“I’m here!”
That phrase, flung from the doorway in a firm, no-nonsense voice, hit Ksenia like a blast of icy wind. She hadn’t even had time to fully register who was standing there before the massive figure of her mother-in-law was already seeping into the hallway, rudely pushing Ksenia aside with her shoulder. Yevgeniya Petrovna looked over the apartment with the air of an owner, like an inspector who’d arrived for a surprise check. There was no warmth or family feeling in her gaze; it was the look of a proprietor evaluating property that was hers, even if temporarily handed over for someone else’s use.
Ksenia stood there in a strict graphite pantsuit, high stilettos, and perfectly styled hair. The final touch—a click of the lock on her expensive leather briefcase—she’d made one second before the doorbell rang. Her whole being was tuned to one frequency, one goal: the presentation scheduled in an hour and twenty minutes. The project she’d been losing sleep over for the last six months, polishing every detail, checking every figure. Her career Olympus, her personal Everest.
“Hello, Yevgeniya Petrovna,” Ksenia said, automatically closing the door behind her mother-in-law. In her head an invisible timer was already ticking, counting off lost seconds she would never get back. “Sorry, I wasn’t really expecting visitors.”
Her mother-in-law, already taking off her heavy coat and hanging it on the hook as if she did this every day, merely snorted. She walked into the living room, her confident steps echoing loudly in the tense silence of the apartment. Her bulky bag landed on the floor beside the sofa with a dull thud, like an anchor dropped from a ship preparing for a long stay.
“I’m not here as a guest. I’m here on business,” she declared, turning to Ksenia. Her sharp, appraising gaze slid over her daughter-in-law from head to toe, lingering on the pointed heels and business briefcase. “Where are you all dressed up to go so early in the morning? To a parade?”
Ksenia took a short, almost invisible breath, trying to hold on to her composure and not let the irritation seep into her voice. She glanced quickly at the watch on her wrist. Time was not just passing, it was slipping away like sand through her fingers.
“I’m in a big hurry to work. I’ve got an important meeting today. A project presentation.”
She hoped words like “work,” “project,” “important” would sound weighty enough. But to Yevgeniya Petrovna they were empty noise, a bothersome buzzing that simply needed to be silenced. She ignored them as easily as people ignore street sounds.
“What presentation? Nonsense!” her mother-in-law waved a hand, settling herself on the sofa with a regal air. She didn’t just sit. She enthroned herself, as if on a throne, making it clear she was here for a long time and the conversation would be serious. The springs in the sofa creaked faintly under her weight. “You’re not going anywhere! Sit down, we’re going to talk!”
Something unpleasantly chilled inside Ksenia. This wasn’t just an intrusion into her home. It was a direct, deliberate act of sabotage. She could almost physically feel a steel band of anxiety tightening around her chest. Thoughts about slides, figures, and key talking points started to tangle, pushed out by a growing, dull fury.
“Yevgeniya Petrovna, I can’t talk right now. This is really very important for my career. Can we discuss everything tonight? Or on the weekend?” Ksenia tried to keep her voice even, but metallic notes were already slipping in, like a string pulled to breaking point.
Her mother-in-law looked at her with poorly concealed disdain. Her eyes already held the entire program for the visit.
“Career… Listen to her. Found herself a word,” she snorted. “The main career for a woman is her family and children. And you keep dragging it out, always waiting for something. Andrey is always going on: ‘later,’ ‘not now.’ And I’m tired of waiting! I need grandchildren! Now! And we’re going to talk about it today. Sit down, I said. This is going to be a long conversation.”
Ksenia didn’t sit. She stayed standing in the middle of the room, straight and unmoving, like a statue carved from expensive office stone. Her mind, which a few minutes ago had been working at full capacity, generating strategies and sharpening wording for her presentation, was now frantically searching for a way out of this domestic dead end. Every glance at the clock on the wall echoed in her temples with a heavy thud. Time—her most precious resource today—was turning into dust under the weight of her mother-in-law’s heavy, expectant stare.
“Please, not now, I’m begging you,” she repeated, choosing her words carefully, as if speaking to an unreasonable but very important client. “The contract at stake is worth several million. That’s six months of my life. Please understand…”
“You understand!” Yevgeniya Petrovna cut her off, and there wasn’t even a hint of dialogue in her voice. It was the voice of a lecturer stepping up to the podium. “Your millions are just pieces of paper. Today they’re here, tomorrow they’re gone. But the family line—that’s forever! Do you even understand what women’s health is? You’re thirty-one! Thirty-one! That’s the last carriage of the train, Ksenia! Doctors say the best age is before thirty. After that—only risks. Do you want to give birth to a sick child? Spend your whole life running around hospitals?”
Her words fell into the silence of the room like heavy stones. She wasn’t shouting. She was proclaiming, stamping out each accusation with the confidence of a professor of medicine. Ksenia felt her head go foggy. The neat rows of slides in her mind began to blur; figures and graphs lost their clarity.
“My friend Lida already has a granddaughter who’s five, she’s starting preparatory classes this year!” the mother-in-law continued, ticking points off on her fingers. “Valya from the second entrance already has two, a boy and a girl, she’s pushing them both around in the stroller! And me? What do I say when they ask? That my son married a career woman who cares more about her papers? That I, like a fool, sit and wait until you deem it convenient? Is my Andrey worse than everyone else? Why does everyone else have normal families, children laughing, and in your apartment it’s as quiet as a museum?”
She swept her eyes around the room, and open condemnation flashed there. Perfect order, expensive books on the shelves, modern appliances—all of it, in her value system, was just soulless scenery covering up the main failure of this family.
Ksenia clenched her fists so tightly her nails bit into her palms. She felt a hot wave of anger rising up her spine to the back of her head. This was no longer just intrusive pressure. It was a targeted attack, a carefully calculated attempt to break her, to subdue her, to make her feel guilty and defective.
“Andrey and I will decide ourselves when we…”
“What will you two decide?!” Yevgeniya threw up her hands. “He’s under your heel! Whatever you tell him, that’s what he does! He runs around with his computers and doesn’t think about what really matters, because his wife doesn’t allow it! A real man must plant a tree, build a house, and raise a son! Not sit around listening to your presentations! You’re ruining his whole life, and he can’t even see it!”
She paused to catch her breath and stared straight at Ksenia. Her face showed righteous anger and unshakeable faith in her own rightness. She was waiting for an answer, but in truth she didn’t need one. She hadn’t come to talk. She’d come to pronounce her will. And at that moment Ksenia realized that all attempts to negotiate, explain, appeal to logic—were useless. She wasn’t looking at a relative. She was looking at an enemy who had locked her in her own home to methodically destroy the most important thing she had today.
Right then something inside Ksenia snapped. With a sharp, dry crack, like an overtightened string. All the politeness, all the corporate restraint, all the conflict-management training she’d gone through evaporated without a trace. Suddenly she saw the situation with crystal, freezing clarity. This was not a family discussion. This was a seizure. A seizure of her time, her home, her career and, in the end, her life. And she was the primary target.
Her face, which until then had been tense but controlled, became unreadable. She slowly—very slowly—let her eyes drop to her briefcase on the coffee table. Then just as slowly lifted them back to her mother-in-law. There was no longer any pleading there, no attempt to come to terms. Only the cold, focused calculation of a predator driven into a corner with nothing left to lose.
“I’ve said what I had to say. This will be decided,” summed up Yevgeniya, satisfied with the effect she’d produced and expecting a capitulation.
But Ksenia didn’t answer. She silently walked around the sofa, picked up her briefcase in one hand, and her car keys in the other, the key fob chiming softly in the sudden silence. That sound was the only thing breaking the quiet, sharp and out of place. Yevgeniya watched her in bewilderment, her triumphant pose slipping a little. She’d been expecting tears, excuses, a phone call to her son—anything but this calm, methodical gathering.
Ksenia didn’t head for the door. She took a few steps and stopped right in front of the sofa, towering over the seated woman. She looked down at her, and that change in angle instantly shifted the power dynamics in the room. Now she was in control.
“I’ve heard you, Yevgeniya Petrovna,” Ksenia said. Her voice was flat, devoid of any emotion, and that made it sound even more threatening. “Now you’re going to listen to me. And you’re going to listen very carefully, because I won’t repeat myself.”
Yevgeniya was stunned by such audacity. She opened her mouth to release another volley of accusations, but Ksenia didn’t let her get a word in.
“This apartment was bought with my money. Every square meter, every cup in the kitchen, every book on these shelves was paid for by me. The only things Andrey brought here were his computer and his toothbrush. This is my home. Not yours. Not yours and Andrey’s. Mine.”
She paused, letting the words soak into the air, become solid. Her mother-in-law stared at her, and confusion in her eyes was giving way to fury.
“How dare you—”
“Silence,” Ksenia cut in, and that word hit like a slap in the face. “You came into my home without an invitation. You’re trying to wreck the most important deal of my life. You insult me, telling me how I should live and what I should do. You’re done. Your time is up.”
And then she said that phrase. Slowly, distinctly, hammering each word in like a nail.
“No one invited you here, Yevgeniya Petrovna. Are you going to walk out on your own, or do you need help? And the fact that your son lives here doesn’t give you any discount on barging into our home without an invitation and throwing your weight around!”
For a few seconds, absolute silence reigned in the room. Not ringing, not heavy—dead. Yevgeniya looked at her daughter-in-law as if Ksenia had just turned into a monster before her eyes. Her face, flushed a moment earlier, went deathly pale. She rose slowly from the sofa, her body straightening like a compressed spring. The contempt and anger in her gaze were replaced by something else—cold, calculated hatred.
“Oh, so that’s how it is…” she hissed, her voice barely audible. “So that’s what you really are. Well. Fine. Now I understand everything.”
She didn’t say another word. With the offended dignity of an exiled queen, she walked slowly toward the hallway. But Ksenia knew—this wasn’t the end. It was only the beginning. And the next blow would come not head-on, but straight at the weakest spot.
Yevgeniya didn’t go home. She sat down on a bench by the entrance, took out her phone, and hit “Call.” Her hands weren’t shaking. Her finger confidently found “My boy” in the contact list. She waited exactly three beeps and, when Andrey answered, her voice transformed instantly. It filled with wounded, suffering notes that hadn’t been there even five minutes earlier. She spoke in a choked, broken way, but chose her words so that each one hit the mark—his most vulnerable point: his sense of duty as a son.
By that time, Ksenia was already sitting in the car. She started the engine, and the cabin filled with a steady, calming hum. The adrenaline from the confrontation was receding, replaced by a cold, focused energy. She wasn’t thinking about what had just happened. All her thoughts were there, in the conference room, where in forty minutes her fate would be decided. She drove out of the courtyard without even glancing at the benches.
Andrey’s call came when she was already halfway to the office. She connected the phone to the car’s speaker.
“Ksyusha, what happened? Mom called, she’s really upset. She says you threw her out.”
His voice was anxious but, as always, conciliatory. The voice of someone who was already preparing the ground for compromise.
“I asked her to leave,” Ksenia replied evenly, changing lanes. “She showed up without warning and tried to stop me from going to work.”
“But she’s my mom! You could’ve handled it softer, talked to her… She says you told her she’s a nobody in this house.”
Ksenia gave a short laugh, but there was no amusement in it.
“Andrey, she came to sabotage my presentation. Intentionally. Do you understand that? She sat down on the sofa and told me I wasn’t going anywhere until we settled the ‘grandchildren issue.’ That’s what you call ‘talking’?”
There was silence on the line for several seconds. Andrey was processing the information, trying, as he always did, to glue together two mutually exclusive truths—his and his mother’s.
“I understand that you were in a rush… But she’s an older woman, she worries about us…”
“Andrey, let’s do this,” Ksenia interrupted, her voice turning hard as steel. “I’m about to go into a meeting my entire career depends on. When I get home, we’ll talk. And not about your mother. About us.”
She ended the call without waiting for a reply.
When Ksenia came back that evening, Andrey was already home. He was sitting in the kitchen, a cup of cold tea in front of him. The atmosphere in the apartment was thick and heavy, like a storm that hadn’t yet broken. He looked up at her, and she saw the same tortured indecision in his eyes.
“Did you talk to her?” Ksenia asked, setting her briefcase down on the floor.
“Yes. She thinks you hate her. That you’re trying to take her son away from her.”
Ksenia leaned tiredly against the doorframe.
“And what about you? What do you think, Andrey? Were you here? Did you see how she tried to break me?”
“Ksyusha, she just wants grandchildren. All women her age want that. She didn’t mean any harm…”
And in that moment Ksenia understood that it was over. He would never understand. He would always look for excuses for her. He would always put his mother’s feelings, her anxieties, her “mother’s love” above everything that was happening to Ksenia. He would forever try to sit on two chairs that had long since slid apart in different directions.
“Fine,” she said quietly, very clearly. “I hear you. Then listen to my decision. Your mother will never set foot in this home again. Ever. For any reason. Not on holidays, not ‘on business.’ This is not up for discussion.”
Andrey jumped up.
“You can’t say that! She’s my mother!”
“This is my home,” Ksenia cut him off. “And I won’t allow anyone to humiliate me here ever again. You can choose. Either you live here with me, by my rules, or you pack your things and go to your mother. To comfort her, to understand her, to worry together with her. Right now.”
He stared at her, his face twisted in disbelief. He couldn’t believe this was really happening. This wasn’t the script he was used to. There were no screams, no hysterics, no scenes. Just a cold, calm ultimatum.
He grabbed his phone to call his mother again, to explain something to her, to once more try to be a bridge over the abyss. But Ksenia was ahead of him. She silently went into the bedroom, took his travel bag, threw in a couple of his shirts, his laptop, the charger, his toiletry bag from the bathroom. She carried the bag into the hallway and set it by the door.
“She’s waiting for your call, Andrey,” Ksenia said, looking straight into his eyes. “But you’d better not call. You’d better go. She needs your support right now much more than I do.”
He stood in the middle of the kitchen, crushed and destroyed by that calmness, which was more frightening than any hysterics. He looked at his wife, at the bag by the door, and realized there was nothing left to choose. The choice had already been made for him. Silently, he picked up the bag and walked out. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded in the empty apartment like a gunshot…