He slid the key into the lock with such a quiet, treacherous whisper it felt as if it were piercing not metal, but my own heart. A new, shiny, cold key, smelling of someone else’s sweat and someone else’s ambitions. Galina Sergeyevna gave a bitter smile— the old, faithful lock that had lived through so many winters with her had not withstood her involuntary betrayal, her forced flight. And now it, too, had become part of the conspiracy, a silent accomplice.
She pushed the door, and the leaf—once squeaking with its special, tear-familiar greeting—glided inward without a sound, opening a portal into a different reality.
The first thing that struck her, knocked her off balance, wrapped her mind in a sticky web—was the smell. Not her smell. Not the tart, healing scent of dried herbs hung in bunches in the entryway for the purity of the air and the spirit. Not the noble breath of old, dog-eared books, smelling of wisdom and the dust of ages. Not the light, cozy vanilla that always drifted from the kitchen, where she made her famous jam.
It smelled. Of strangers. A stubborn, suffocating chemical air freshener with the pretentious name “Sea Breeze,” which in reality recalled the odor of a public restroom. The acrid, clinging trail of cheap tobacco. And something else… deeply alien, stale, brazenly lived-in, that had seeped into the walls, the curtains, the very air, pushing out the memory of her.
In the corridor, where her old, bent Viennese coat rack had stood— the one she had once, it seemed in another life, restored together with her late husband, rubbing in varnish for hours and laughing at his clumsy movements—there now stood an ugly, faceless construction of light, peeling particleboard. Cheap. Temporary.
On the floor—someone else’s footprints made flesh in footwear. Men’s sneakers, size 43, smeared with dirty streaks, and women’s shoes with ridiculous, aggressively pink pom-poms, tossed insolently in the middle of her once impeccably clean parquet.
Her heart did not plunge into an abyss as she expected. It simply… stopped. It froze for one stretched-out, endless instant, and then set off again, but now it beat heavily, dully, as if forced to pump not blood but molten, searing lead through her veins.
From the kitchen—her kitchen! Her holy of holies, her place of strength and comfort!—came voices. Loud, young, brazen laughter. The clink of her dishes. Her cups? Her plates?
Without taking off her coat, without releasing the handle of the small battered suitcase from her numb fingers, Galina Sergeyevna moved down the hall like a sleepwalker. The wheels of her companion rattled nastily and loudly over the parquet, scratching out the rhythm of her intrusion.
The music and laughter in the kitchen broke off sharply, as if someone had slit the carefree atmosphere of a stranger’s party across the throat.
They were sitting in the kitchen. Young. About thirty. Two of them.
A girl with unnaturally dyed, flaming red hair gathered into a messy bun, and a guy in a stretched-out tank top, bare sinewy arms. They were eating fried potatoes straight out of the skillet set in the middle of the table, on her favorite tablecloth embroidered by her own hands. They were drinking… something from her cups. Those very porcelain cups with forget-me-nots that her husband had given her twenty years ago. “So you’ll always have summer, Galya,” he used to say.
They stared at her. First with mute, stunned bewilderment, as if they had seen a ghost. Then fear flared in their eyes—a quick, animal fear.
“Who are you here to see?” the girl snapped, setting the precious cup down on the table so hard it gave a plaintive clink.
Galina Sergeyevna reeled as if from a physical blow. In her own home, in her fortress, in her kitchen where she knew by heart every vein in the wooden fronts, every crack in the tiles, they were asking her, the mistress, “Who are you here to see?”
“I live here,” she said quietly, but so distinctly and firmly that each word rang out like a hammer striking glass.
The guy and the girl exchanged glances. Something passed between them—something shared—that united them against this uninvited specter of the past. The guy rose slowly, reluctantly, showing his height.
“How… live?” He wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt. With disgust, Galina Sergeyevna followed the motion. “The realtor… I mean, Oleg and Lida told us the owner was… well… at a sanatorium. For a long time. At least six months, maybe more.”
“Anatoly and Lidiya moved us in,” the girl added quickly, apologetically, as if pleading her case. “They said you definitely wouldn’t be back until the end of the month. Are they your children? Oh…”
Anatoly and Lidiya.
Her son and daughter-in-law.
Their gift. That dazzling, treacherous resort voucher for her 70th birthday. “A wonderful sanatorium in a pine forest, Mom! You have to finally rest! You worked yourself to the bone for us your whole life; you’ve earned it!” Anatoly’s voice had sounded so sincere, Lidiya’s eyes had shone with such concern.
It wasn’t a gift. It was a refined, carefully planned exile. An operation to clear the territory.
Unable to keep her feet, Galina Sergeyevna sat down on her suitcase right there in the hallway like a supplicant, an exile. The young couple—Katya and Denis, as it turned out—shifted guiltily and awkwardly nearby, as if not knowing what to do with this living rebuke in the form of an elderly woman in a coat.
“We didn’t know, Galina Sergeyevna… Honestly. They showed us a rental agreement. Anatoly—well, your son—said you’d asked him to arrange it while you were getting treatment. So the apartment wouldn’t be left unattended.”
She pulled out her phone. Expensive, modern—also their “gift,” “so you’re always reachable.” Her hands didn’t shake. She was a Stoic, as her late husband used to call her with gentle irony and boundless respect. “You, Galya, hold up the sky of our family happiness on your shoulders, and it won’t even wobble.” She had held it. And now she would not let this world, this treacherous world, see the cracks running through her very core.
Ringing. Each tone like a sharp little hammer tapping at her temple.
“Mom?” Anatoly’s voice sounded cheerful, but somewhere deep down there swam a false, sticky note. “Why are you calling? Aren’t you supposed to be having your aromatherapy session now? How’s the rest? Getting your strength back?”
“Tolya,” she spoke very calmly, a soft quiet that made her words only more frightening. “Explain to me why I am now standing in the hallway of my own apartment, while in my kitchen, at my table, two completely unfamiliar people are sitting, eating out of my skillet, and drinking from my cups?”
Silence on the other end. Not just quiet. A thick, viscous, ominous pause, full of unspoken horror and feverishly oozing lies.
And then—a waterfall, a flood of words. Fast, muddled, excusing.
“Mom! What are you doing?! You… you came back early! We didn’t expect it! We thought…”
“Early?” Her voice remained steel. “The voucher was for exactly three weeks. Today is day twenty-one. I came back on the day we agreed.”
“Oh, well…” he clearly lost the thread of the prepared script. “Mom, we were only trying to do what’s best! We thought…”
There was a rustle in the receiver, a sigh, and Lidiya, the daughter-in-law, took over. Sharp, bossy.
“Galina Sergeyevna, why are you starting this like a child? We take care of you! The apartment is huge, three rooms, and you’re alone in it like a finger. Just the utilities in winter are insane! And this way—a young, ambitious family, decent people, they transfer the rent to our card. It’s a nice little supplement to your pension! You’ll thank us later!”
“You… rented out my apartment.” It wasn’t a question seeking confirmation; it was a death sentence pronounced.
“Well not forever, for goodness’ sake! Hardly a tragedy! We agreed you’d come straight to our place after the sanatorium! Move in with the grandkids! You missed Yegor and Vanya so much! And meanwhile the apartment would be working for the family budget!”
Lies. Thick, oily, like cheap margarine. Of course she wanted to see her grandchildren, but not as a hanger-on, not as a free nanny and cook, crammed onto a folding couch in their narrow walk-through living room while they spent the money wrung from her blood, her memory, her life.
“We gave you a gorgeous voucher!” Lidiya squealed, slipping into falsetto. “For your jubilee! Cost a fortune! And we’ve got a mortgage around our necks like a noose, Yegor starts school soon, the uniform alone is ten thousand, and then clubs, tutors!”
They hadn’t just rented out the apartment. They had sold it off—piece by piece. Along with her, her past, her right to peace and respect. They had put it up for auction.
“Lida, I’m coming to your place now,” said Galina Sergeyevna, leaving no room for objections.
“Oh, Mama, but we… we’ve just had Vanya get sick. Chicken pox, can you imagine? The strictest quarantine! You mustn’t come, you’re fresh from the sanatorium, your immunity’s low, you’ll catch it!”
They had blocked her. On all sides. Cut off every retreat. Scorched the earth around her.
Galina Sergeyevna quietly tapped “end call.” The screen went dark, reflecting her own face, suddenly older.
Katya and Denis looked at her with genuine, aching pity. They were pawns in this game, but pawns who had seen more than they should have.
“They showed us an official contract…” Denis said softly, almost in a whisper. “Printed, with the stamp of some firm. And we… we paid six months in advance. With all our savings. We don’t have money for anything now. We came from Vorkuta, just got settled here…”
“The price…” Katya flushed, embarrassed. “The price was very low. Laughable. Far below market. We probably should have realized something was off… But we wanted our own place so badly…”
The trap that had snapped shut on everyone except those who had set it.
With an inhuman effort, Galina Sergeyevna rose from her suitcase. Her legs were cotton, but she held herself straight.
“You are not to blame,” she said clearly and firmly to these strangers who were just as deceived as she was. “Stay. As long as you can.”
“And you… where will you go?” Katya gasped, an honest tremor of worry in her voice.
“To my sister’s. She has a couch.”
“What?!” Zoya Sergeyevna, the younger sister, threw up her hands so violently she nearly spilled her evening tea. “They… your APARTMENT?! Anatoly?! Your adored little Tolya you worshiped?! I’ll— I’ll pull every hair out of that Lida’s head! Galya, how could you just leave?! It’s your home!”
“Zoya, don’t shout, my head is splitting. And something’s up with my blood pressure.” Galina Sergeyevna sank onto her sister’s old, sagging sofa. The shock—the cold anesthetic of despair—began slowly to loosen.
And something else took its place. Not hysterical rage. Not tearful, degrading grievance.
Cold, ringing, absolute clarity. A drop of water turned to diamond under monstrous pressure.
They had decided that she wasn’t living anymore, only “seeing out her days.” That her 70th birthday was not a celebration of wisdom and long life, but a convenient pretext to write her off, send her to the scrap heap of their pragmatic ambitions. They had decided her place was on their couch, as uncomplaining help, while her own life, her own nest, served their enrichment.
Zoya’s phone rang. She frowned at the screen.
“Olga. Our niece. What does she want at this hour…”
Out of habit she turned on the speaker.
“Zoya, hi! Listen, I’ve been trying to reach your Galya, but she’s unavailable. Wanted to congratulate her on her successful return! I spoke to Anatoly the other day, can you believe it…”
Olga’s voice was syrupy, gushing.
“…he said Galya has moved in with them! For good! Decided to help with the grandkids, to be closer to the family. And her apartment—imagine!—she decided to rent to a young couple for a song! Not for the money, just to help! Isn’t she just wonderful! So wise, so generous—a real role model!”
Zoya opened her mouth to pour out righteous fury, but Galina Sergeyevna stopped her with a sharp, slicing gesture.
They had already prepared public opinion. In advance. “Pragmatists.” “Caring children.” It wasn’t they who had thrown her out, deceived her, robbed her. It was she, of her own “wise” will, who had decided everything that way. A lovely legend for the relatives behind which to hide their cynical betrayal.
Galina Sergeyevna took the phone from her sister’s still hand.
“Olya,” her voice was calm and firm, polished granite. “Tell everyone who asks: I. Was. Thrown. Out. Of. My. Own. Home. By my son and my daughter-in-law. Nothing else needs to be invented.”
Stunned, deathly silence hung on the line. She didn’t wait. She simply hit “end” and handed the phone back.
Zoya stared at her, eyes huge with horror and a kind of wild, involuntary admiration.
“Galya… Galyonka… what are you going to do now?”
“Tomorrow,” said Galina Sergeyevna, looking out the window at the strange, but for the moment safe, moon-washed courtyard, “tomorrow morning I’m going to a lawyer.”
The lawyer, Viktoriya Igorevna, was a young woman of about thirty-five, but with eyes the color of old ice and an attentive, gripping gaze that could haul the very essence of a problem into the light. There was no fake, mollifying pity in her office—only facts, documents, and a cool, unemotional analysis.
She looked through the folder with the apartment papers that, by a fortunate, prophetic habit, Galina Sergeyevna always carried with her in a separate zipper portfolio.
“The apartment is entirely yours,” Viktoriya stated. “Privatized in your and your late husband’s names; you alone inherited. Anatoly wasn’t even registered there.”
“Yes, as soon as he got married we registered him in his own co-op apartment, which we helped him buy,” said Galina.
“Excellent.” Viktoriya leaned back in her swivel chair. “That simplifies things dramatically.”
“So we can evict them? The tenants?” Zoya asked hopefully, having tagged along for moral support.
“We can.” The lawyer nodded with confidence. “The contract Anatoly signed with these… Katya and Denis… isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. He isn’t the owner and had no legal right to rent anything.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Zoya threw up her hands. “Let’s go to the police! File a complaint for self-help and unlawful actions!”
“The problem,” Viktoriya turned her icy gaze directly on Galina, “is that the person who did all this is your son.”
Galina was silent, absorbing every word.
“We can file a claim to invalidate the contract, for unlawful occupation, and for eviction. But the formal respondent will be your son. Anatoly. We can push for a criminal fraud case of significant amount. The accused will very likely be your son. And his wife as an accomplice. Are you ready for that, Galina Sergeyevna? Ready to drag your own son, your own blood, into a courtroom, before the prosecutor?”
Zoya gasped and sank into a chair as if her legs had given way.
There was the main knot. The expertly tightened noose Lidiya and Anatoly had counted on.
They knew her. Knew she was a Stoic. Knew she was a Mother. They were sure she wouldn’t start a public scandal, wouldn’t air dirty laundry, wouldn’t “sink” her own child, blackening the family name. They’d gambled that after crying in secret at her sister’s, she would give in, break, and crawl back to them. To their living room. To that very folding cot. To mind their kids and wait silently until “the tenants” chose to move out—if they ever did.
“That’s exactly what they were counting on,” Galina said hoarsely, tiredly.
“Of course,” the lawyer confirmed. “It’s a classic, textbook manipulation. They put you in a position where any lawful, logical action of yours will look—to society and in your own eyes—like betrayal, like trampling ‘family values.’”
“So what do we do?” Zoya looked back and forth between sister and lawyer, seeking support from both.
“The formal path? Evict through the courts. It’s long, messy, dirty. And yes, your numerous relatives will joyfully launder your linen at every family gathering.” The lawyer folded her hands on the desk. “The informal path? Effective?”
She paused theatrically, letting her words settle.
“Informally, you must do what they least expect. They expect you to act like a ‘mother.’ Emotionally. Offended. Weak. Hysterical or submissive. You must act… as an owner. As the mistress. Cold-blooded. Pragmatic. Without emotion.”
The phone started to blow up before evening. The “bomb” set off by her call to Olga worked flawlessly.
Uncle Kolya, her late husband’s brother, called first.
“Galya! Are you out of your mind? Off your rocker in your old age? Olga called, says you’re babbling nonsense! That Anatoly threw you out?!”
“I told the truth, Kolya.”
“What truth?! So they rented out the apartment! Big deal! Young people need money! Mortgage, kids, prices are up! And you’re alone in a three-room like a queen! You could make room, yield your spot to the young! You’re a mother, after all! A mother should help, not stand in the way!”
She ended the call without argument.
Next was Aunt Anya, a distant relative from Podolsk.
“Galya dear, what’s going on there? Your little Lida called me, sobbing her heart out. Says you cursed them, threw yourself at your daughter-in-law’s knees!”
“I didn’t curse anyone or throw myself anywhere.”
“How’s that, how’s that… She says you want to hex them, went to lawyers, writing statements! Galya, come to your senses! It’s your only son! Your own flesh and blood! He gave you two grandsons, the light of your life!”
All of them, as one, pressed on her most sacred role—“Mother.” The Stoic must endure. A mother must forgive, turn the other cheek, give her last. A mother has no right to anger, to justice, to defending her own dignity.
The knot drew tighter. They had already managed to cast her not as the victim, but as the aggressor. An old, senile, spiteful, selfish hag who won’t help her dear children and deliberately stirs up conflict, disgracing her own family name.
And then came the call she had been waiting for, deep down. Lidiya.
“Galina Sergeyevna!” The daughter-in-law’s voice vibrated like an overtight string with poorly disguised, hissing rage. No chicken pox, no illness. “What have you done?! The relatives have blown up our phones! You shamed us in front of the whole family! We’re lepers now!”
“Lidiya, I just want to come back to my home. Is that too much?”
“Your home?!” she screeched. “And what are we to you then?! Strangers? We are your family! Your flesh and blood! We gave you that voucher… our last money, the money we set aside for renovations! We take care of you! We wanted you to live with the grandkids, under our supervision, in warmth, instead of moldering there alone, in melancholy and emptiness!”
“Under your supervision?” Galina felt something soft and yielding inside her harden into tempered steel. “In your living room? On a cot? So I could cook, launder, clean, and babysit Yegor while you spent the money you got for my apartment? That’s your care?”
On the other end—heavy, angry silence. Then Lidiya exhaled, and her voice held open, undisguised notes of hatred.
“Yes! So what?! Are you stingy about it? We are your family! You owe us help! It’s your duty! If only Anatoly had known what kind of mother you really are, a miser and an egoist, he would have… he would never…”
And that became the final, “last straw.” The point beyond which there was nowhere to retreat.
They had violated not things. Not square meters. Not furniture. They had violated her essence. Her personhood. They had devalued her entire life, all her love, every sacrifice, all those nights by her son’s crib, all the money she had denied herself, poured into his education, into his future. They had rewritten her story, casting her not just as a victim but as a bad, unworthy mother.
Calmly, without raising her voice, Galina cut off the stream.
“That’s enough, Lidiya. This conversation is over.”
She set the phone down and looked at Zoya, pale and swallowing heart pills.
“Zoya. They’re right.”
“Galya?!” her sister choked on the tablet. “Are you crazy? They’re monsters! They—”
“I am a mother,” Galina said with absolute firmness, without a shadow of doubt. “And my principal, most important mother’s duty—the one I evidently neglected long ago—is to teach my son that in this world vile, base deeds bring pain. Terrible, terrible pain. And that a mother’s love is not an indulgence for all sins.”
“You… you’re going to court after all?” Zoya whispered.
“Court is long. And dirty. As Viktoriya rightly said, I must act as the owner. Cold-blooded. Pragmatic. And merciless.”
She picked up the phone. Her hands no longer trembled. Her fingers were sure and steady.
She found the number in her contacts. Not Anatoly’s. Not Lidiya’s.
“Katya? My dear… hello. This is Galina Sergeyevna. I have one very important question. Do you still have a copy of the contract you signed with Anatoly?”
“Yes… why?” the girl squeaked, frightened. “We didn’t mean any harm…”
“Excellent. I need you to photograph it for me right now and send it. Every page. And tell me honestly—did you pay them in cash?”
“Yes… Anatoly said only cash, no transfers, so… so there wouldn’t be any taxes to pay… Galina Sergeyevna, we…”
“Perfect.” Galina looked out the window where evening was starting to thicken. The knot wasn’t going to be untied. It was cinched so tightly, so cleverly, there was only one way out.
It had to be cut. With one precise, crushing blow.
The next morning she was back in Viktoriya’s office. Zoya stayed home—her blood pressure had spiked from the stress.
Galina herself was calm, like a cliff before a storm.
She set her phone on the lawyer’s immaculate desk with the photo gallery open.
“They were paid six months in advance. In cash, of course. No receipts, naturally. The money, apparently, is already spent.”
Viktoriya put on stylish, thin-rimmed glasses and studied each image carefully, unhurriedly. Then she slowly raised her head and smiled.
It was a very predatory, very cold, very professional smile—the smile of someone who has just found the one weak spot in the enemy’s armor.
“Well. What can I say. Your son and daughter-in-law are ‘Pragmatists,’ as you called them. But, fortunately for you, very shortsighted and absolutely greedy ones.”
“What do you mean?” Galina asked.
“They didn’t just cheat you, an elderly woman. They cheated the state.” The lawyer took off her glasses and set them aside. “Illegally, off-the-books renting of housing is first and foremost unreported income. Income on which, of course, no income tax has been paid. Not a kopeck.”
Galina exhaled slowly. She understood. The plan took shape before her—refined, almost poetically just.
“You want to…”
“I want you to win, Galina,” said the lawyer quickly and crisply. “And to win, there is a marvelous, very effective organization—the Federal Tax Service. They cannot stand being brazenly cheated. They really can’t.”
She turned her large monitor toward Galina.
“Look. As your official representative by power of attorney, I’m drafting a detailed report right now. It will state that at your address, which belongs to you by right of ownership, individuals are residing illegally, and that your son, Anatoly, received substantial unreported income for this.
I’ll attach this very contract with his own signature prominent. I’ll attach notarized witness statements—that is, from these tenants—officially confirming the cash transfer.”
“But they… they’re victims here too!” Galina felt a stab of pity for Katya and Denis, as young and deceived as her own son had once been.
“Precisely!” Viktoriya’s eyes flashed. “Which is why they’ll be our key, highly motivated allies! They’ll gladly give any testimony if it means they themselves won’t be charged for residing without registration. We’ll offer them a deal—their testimony in exchange for our petition that no sanctions be applied to them.”
The plan was devilishly simple. And perfectly lawful. Pragmatic to the core.
It didn’t require Galina to personally sue her son for eviction or fraud.
It turned Anatoly and Lidiya from “caring children” and “victims of Mom’s anger” into ordinary, petty, greedy fraudsters in the eyes of the sternest, most impartial agency—the tax service.
“What happens if… we send it?” Galina asked, already knowing.
“Large fines. Very large. Back taxes for the entire presumed period plus massive penalties for late payment, plus the fine for concealing income. They’ll have to sell something valuable quickly to pay up. For example, that brand-new foreign car Lidiya said they’d been ‘saving up for.’ And there’ll be an indelible stain on their financial reputation. Lidiya, if I’m not mistaken, is a senior cashier at a big bank? They don’t care for employees involved in such… ‘optimizations’ of taxes.”
The lawyer paused, letting the weight of it sink in.
“They were counting on your motherly love. On your softness. On your unwillingness to air dirty laundry. And we won’t. We’ll simply and quietly, by the book, inform the proper authorities that something unlawful is going on at your address. And we’ll provide all the evidence.”
Galina looked a long time at her hands resting on her knees. Hands that had rocked her son, stroked her husband’s head, cooked borscht, turned pages of books, held this home. Stoic. She had held up the sky. Now she only needed to shake off what wasn’t sky at all but an ugly awning of someone else’s greed.
“Viktoriya,” she said slowly, weighing every word. “Print this document for me, please. All of it. But don’t send it yet.”
The lawyer raised an eyebrow, surprised, but without questions tapped a few keys. The printer hummed and spat out pages with official headers.
“I want my son to see it. In the flesh. To hold it in his hands. To understand this isn’t an empty threat but a cold, iron reality.”
Zoya gasped when Galina returned with a thick folder whose flap revealed a formidable letterhead.
“Galya, what are you planning? This is…”
“Call him, Zoya. Tell him to come. Immediately. Right now. Tell him it’s a matter of life and death. His life.”
Anatoly arrived in forty minutes. Angry, rumpled, bloodshot. He was sure Aunt Zoya had summoned him for another lecture and attempt at “reconciliation.”
He burst into the room without a greeting and snapped, “Well? What now? I’m busy; I’ve got a meeting in an hour!”
Without a word, Galina handed him the printed pages.
He began to read. First with a superior, irritated smirk. Then the smirk slid off his face like a mask. His cheeks blotched, then flushed, then turned chalk-white; beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.
He reached the lawyer’s signature, the list of attachments—“Copy of lease agreement,” “Affidavits of witnesses regarding transfer of funds.”
Anatoly’s face twisted into an expression of real, animal terror.
“You… you…” he began to gasp, gulping air. “To the TAX OFFICE?! Against your own son?! Mother! Are you completely insane?!”
“Me?” Galina asked in an icy calm. “I didn’t do this, Tolya. You did. The moment you took that bundle of cash from those kids and stuffed it in your pocket, signing this paper.”
“Mama!!!” he screamed, with a childish, panicked note. “What have you done?! Do you understand what this is?! Lida will be fired! I’ll… I’ll be fined! We’re talking millions!”
“Not yet,” she cut him off coolly. “This document hasn’t been sent. It’s here. And on my table lies my phone. On speed dial is Viktoriya. I call, say one word, and she hits ‘send.’ Or… she doesn’t.”
“What… what do you want?” he whispered, his voice breaking. For the first time in years she saw her grown, confident son truly frightened, backed against a wall.
“I want to go home.”
“But we don’t have that money! We… already… put part of it toward the mortgage payment! Some toward the car… It’s gone!”
“That’s your problem, Anatoly. You’re the ‘pragmatist.’” She stared him down without blinking. “You have exactly two days. Forty-eight hours. For there to be not a single stranger left in my apartment. For the entire amount you took from them to be on my table—I will return it to those poor kids myself. And for my old Viennese coat rack to be back in its place.”
“Where am I supposed to get it, damn it?!” he roared.
“Get a loan. An emergency one. Sell your precious car. Ask your Lidiya to borrow from her parents. I don’t care.” She took the folder back into her hands. “Forty-eight hours, Anatoly. Exactly. Or your ‘pragmatic,’ successful little world collapses. You will be ruined. And I won’t help.”
He looked at her. Not as at a mother. As at a strange, implacable person. A judge.
“You…” His lips trembled, words failed. “You’re horrible…”
“Go,” she said, turning her back. “Time has started.”
A ringing, funereal silence hung in the room after he left. Zoya looked at her sister with a mixture of horror and a kind of primal awe.
“Galka… he’ll never forgive you… You burned every bridge…”
“It’s I who won’t forgive him, Zoya,” Galina said quietly but very distinctly. “Not this time. Never.”
Exactly forty-eight hours later to the minute, Anatoly stood on Zoya’s threshold.
He was gray. Not angry, not frightened—gray, emptied out, wrung dry like a lemon. He had aged ten years in two days.
He didn’t meet her eyes. He stared somewhere around her slippers.
“Here,” he held out a thick, battered envelope. “This… this is the full amount. To the kopeck.”
She took it. She didn’t count it. The weight and thickness spoke more clearly than numbers.
“Lida… Lida took an emergency consumer loan. At a savage, extortionate rate,” his voice was dull, lifeless. “Now we’ll be paying it off for a year, if not longer… We’ve fallen into a debt pit.”
He broke off. He seemed short of breath.
“Have they moved out? The tenants?”
“Yes. Katya and Denis, too. Took their things. And here,” he almost threw her keyring onto the hall table. New, shiny keys. Keys to her prison.
They looked at each other. Mother and son. Two strangers, utterly alien, separated by a chasm he had dug himself.
There was not a trace of remorse in his eyes. Only black, bottomless grievance and hatred. He still didn’t understand what exactly he had done wrong. He only understood he’d been caught and harshly punished.
A week later the niece Olga called—the one who had started the “gossip marathon.”
“Galya! What have you done?! Anatoly… he’s selling his car now, his favorite! Lida is working two jobs like a whipped horse, she’s all worn out! They’re drowning in debt! How could you? They’re your children!”
Olga’s voice was no longer sweet and rapturous. It was full of reproach, judgment, righteous anger.
The whole family buzzed like a disturbed hive. But now they were discussing not the children’s vile act, but the mother’s “cruelty” and “greed,” the mother who had driven her own blood to poverty.
“Olya,” said Galina as she watered her ficus, brought from her sister’s, which had, thankfully, weathered the upheaval. “You are calling me on my landline. In my apartment. In my home.”
She allowed herself a small, pointed pause.
“That, I think, says it all. No further questions.”
She set the receiver down gently but firmly.
That evening a text came from Anatoly. Three words that became the final verdict on their relationship: “I hate you.”
Galina looked at the glowing letters. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cry. She simply took the phone and deleted the message. Like wiping dust off the table.
Then she dialed another number she had found online.
“Hello, good afternoon. I’d like to order a service… Yes, it’s urgent. I need every single lock in the apartment changed. The front door, the balcony… Everything. And a full recoding. Yes, I’ll wait.”
Winter passed. Creaking, frosty, lonely. But in that loneliness there was a bitter kind of freedom.
Galina grew used to the new locks. They closed more stiffly than the old ones, with a solid, heavy, confident click that seemed to say: “You’re home. You’re safe. You’re the mistress.”
Her relatives stopped calling. Not Olga, not Uncle Kolya, not Aunt Anya from Podolsk. No one.
In the family she became “that very Galina Sergeyevna,” “the one it’s best not to tangle with.” Persona non grata.
Some—so Zoya later recounted warily—whispered that she had “gone funny” after that sanatorium, “lost her mind.”
Others, the older ones, spat that she’d always had “a worm inside,” and that only her late husband had “kept her bad temper in check.”
A third camp—the most “pragmatic” and scared—simply feared her. Feared the tax office, feared lawyers, feared this quiet, calm, steely fury that turned out to be a thousand times more terrifying than any hysterical scene.
And she couldn’t care less. Methodically, day after day, she cut away that section of her life as a gardener lops off diseased, dried-out branches. The Stoic no longer held up anyone else’s sky. Only her own. And its vault was clean and sound.
She enrolled at the pool. Not for “wellness” or “a new life”—those slogans rang hollow. Simply because she liked water. Its weight, its coolness, its silence. In the water she felt free of the burden of the past.
She met with Katya and Denis. They returned the money she had honestly given back to them. They did it in installments, painfully embarrassed. Their conscience smarted unbearably.
Galina took the money. Not out of greed, but to finally close this heavy, painful gestalt. So nothing tied them together anymore.
They rented a tiny room in a far district. Denis found an extra job as a courier. They looked tired and drawn, but they stuck together, and in their gaze there was a new, mature resolve.
She hadn’t seen or heard from her son since that day at Zoya’s. He didn’t call. He didn’t write. Nothing.
Zoya, who at first was afraid even to mention him, eventually let it slip, unable to hold back.
“They sold the car in the end. For a pittance. They’re paying off that monstrous loan. Lida’s furious like a chained dog, complaining to the relatives all the time. And Tolya… Gal, he’s taken to drinking. Not a bender, but… steady. He goes to work, but…”
Galina listened silently, without interruption, and did not react.
“He says you ruined his life. That he’s not a stranger to you, but you treated him like a sworn enemy, according to every letter of the law.”
“He treated me like a sworn enemy, Zoya. Worse. I might forgive an enemy. He abused what was most sacred.”
“But he’s your son!” Zoya cried in despair.
“And I am his mother.” Galina set down her cup with the unfinished tea. “I gave him life. I was not obligated to give him mine. And I am certainly not obligated to let him trample what remains.”
It was a new understanding—simple and frightening in its clarity. And it gave her a quiet, incredible strength.
Then, with spring, when the first leaves greened outside, the phone rang. Her landline—the same number she’d had for thirty years.
She picked up.
“Galina… Sergeyevna? Hello?”
Lidiya’s voice. But not as before. Gaunt, dim. Without the metallic, commanding ring. Only weariness and a kind of dull, animal fear.
Galina kept silence, letting her speak.
“Yegor misses you very much. He keeps asking where Grandma Galya is, why you don’t come see us. He draws pictures for you.”
It was the last, weakest, most desperate attempt at manipulation. Press the “grandmother” lever, since the “mother” lever had snapped in their hands.
“And… Vanya… he started walking. On his own. Yesterday he went toddling like a little penguin.”
The heart—no stone at all—did quiver. Squeezed with pain and a tender ache. The grandchildren… They truly weren’t to blame.
“I know we… that Anatoly… He’s a fool, Galina. A stupid, greedy boy. And I’m a fool. We thought…”
“What did you think, Lidiya?” Galina asked softly.
“That you… that you didn’t care anymore,” she blurted out honestly in one breath. “That the main thing for you was seeing the grandkids. And the apartment… well, it just stands there, dead weight. We didn’t mean harm, you understand? We… out of greed, out of desperation. The mortgage is strangling us.”
It was almost repentance. Almost.
“We’re in a bad way, Galina. Anatoly… he’s completely lost. He… he’s afraid of you now. To the bone.”
“Good,” Galina said quietly and clearly. “That means at least something got through that empty head. Means my lesson wasn’t for nothing.”
She heard muffled, awkward sobs.
“Can… can we come? With the boys? Yegor really is begging…”
“You may bring the grandchildren, Lidiya,” Galina cut in. “Next Saturday. At precisely noon. I’ll make them soup. For children, with meatballs. The way Yegor likes.”
“And… and Anatoly?” Lidiya asked timidly.
“Anatoly,” Galina’s voice turned steel again, “has not yet earned my soup. Nor my table. Nor my forgiveness. Maybe someday. But not now.”
She set the receiver down gently.
The next Saturday, right at noon, the doorbell rang—cautious, hesitant. The new, reliable locks clicked softly as they opened.
Lidiya stood on the threshold. Thinner, gray, with bluish shadows under her eyes. And two boys.
Yegor, seven, looked from under his brow, wary, not understanding the intricacies of adult games. The younger, Vanya, a year and a half, clung unsteadily to his mother’s hand, staring at his grandmother with big blue eyes like his father’s.
Overcoming a sudden trembling in her knees, Galina knelt to be on their level.
“Hello, Yegorushka,” she said gently.
The boy was silent, biting his lip.
“Come here, Vanechka. Come to Grandma.”
The toddler hesitated for a second, then took a step, then another, let go of his mother, wobbled over, and hugged her neck with his small, chubby arms.
Galina pressed her face to his silky crown, smelling of milk and childhood. She closed her eyes, soaking in this moment, this island of purity in the storming ocean of betrayal.
Then she looked up at her daughter-in-law, standing in the doorway, afraid to cross the threshold as if it were the border between two worlds.
“Lidiya. Are you coming in? Or will you stand on the threshold of my home?”
And Lidiya, mustering herself, stepped into the entryway. Into the place where once again, as before, it smelled of dried thyme and mint, where a faint thread of vanilla lingered, and where, in its rightful spot, stood the old, bent, lovingly restored Viennese coat rack