— “Guess what—they gave me a bonus today. Totally unexpected, but damn, it feels good,” Marina speared a lettuce leaf and a piece of warm chicken breast with evident pleasure. “The boss said the quarterly project took off specifically because of my edits. Now we can finally take a proper vacation, not like last year.”
Artyom nodded, but distractedly, chewing his dinner mechanically. The light in their small, cozy kitchen was warm; the air smelled of garlic and roasted herbs. An ordinary evening. One of hundreds of calm, predictable evenings that, like bricks, make up a family life. He pushed his plate away, though he’d eaten barely half.
— “Marina, I wanted to talk. There’s a thing… So, Lena quit her job.”
Marina swallowed her salad and looked at her husband with a touch of routine sympathy. Lena, Artyom’s younger sister, was a passionate but fickle girl. Her work record resembled a collection of short stories more than a serious document.
— “Really? That’s a shame. Has she found something else, or just got tired of it?”
— “Not exactly tired,” Artyom chose his words carefully, as if walking through a minefield. “She says the job drained her emotionally. Creative block, burnout. You know, she’s a sensitive soul, fragile. She needs time to pull herself together, to find her path, as she puts it.”
Marina nodded, but with less enthusiasm now. She’d heard all this talk about “sensitive souls” and “finding oneself” more than once. It usually ended with Artyom “understanding” and slipping his sister some money until the next fleeting passion came along.
— “Well, finding oneself is a fine thing,” she said diplomatically, returning to her meal. “The main thing is not to drag it out. She still has a mortgage—how is she planning to pay it?”
Artyom took the question as the perfect bridge to his big news. He even leaned forward a little; his face assumed a serious, almost ceremonial expression.
— “That’s what I wanted to talk about. I’ve been thinking… Basically, I decided to help her.”
The air in the kitchen seemed to thicken. Marina froze with her fork a centimeter from her mouth. She slowly set it back on the plate; the delicate clink of porcelain sounded deafening against the conversation that had suddenly cut off. She studied her husband closely, as if seeing him for the first time.
— “What do you mean, help?” she asked in a flat, emotionless voice. “You’re going to lend her money?”
Artyom waved his hand with the carefree ease of someone talking about buying a pack of cigarettes.
— “No, why complicate things with a loan? I’ll just give her my salary. All of it. While she’s finding herself—so they don’t kick her out of the apartment for nonpayment.”
He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that for a second Marina thought she’d misheard him. That it was some stupid, inappropriate joke. But Artyom’s expression was completely serious. He looked at her expectantly, as if waiting for praise for his nobility and generosity.
— “What’s the big deal?” he added, seeing her confusion and clearly misreading it. “We can live on yours for now. You just got a bonus, you said so yourself. The money will be enough.”
Marina slowly set her plate on the table. The porcelain tapped softly against the wood of the tablecloth, and the sound seemed louder than a gunshot. She didn’t look away from her husband, but her eyes were empty, as if she were looking not at him but through him—at the ugly truth that had suddenly crawled out and seated itself between them at dinner. His words didn’t compute. They were so absurd, so monstrously illogical, her brain refused to process them.
— “Say it again,” she asked. Her voice was quiet, but there was not a drop of softness in it. It was like a thin layer of ice over a bottomless abyss. “I want to make sure I heard you right. You’re going to give your entire salary to Lena. And we—our family—will live on mine. Did I get that right?”
Artyom squirmed in his chair. He had expected anything—surprise, maybe mild displeasure that could be soothed with a few words about family duty. But this icy, almost clinical cross-examination threw him off. He tried to smile, to soften the moment.
— “Well, yeah. Marina, why are you so tense? It’s temporary. A month, two, three max. She’ll find herself, find a new job, and everything will go back to normal. She’s Lena—my sister! My own blood! I can’t just stand by and watch her drown. Family has to help each other, right?”
He was saying all the right, pretty words. But in this context they sounded false and insulting. Marina saw how deftly he was swapping concepts: help was turning into full maintenance, support into offloading responsibility. Her bonus, her exhaustion after a tough quarter, their shared plans for a vacation—everything was being devalued, repurposed as a resource for his sister’s “self-discovery.”
— “Our family, Artyom,” she pronounced the phrase as if tasting it and finding it bitter. “Our family is you and me. And our family has its own plans, its own needs, its own budget. My bonus is not manna from heaven—it’s the result of my work. We wanted to go to the sea. Remember? We’d been saving, choosing a hotel. Or does that not matter now? Does Lena’s creative crisis cancel our vacation?”
He frowned. The conversation was not going according to his script. He wanted to be the noble knight rescuing his sister, and instead he was being turned into a petty bookkeeper.
— “What does a vacation have to do with anything? You can’t be so selfish! We’re talking about a person—a blood relative—in trouble! And you’re talking about the beach! Do you have no compassion at all? Are money and things all you care about?”
That was the final straw. To be accused of heartlessness by a man who had just proposed, without a second thought, that she carry them both while he funneled his entire salary into his sister’s mortgage—this blew her up from the inside. She leaned forward slightly, and her voice, until then even and quiet, took on a metallic hardness.
— “Is that so? I’m supposed to provide for our family while you pour all your paychecks into your sister’s mortgage? Seriously?!”
The question landed like a slap. In it were anger, bewilderment, and bitter disappointment. Artyom flinched at the sudden force of her voice.
— “Stop it! You’re just making everything more complicated! She’s my sister and you should understand that! I can’t leave her like this! If you can treat your relatives that way, I can’t! And it’s not ‘pouring money down the drain,’ it’s helping!”
— “Helping is lending her a thousand until payday! Helping is bringing groceries! What you’re proposing is something else. You want me to take on the support of an adult, able-bodied woman who’s simply tired of working! While you wash your hands of it. You’re just shifting your sister—with her mortgage—onto me! Brilliant, Artyom. Simply brilliant.”
Morning brought no relief. It arrived steeped in last night’s quarrel, like old clothes in the smell of campfire. There had been no shouting, no broken dishes—just a dense, sticky silence that wrapped itself around every object in the apartment, making them heavier and uglier. Artyom got ready for work with demonstrative loudness: the keys clinked, the closet door slammed, he marched down the hallway with exaggerated briskness. He was certain he was right, morally unassailable. Marina, in his view, had just thrown a tantrum out of feminine contrariness; after a night’s sleep, like any sensible woman, she would come around. He didn’t doubt it. After all, he was doing the right thing—the family thing.
— “I’m off,” he tossed toward the bedroom without looking in.
There was no answer. Fine. She’d sulk and get over it. He closed the front door behind him, carrying off his unshakable confidence that the world was simple and just, and that he, in that world, was a noble hero.
Marina lay in bed for another ten minutes, listening to her husband’s footsteps die away in the stairwell. Then she sat up. There was nothing hesitant in her movements.
Three days passed. Three endless, viscous days like a bad dream. The apartment that had once been their fortress had turned into neutral ground, divided by an invisible demarcation line. They moved through it like ghosts, trying not to cross paths. Artyom left early and came home late. He hoped that time and his silent condemnation would break Marina. But she didn’t break. She continued her quiet, exhausting sabotage. In the mornings she lingered over coffee, reading a book while he dashed about the apartment, running late. During the day she ordered food from expensive restaurants, leaving the receipts and empty containers on the kitchen table. She didn’t meet his eyes, didn’t answer direct questions; her polite detachment infuriated him far more than an open fight.
On the evening of the fourth day, Artyom came home completely spent. He’d been distracted at work; Lena had called him twice during the day, her voice increasingly demanding and panicked—the mortgage payment date was inexorably approaching. He stepped into the apartment and froze. No music, no trace of any gourmet delivery on the table. Marina sat in an armchair in the living room, calmly looking out the window. The sharp ring of the doorbell sliced through the quiet.
Marina didn’t move. With a heavy sigh, Artyom went to open it. He already knew who it was. Lena stood on the threshold, tragic in appearance: pale face, exaggerated dark circles under her eyes, trembling corners of her mouth.
— “Artyom, I can’t take it anymore,” she wailed from the doorway, throwing her arms around his neck. “That bank… they’re calling me, threatening me! I haven’t slept in nights! My nerves are shot!”
She walked in as if it were her own home and only then seemed to notice Marina. Her glance slid over her brother’s wife with poorly concealed disdain. Artyom closed the door and stood beside his sister, as if forming a united front with her.
— “There, Marina, look! Look what you’ve driven her to!” he burst out, his voice raw. “I told you she was in a bad way! She needs help, and you pulled this circus!”
Lena picked up the tune.
— “I don’t understand, Marina—what did I ever do to you? I thought we were family. I thought you’d be understanding. Can it really be that you begrudge helping me? I’m not a stranger! I’m your husband’s sister, and he’s obligated to help me—so are you! You know how hard it is for me. I’m searching for myself, I need to recover…”
They spoke over each other, echoing and amplifying. Their voices merged into a single accusatory drone. Artyom explained how easily they could live on Marina’s salary, while Lena complained about heartless employers and her fragile mental balance. They stood in the middle of the living room—brother and sister—united by a common goal: to force, to break, to pressure the one sitting in the armchair.
Marina stayed silent. She let them get it all out. She watched as her husband—the man she shared a bed and future plans with—turned into a pathetic supplicant for his sister, ready to betray their own family. When their torrent of eloquence finally ran dry, she rose slowly.
— “Sit. Both of you,” her voice was calm, but it carried such authority that they obeyed instinctively and sank onto the sofa.
Marina walked to the sideboard, took out some papers, and set them on the coffee table.
— “You talked about compassion, Artyom. And about money. So listen, both of you. My bonus—the one you were counting on—has indeed been spent. Yesterday I paid in full for a rehabilitation program for my mother. Her back is bad—you know that. She’s endured it for years because it’s expensive. Not anymore.”
Bewilderment flickered on Artyom’s and Lena’s faces, then turned to shock.
— “And now some simple arithmetic for you, genius,” she turned to her husband. “After paying the bills for this apartment and buying food, my salary will now be enough for exactly one person—me. For my needs. For my lunch, which I am not obliged to cook for you. For my clothes. For my life.”
She paused, letting the words soak into the room’s air. Lena opened her mouth to object, but Marina stopped her with an icy look.
— “As for you two…”—she swept them both with a long, heavy gaze, devoid of hatred or hurt, just a statement of fact—“you are a family now. You share problems. You share financial obligations. He promised to help you. So let him. Work it out.”
— “But how can you—?” Lena exhaled in disappointment.
— “Like this.” Marina jerked her chin toward her husband. “You can pack his things together—and move in with you. He can pay your mortgage, buy you everything you need, Lena! But I won’t be in any of this. I am not an ATM, I am not a sponsor. That’s it. Figure out your soul-searching and your mortgage on your own—however you like.”
She headed to the bedroom, then almost immediately returned and added:
— “Oh—and darling? When you leave, don’t forget to leave the keys to my home here, because you don’t live here anymore. I’ll manage without you. In fact, I’ll probably find it easier without you. Well then—have a wonderful life, and happy packing.”
This time she truly went into the bedroom, leaving brother and sister in utter bewilderment.