.” It grated on the ear. Roman spoke as if they had equal rights and duties toward Misha. As if he weren’t just the man she’d been living with for the last six months, but a father.
— “I’ll teach him everything he needs to know,” she snapped—sharper than she meant to. “And first of all, that at home you can laugh, run, and sometimes drop your toys. Because this is his home.”
Roman set the bottle on the table. His face didn’t change, but in his eyes appeared that very expression of condescending superiority that infuriated her.
— “You’re too soft on him. He’ll grow up an infantile egoist who won’t consider others. I just want to help. To make a real man out of him.”
— “A real man, Roma, isn’t someone who’s afraid of dropping a building block. Don’t turn him into a soldier.”
He said nothing. He just looked at her for a long moment, and in that look you could read: “You’re a woman, you don’t understand.” Then he turned and left the kitchen. A minute later his voice came from the children’s room, calm and moralizing: “Misha, let’s put everything back in the box. Playtime is over.”
Anna clenched the knife in her hand. The clatter in the kid’s room stopped. An unnatural, oppressive silence set in. She peeked around the doorframe. Misha, head bowed, was obediently putting the bright pieces into the container under Roman’s watchful eye. The joyful spark was gone from the boy’s face. Only bewilderment and hurt remained. And in that moment Anna realized that the coziness of her home had suffered its first, very deep crack. And the culprit wasn’t the noise of children’s play.
— “Misha, time’s up. Cartoons are over.”
It was Saturday. Nine in the morning. Time that used to belong to the two of them completely—to Anna and Misha. Time for lazy breakfasts, pajamas till noon, and cartoons without counting. But now their time had acquired a chronometer named Roman. He stood by the TV with his finger on the power button, looking at the boy with the impassivity of a prison guard.
— “Come on, Rom, five more minutes! It’s the best part!” Misha didn’t even turn around, his eyes glued to the adventures of cartoon robots.
Click. The screen went dark. The world of robots vanished, replaced by the black, glossy reflection of the room.
— “A deal is a deal,” said Roman, turning to Anna, who had come in with a cup of coffee. “We agreed: one hour in the morning on weekends. The hour is up. A man should keep his word.”
Anna set her cup on the table. The smell of coffee mixed with the ozone from the powered-off electronics, and the cocktail made her feel sick.
— “Roma, it’s just cartoons on a Saturday morning. What ‘deals’? He’s a child.”
— “Exactly,” Roman nodded, as if she had proven his point. “And that’s precisely why he needs to be trained to follow rules. Otherwise he’ll grow up to be someone for whom rules don’t exist. Is that what you want?”
His logic was impeccable, like a freshly ironed shirt. And just as soulless. He wasn’t simply setting rules; he was building walls in their small world. Over the last month the apartment had turned into a territory with clear borders and laws. Toys—only on the special mat in the corner. One block rolled past the boundary—that’s a “violation of order.” Dinner—exactly at seven-thirty. Late washing your hands—eat your food cold. Every day a new paragraph appeared in Roman’s unspoken statute.
— “I want my son to be able to watch cartoons in peace,” Anna looked at Misha. The boy sat on the couch, curled up, staring at the floor. The joy had been erased from his face like a drawing rubbed out with an eraser. “You’re turning our home into a barracks.”
— “I’m turning it into a place with discipline,” Roman countered, lowering his voice so Misha wouldn’t hear. “And you, by indulging him, are undermining my authority. We can’t be telling him different things. He needs to see the adults are on the same side.”
— “Then be on my side!” a steely note rang in her voice. “And understand that you can’t deprive a child of his childhood because of your notions of ‘manly upbringing.’ He isn’t your soldier.”
— “And you aren’t his maid who should indulge his every whim,” his gaze hardened. “Today he wheedled five more minutes of cartoons, tomorrow he’ll refuse to do his homework, and in ten years he’ll ride on your neck. It all starts small. And since I’m here, I won’t let that happen.”
He said it as if doing her a great favor. As if he were saving them both from an inevitable catastrophe that she, in her feminine foolishness, simply failed to notice. His rightness was absolute, allowing no objections. He wasn’t just a live-in partner. He was a missionary bringing the light of order and discipline into their dark kingdom of chaos.
— “Since you broke our morning agreement,” Roman turned back to Misha, who flinched at his voice, “that means our afternoon agreement is canceled too. No walk in the park today. You’ll sit at home and think about your behavior.”
Anna opened her mouth to protest, then stopped short. She looked at Roman, then at her son, and she saw between them an invisible wall he was so methodically erecting. And she understood that arguing with the architect of this prison was pointless. The walls had to be knocked down.
Tuesday evening. Anna was putting away groceries in the kitchen, arranging grains and vegetables on the shelves. Misha sat on the living-room floor watching an old Soviet cartoon about hapless Cossacks. Roman was in the bedroom answering work emails. The apartment was filled with the quiet he valued so much—steady, orderly, disturbed only by the muted sounds of the TV.
And then that quiet was torn apart. Torn to shreds by the purest, most forbidden sound in this house—a child’s laughter. Not just a chuckle. Misha was laughing. Pealing with laughter, from the heart, head thrown back, legs kicking. Laughing the way only children can—carefree, loud, without thinking about any rules or consequences. The sound of that happiness rolled through the apartment like ball lightning.
Anna froze with a pack of pasta in her hands and smiled. She had already forgotten the last time she’d heard her son laugh like that. But her smile faded at once. She heard the chair in the bedroom scrape sharply and quick, heavy footsteps.
Roman burst from the bedroom like a hawk. His face was twisted in a grimace of rage. He didn’t say a word. He crossed the living room in three strides, loomed over the boy, and with one motion yanked the TV plug from the socket. The screen went dark. The laughter was cut off mid-note.
— “What is this circus?!” he snarled. This was no longer the instructive tone, but naked, animal fury. “How many times have I told you to keep quiet?! Can’t you just sit still?!”
Misha stared up at him in fright, his eyes filling with tears. He didn’t understand why he was being punished. He had only been laughing.
— “I… it was funny…” he stammered.
— “It’s not funny to me!” Roman grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a little shake. The thin fabric of the boy’s home shirt stretched under his fingers. “Your idiotic cackling isn’t funny to me! When will you learn to control yourself?!”
Anna walked into the room at the very moment he shook Misha a second time. She saw everything: Roman’s anger-clenched face, his fingers digging into her son’s shoulders, her child’s frightened, tear-wet face. And in that moment something inside her clicked. Loudly, definitively, like a blown fuse. All the swallowed compromises, all the grievances she had choked down, all the attempts to understand and justify his “upbringing”—all of it evaporated, burned to ash. Only a cold, ringing vacuum remained.
She didn’t run. She didn’t scream. She went up to them slowly, with such icy composure that Roman instinctively loosened his grip. Silently she laid her hand over his wrist and pried his fingers off Misha’s shoulders. One by one. He yielded, stunned by her wordless force.
Without looking at Roman, she took her son by the hand and led him to the kitchen. Sat him on a chair, poured a glass of water, and held it out to him.
— “Drink. And sit here quietly for a bit, alright? I’ll be right back.”
Misha nodded, sniffling. Anna turned and went back to the living room. Roman was still standing in the middle of the room, bewildered and already bracing for a fight. He expected a scene, tears, reproaches. He got none of that.
She stopped a couple of steps from him and looked straight into his eyes. Her gaze was absolutely empty.
— “You yelled at my son again because he was noisy? This is MY child and MY apartment. Pack your things—your ‘upbringing’ is over here.”
Each word was honed like a blade.
— “You have one hour.”
He opened his mouth to object, to explain that he’d only meant the best, that it was her fault.
— “Anya, you don’t understand…”
— “I understand everything,” she cut him off in the same icy whisper. “I understand that a man who is a stranger is humiliating my child in his own home. And I’m ending it. Right now. Your time is up.”
She didn’t wait for his answer. She simply turned and silently pointed at the front door. The gesture was more eloquent than any words. It was a verdict. Final and not subject to appeal.
— “You’re serious? Because I said something to your son? You’re throwing me out of the house?”
Roman even gave a short laugh. A brief, disbelieving chuckle of a man convinced he was being made the butt of a bad joke. He had expected anything: shouting, ultimatums, demands for an apology. But this icy, quiet banishment was so unlike her usual manner that he couldn’t take it seriously. He stepped toward her, preparing to use his usual tactic—to take her by the shoulders, look into her eyes, and calmly, condescendingly explain how wrong she was.
But Anna didn’t let him. She walked around him in silence, went to the hall, and opened the overhead cupboard. From there she took down his black duffel—the one he’d carried when he first came to this apartment. Without a word, she dropped it on the floor at his feet. The dull thud of fabric on laminate sounded deafening in the silence. It was her only answer.
— “Ah, so that’s how it is,” his face turned to stone. The condescension evaporated, replaced by cold fury. “So you’re ready to cross out everything we had because of one whim? I spent my time on you two, my effort, tried to make a person out of your runt, and you…”
He talked, but she didn’t listen. She went to the kitchen, took two magnets off the refrigerator door—the ones they had brought back from their only trip out of town together. One with a lake, the other with a ridiculous wooden bear. She didn’t look at them. She walked to the trash bin, pressed the pedal, and dropped them in. The plastic thudded against the bottom. The lid snapped shut.
— “Are you even hearing me?!” he raised his voice, following her. He couldn’t bear the silence, the methodical erasure of his traces. “I’m talking to you! You’ll regret this. He’ll grow up spineless, and you’ll remember my words!”
Anna went into the bathroom. Roman stood in the doorway, blocking the light. She opened the cabinet and took out the cup with the toothbrushes. There were three. Hers, Misha’s, and his. She took his, held it under the running tap, and rinsed it thoroughly. Then, without turning off the water, she dropped it into the same trash bin under the sink. The rush of water drowned out his words.
That simple, domestic gesture turned out to be worse for him than any slap. He understood. This wasn’t a tantrum. This was an execution. He was being slowly and demonstratively erased from their lives. The rage in him gave way to confusion, and then to impotent malice.
— “Fine. You asked for this yourself.”
He lunged into the bedroom and began ripping his shirts off hangers, crumpling them and shoving them into the bag. He acted roughly, noisily, deliberately carelessly, hoping to provoke her, to make her intervene, to shout at him for ruining things. But she simply stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, and waited in silence. Her calm was unbearable. It devalued all his fury, turning him into a clumsy, bustling insect.
Fifteen minutes later it was over. The bag was stuffed. He put on his shoes, threw on his jacket. He stopped in front of her at the door, making one last attempt to pierce her armor. — “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life. And don’t think I’ll come back when you come to your senses and start calling.”
She looked at him. There was no hatred in her eyes, no regret. Nothing. She simply took hold of the doorknob and opened it, creating his passage into the stairwell.
He stood there for a moment, drilling into her with his gaze, but found nothing there for himself. Then he spun around and left. Anna didn’t watch him go. She simply closed the door behind him. Turned the key in the top lock. Click. Then in the bottom one. Click.
She rested her forehead against the cold wood of the door. There were no tears. There was a deafening emptiness and silence. The very silence Roman had dreamed of. Only now it was the right kind. Real. It was broken by a quiet voice from the kitchen:
— “Mom, he won’t yell at me anymore, will he?”
Anna drew a deep breath. The air in her apartment felt clean and fresh.
— “No, sweetheart,” she replied, turning away from the door. “Never again…”