“Drinking plain tea, Ksyusha? Nervous?”
Tamara Pavlovna’s voice was sweet like an overripe fruit whose skin already hides rot. She sat at the table in her daughter-in-law’s impeccably clean kitchen and methodically stirred the spoon in her porcelain cup, though the sugar had long since dissolved. That monotonous, scraping sound—scritch, scritch, scritch across the bottom—frayed the nerves more than any shout. It was like the rasp of a whetstone on which a knife is honed just before the blow.
Ksenia slowly shifted her gaze from the window, where a quiet April evening was beginning, to her mother-in-law. One hand lay calmly on her noticeably rounded belly, as if shielding her small, unborn treasure from the poisonous atmosphere this woman had brought with her. She didn’t feel nervous. She felt tired of this predictable, tedious game.
“I’m not drinking tea, Tamara Pavlovna. It’s rosehip broth. It’s good for you. And I’m perfectly calm.”
She answered evenly, without defiance but with no hint of ingratiation. Over the months of pregnancy she had learned to distance herself from outside irritants, building around herself and her future child an invisible cocoon of serenity. But her mother-in-law seemed determined to pierce that protection with the well-honed bit of her years-old drill.
“Good for you, of course,” Tamara Pavlovna nodded, finally setting her cup aside. Her small, grasping eyes took in everything: the new refrigerator with its silent motor, the jars of expensive prenatal vitamins on the open shelf, a bouquet of fresh tulips in a heavy crystal vase. Over all of it she saw an invisible price tag, and the total clearly displeased her. “Back then, Antosha helped me every month. With medicine, with the utilities… I’m alone, you know what my pension is like. And now it’s all for the family, all for the future baby.”
She said this with such a suffering sigh as if her son weren’t starting his own family but betraying his homeland. As if the money he now spent on his wife and their future heir had been taken straight from her handbag.
“Anton is a wonderful husband and a future father,” Ksenia replied calmly, refusing the provocation. She knew any justification would be taken as weakness. “He works hard so none of us lacks anything. Neither you nor we. He brought you groceries last week and paid the utilities.”
“Groceries…” the mother-in-law snorted, her pursed lips curling in a disdainful smirk. She took up the spoon again, this time only tapping it against the rim. “He brought a bag of buckwheat and a frozen chicken. He used to hand me an envelope. I decided for myself what I needed. Maybe I didn’t want buckwheat but a session of therapeutic massage. My back’s bad, it’s killing me. But who’s supposed to think of me now? Now all thoughts are only of one thing.”
She deliberately glanced at Ksenia’s belly. The look was heavy, oily, as if she were trying to burn through the dress and flesh to peer inside and deliver her verdict. Everything inside Ksenia tightened into a hard knot, but outwardly she remained unruffled. She knew this game. Every word from her mother-in-law was a tiny drop of acid designed to eat away at her peace.
“Let’s hope this child brings happiness to the family—and not the opposite,” Tamara Pavlovna went on, shifting from complaints to poorly veiled threats. “The investments are big. The responsibility. Anton is a trusting boy, pure-hearted. He thinks everyone is the same. Honest. Decent.”
She paused, waiting for a reaction. But Ksenia was silent, her fingers only tightening slightly on her belly, tracing the outline of the new life. She looked straight at her mother-in-law without looking away. There was no fear in her large gray eyes. Only a cold, firm appraisal. She saw not a miserable, lonely woman, but a calculating, dangerous predator who had come to take what she believed was hers by right.
“Life is a complicated thing,” Tamara Pavlovna continued in a coaxing tone, leaning over the table. Her voice dropped, more intimate, and thus even more repulsive. “Sometimes things come out you never expected. And secrets… they don’t live long. Especially in small towns, where everyone knows everyone. I’m not blind, Ksenia. And I’m not deaf. I see everything… and I know everything about everyone.”
Ksenia didn’t utter a word. She simply looked at her mother-in-law, and her calm seemed thicker, denser than the kitchen air. It was not the silence of a victim, but of a surgeon studying a malignant tumor before delivering a verdict. It was exactly this icy, assessing calm that made Tamara Pavlovna burst. Her saccharine mask cracked, and out crawled the ugly, grasping inside.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Think I don’t understand anything?” she leaned across the table, her voice dropping to a poisonous hiss. “I saw you. Two weeks ago. By the mall. You got into a car with some tall, dark fellow. Not Anton, no. He was slaving away at a meeting then, earning money for your vitamins. And you were smiling at him. Not the way you smile at just an acquaintance.”
The lie was crude, thrown together on the fly, but Tamara Pavlovna didn’t need plausibility. She needed a pretext, a weapon to punch a hole in her daughter-in-law’s defenses and reach her goal—her son’s wallet.
Ksenia slowly, without a single extra movement, took her hand off her belly and folded it over the other. Her posture didn’t change; she still sat straight, like a queen on an uncomfortable throne. She didn’t justify herself, didn’t ask “when?” or “with whom?” She denied her mother-in-law the pleasure of seeing her flustered.
And that sent Tamara Pavlovna into a real rage. She expected tears, panic, babbling about “you misunderstood.” Instead, she ran into a blank wall of contempt.
“Silent? Of course—what is there to say? I knew at once. As soon as Anton said you were pregnant. He, my fool, was delighted. And I thought right away—how come? Three years of marriage, nothing, and suddenly—there you are. A gift. Only whose?”
She rose from her chair, her short, stocky figure emanating menace. She went around the table and stopped beside Ksenia, looming over her. Her breathing was noisy, smelling of valerian and malice.
“I know this child isn’t my son’s! So either you confess it to him yourself, or I’ll tell him everything! And he’ll throw you out for sure!”
There it was. The ultimatum. Pronounced with relish, with the anticipation of this cozy life—built without her participation—collapsing. Of her Anton, her boy, crushed and humiliated, crawling back to her, to Mama, the only one who truly loves him. And the money stream would again flow in the proper, only correct direction.
Ksenia slowly raised her head. Her gray eyes were like two pieces of polished ice. She looked up at her mother-in-law, and there was so much cold power in that gaze that Tamara Pavlovna involuntarily stepped back half a pace.
“Are you finished?” Ksenia’s voice was quiet but cut like a scalpel.
“What?!” the mother-in-law faltered.
“I’m asking if you’ve finished your monologue?” Ksenia repeated, rising slowly, with dignity. Now they were almost the same height. “If so, I’d like to rest before my husband gets home.”
She didn’t throw her out. She simply turned and walked toward the bedroom, showing complete disregard both for Tamara Pavlovna and her threats. It was worse than a slap. It was erasure.
“You little—” wheezed Tamara Pavlovna at her back, choking on helpless rage. “You’ll be sorry! He’ll believe me, not you! I’m his mother! We’ll continue this conversation tonight. The three of us!”
She snatched up her bag, yanked the front door hard, and flew out into the stairwell. Ksenia, without turning, reached the bedroom door and pulled it to behind her, sealing herself off from the poisonous trail her visitor had left in the home. She wasn’t going to rest. She was going to wait.
Anton stepped into the apartment and immediately sensed something was wrong. The air wasn’t merely quiet—it was motionless, like water in a deep, abandoned well. Usually he was met at the threshold by the smell of dinner and the low murmur of the TV in the living room. Today there was no smell of anything, except a faint medicinal whiff of valerian, and no sound came from the rooms.
He saw them both at once. Ksenia stood in the opening from the living room to the hall, one hand supporting her back, the other on her belly. She was very pale, but her posture conveyed not weakness, but expectation. Tamara Pavlovna sat in an armchair, straight as a yardstick, boring into him with a gaze burning with a fanatic, unhealthy fire. She looked like an inquisitor patiently waiting for the chief heretic to be brought in.
“I’m home,” Anton said, trying to make his voice sound normal.
He took off his jacket and hung it in the closet. His movements were deliberately slow, buying himself time to take stock of the field. He walked to Ksenia, gently put an arm around her shoulders, and kissed her temple. She didn’t respond, only pressed against him for an instant, and he felt how tense every muscle in her body was.
“Antosha, we need to talk,” snapped Tamara Pavlovna’s voice like a whip. “Immediately. And in private.”
She didn’t even try to hide her irritation at his gesture of tenderness toward his wife. To her, it wasn’t just a kiss; it was an act of disobedience, a declaration of belonging to the enemy camp.
“Mom, I just got in,” he began wearily.
“It won’t wait,” she cut him off, rising decisively. “Let’s go to the kitchen.”
Anton looked at Ksenia. There was no pleading in her eyes, no fear. Only quiet confidence—and something else… almost pity, directed at him. She gave a barely perceptible nod, as if granting permission. Go. Hear her out.
He sighed and followed his mother into the kitchen. Into the place where the guillotine for his family happiness had already been prepared and sharpened. Tamara Pavlovna pulled the door firmly closed behind them, cutting him off from the rest of the apartment, from his world, and turned to him. Her face was both tragic and triumphant.
“Son, I have to tell you something terrible. It hurts, you can’t imagine how. But I can’t keep silent when my boy is being deceived like this.”
She spoke as if by rote, like on the stage of a provincial theater, wringing her hands just enough to look mournful rather than ridiculous. Anton leaned silently against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his chest. He waited.
“That woman… your Ksenia… she’s unfaithful to you,” blurted out Tamara Pavlovna. “She’s carrying a child that isn’t yours.”
She held a pause, waiting for his reaction—shock, anger, denial. But Anton’s face remained unreadable. He simply looked at her, and in his gaze there was nothing but cold attentiveness. That composure knocked her off her prepared script, forcing her to talk faster, stumbling and piling on details.
“I saw her! With my own eyes! With a man, in an expensive black car. They were coming out of a restaurant, she was laughing. And then he put his hand on her belly! On her belly, do you understand? And she didn’t move away! I approached her today, wanted to talk woman to woman, nicely. I thought maybe she’d confess to you herself. But she… she looked at me like I was nothing! Not a word of denial! Not a tear of remorse! Only cold contempt. That’s the proof, Anton! She knows that I know the truth!”
Her voice grew stronger with each word. She herself believed the picture she was painting, intoxicated by her role as savior.
“All your money, all your care goes to her, to someone else’s child! She’s just using you, your kindness! And behind your back she laughs at you with her lover! I came to shame her, and she practically threw me out!”
She fell silent, breathing heavily, and looked at her son with a victorious air. She had done everything. The shell had hit dead center. Now it remained only to wait for the explosion that would tear this alien, wrong marriage to shreds and return to her her obedient, generous son.
Anton said nothing. He kept his heavy, studying gaze on her. He wasn’t looking at his mother. He was looking at a complete stranger of a woman who, with relish, was trying to destroy his life. And in the silence that followed, he finally saw her completely, to the very bottom.
He kept silent so long that Tamara Pavlovna began to shuffle nervously from foot to foot. The silence in the kitchen became thick, tangible; it pressed on the eardrums. In that silence her triumphant monologue collapsed like a punctured balloon, leaving behind only a sticky feeling of awkwardness. She had expected an explosion, shouting, questions to his wife. She wasn’t prepared for this calm, heavy gaze in which she saw neither pain nor shock, only something cold, alien, like a sentence.
“Are you finished?” Anton asked at last.
His voice was even, almost indifferent. He pronounced the same phrase Ksenia had used a few hours earlier, and from that simple question an unpleasant chill ran down Tamara Pavlovna’s spine. She understood that they were on the same side. That her attack hadn’t split them but, on the contrary, had fused them into something monolithic, impenetrable.
“What do you mean—finished?” she squeaked, losing her theatrical assurance. “Anton, didn’t you hear me? She’s cheating on you! She—”
He didn’t let her finish. Without raising his voice, he simply took a step toward her. Then another. He didn’t look angry. He looked tired. Deadly tired of her, of her intrigues, of her eternal, insatiable greed dressed up as maternal care. He came up close and, without a word, took her by the elbow. His grip wasn’t rough, but it was as firm as steel. It was the movement not of a son but of a guard.
“What are you doing? Let go!” her voice broke into a screech. Panic began to flood her mind. “Anton, it’s me!”
He led her out of the kitchen in silence. She tried to resist, but his hand on her elbow was an unbending lever guiding her along the only possible trajectory—to the exit. They stepped into the hall. Ksenia stood in the same place by the doorway, watching them silently. There was neither gloating nor triumph in her gaze. Only a quiet, bitter statement of fact. She wasn’t the victor in this battle. She was the survivor.
“You choose her?! That one?!” screamed Tamara Pavlovna when she realized where he was leading her. Her face twisted with rage and disbelief. Her plan, so flawless, so brilliant, was collapsing before her eyes. She had lost.
Anton ignored her cry. He brought her to the very front door and only then loosened his fingers. With his free hand he took the lock handle and turned it. The click of the mechanism sounded deafeningly loud in the hall. He swung the door open onto the staircase landing, letting the cool air of the stairwell into the apartment.
He turned to her. His face was like a mask carved from stone.
“I know everything, Mom,” he said quietly, each word falling into the silence like a weight. “I know you ran short of money. I know you’re ready to do anything to have it again. I know you came here today not to save me but to destroy my family. You didn’t see Ksenia with any man. You just made it all up.”
Tamara Pavlovna froze, mouth open, staring at him as if at a ghost. He knew. He had known everything from the very start.
“Leave,” he went on in the same icy, colorless voice. “I don’t want to see you again. Ever. Not in this home, not near my wife, not near my child. You no longer have a son.”
He didn’t shove her. He simply stood and waited. And that waiting was scarier than any force. Hunched over, stumbling like a beaten dog, Tamara Pavlovna stepped over the threshold. Anton didn’t watch her go. He simply closed the door. Turned the key in the lock, then slid the bolt. Two dull, final clicks.
He turned slowly and looked at Ksenia. She was still standing in the same place. He walked up to her, smoothed a stray lock of hair from her forehead and, bending down, pressed his cheek to her belly. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t need words. In that silent gesture was everything: his choice, his vow, his promise. The scandal was over. One family had been destroyed. And a new family had just been born amid the ruins.
