“Listen, I’ve been thinking…”
Denis’s voice sounded too chipper in the quiet living room, yanking Katya out of her half-doze. She lazily turned a page of the glossy magazine without lifting her eyes from the bright picture. Beyond the panoramic window on the twentieth floor, the evening city was lighting up—familiar, beautiful, and distant, a backdrop long since fused with the comfortable, well-arranged life they led. The air smelled faintly of expensive perfume and freshly brewed coffee.
“Mmm? About what?” she replied, not putting much interest into the question.
Denis came over to the sofa where she had settled and perched on the armrest. He was brimming with a kind of energetic, almost boyish restlessness that always seized him when another “brilliant” idea popped into his head. Usually it had to do with his small business which, like everything else in their life, had been a generous gift from her father.
“About our Alinka. She’ll be graduating in a year and flying off into adult life. Your parents should get a move on. Help the girl.”
Katya lifted her eyes from the magazine and looked at her husband, baffled. The word “get a move on,” coming from Denis about her father—a man who owned a large construction company—sounded odd and even a bit comical.
“Help? In what sense? Find her a place for an internship? I think Dad won’t say no if she asks herself.”
Denis gave a condescending snort, as if she were a naive child who didn’t grasp the basics.
“Katya, what internship? I mean real help. Literally. They should buy her an apartment to start with. A one-bedroom at least, for a start. So she has a place to move when she leaves the nest. And sort something out with a job, of course. Your father has connections everywhere; he can place her in a cushy spot in no time. They can do it.”
For a few seconds, silence hung in the living room. At first Katya let out a quiet chuckle, deciding it was a very clumsy joke. But when she looked at her husband’s completely serious face, filled with righteous expectations, she slowly lowered the magazine onto her lap. The smile slid from her lips, leaving a mask of cold astonishment behind. The expensive interior, the soft light of the floor lamp, the city lights outside—suddenly it all seemed like the set for some absurd play.
“Hold on,” she said, her voice lower and firmer. “Did I understand you correctly? Are you seriously proposing that my mom and dad buy your adult sister an apartment and get her a job?”
He didn’t even realize that her question already carried a verdict. He took it as an invitation to discuss the details.
“What’s so strange about that?” he asked, genuinely surprised by her reaction. “We’re family. One big family. Your parents helped us, and that’s right. Now it’s time to help Alinka. It’s logical. It’s human. You don’t expect her to be left on the street after university, do you?”
Logic. There it was—his favorite word. In his world everything was perfectly simple and logical. They gave to him—so they owed his sister, too. Just because they were “one family.” Katya rose slowly from the sofa, placed the magazine on the glass table, and walked to the window, turning her back to him. She looked at the distant lights, but all she could see was her husband’s face, twisted by this brazen simplicity.
“Denis,” she said evenly, choosing her words carefully so she wouldn’t start shouting, “when we got married, my parents gave us this apartment. They bought you a car so you could get around comfortably. My father gave you money to start your business and still covers your mistakes with his connections. That’s help for us. For our family. What does your sister Alina have to do with any of this?”
He stood as well, and his voice began to take on offended, accusatory notes.
“What does she have to do with it? Everything! She’s my sister! Part of my family, which means part of ours! Katya, don’t be like that. It’s nothing for your parents, a drop in the bucket for them. But for Alinka—it’s a whole start in life. Don’t you want what’s good for her?”
He took a step toward her, but she raised a hand, stopping him.
“Denis, this conversation is over. It’s not happening. Ever.”
The word “ever” hit Denis like a slap. He froze, and the benevolent expression of universal virtue that had become a fixture on his face slipped, revealing surprise that quickly hardened into stubborn anger. He stopped being the good-natured petitioner for his sister; he was turning into a prosecutor.
“So I didn’t mishear? You’re refusing to help my own sister?” He stepped forward, invading her space by the window. His voice lost its softness; metal rang in it. “I just didn’t expect this from you. Such selfishness.”
Katya slowly turned to face him. The lights of the night city reflected in her pupils, making them cold and unreadable.
“This isn’t selfishness, Denis. It’s common sense. Why should my parents—who aren’t even related to you by blood—solve your family’s problems? Alina has parents. She has you, her older brother. You two are the ones who should be helping her.”
He snorted contemptuously, brushing her words aside like an annoying fly. His face twisted into a mask of righteous indignation.
“My parents? What can they give her? They’ve worked on the factory floor their whole lives; their pension is peanuts! And me? You know my business is only just finding its feet! But for your folks it’s nothing! A puff of air! For them, buying an apartment is like you going out for a loaf of bread! You could share and not even notice!”
Something snapped inside Katya. That thin thread of patience she had braided for years—listening to his musings on justice, watching him accept her family’s expensive gifts as a matter of course—broke. All the gratitude he had never expressed, his consumer nature she had so carefully ignored, suddenly concentrated in that one phrase—“you could share.” As if we weren’t talking about her parents, but about a faceless fund obliged to bankroll all his whims.
“My parents have already bought us everything we need to live! The apartment, the car—and they helped you with the business! And now you want them to do the same for your sister? And who is she to them?”
The headline of their quarrel had been spoken. And it became a point of no return. Denis looked at her as if she had suddenly started speaking a foreign, revolting language.
“Oh, that’s how it is!” he hissed. “There’s your true face! It’s obvious whose daughter you are! The same overstuffed bourgeois, sitting on your bags of money and choking on your greed! You think I don’t get it? To you, people are trash! Relatives, family—empty words unless they bring you profit!”
He paced the room, gesturing like an actor onstage, and with each word his insults grew more venomous. He forgot that he was standing in the very apartment bought by those “bourgeois,” that his fingers clutched the key to the car they had also bought, that his entire current life, his “businessman” status, was directly thanks to them. In his fevered mind, he was Robin Hood demanding justice, while she and her family were grasping rich folk unwilling to share the crumbs from their table.
“You live at their expense and don’t even see it! You sit here like a princess in a tower and pontificate about common sense! I know what a real family is! Where people stand up for each other!”
Katya watched him in silence. The anger inside her died down, replaced by icy, detached calm. She no longer saw her husband in front of her. She saw a stranger she found unpleasant, hurling filth at the people closest to her while standing on the very floor they had laid down for him.
“Enough.” His monologue ran dry. He stopped abruptly in the middle of the room. “I can’t stay here. In this atmosphere of greed and hypocrisy. I’m going to my folks. To normal people who understand duty and support.”
He turned, strode purposefully into the entryway, and yanked his jacket from the hanger. Katya didn’t move. She didn’t say a word after him. She just listened. She listened to him furiously putting on his shoes, to the rattle of keys. Then came the sharp, dry click of the front door lock. The sound was final, like a period at the end of a long, ugly sentence.
When the click of the lock faded, the apartment didn’t become quieter. On the contrary, it filled with sounds Katya had never noticed before: the hum of the wine fridge in the kitchen, the soft rustle of the ventilation system, the distant, almost inaudible wail of a siren from the street. Those sounds had always been there, but Denis’s voice, his presence—his very existence in this space—had drowned them out. Now they emerged the way objects take shape in a room when a harsh, irritating light is suddenly switched off.
Katya didn’t move. She stood by the window and looked at her reflection in the dark glass. She expected to feel hurt, pain, maybe even despair. But none of that came. His last words—especially that poisonous phrase, “overstuffed bourgeois”—acted like a surgeon’s tool that, with a single precise motion, cut away everything unnecessary. The hazy veil of memories, habits, and compromises she had mistaken for love fell away. Only cold, crystal-clear clarity remained. The realization that for the past few years she hadn’t been living with a husband but with an impudent, ungrateful freeloader who saw her family as his personal ATM.
She walked slowly into her study—a small area partitioned off from the living room by a shelving unit. She sat in her desk chair and took her phone in hand. Her fingers didn’t tremble. She found her father’s number—the one most often dialed to take care of Denis’s business issues. She tapped “Call.”
“Hi, Dad. Do you have a minute?” Her voice was even, almost lifeless, like an announcer reading a weather report.
“Of course, Katyusha. Did something happen?” Her father’s voice on the other end was, as always, calm and attentive.
“Denis left. For good,” she said without beating around the bush. There was no point in a prelude. “He’s decided that you and Mom should buy his sister an apartment to start her life. And find her a good job.”
Silence held the line for several seconds. Katya pictured her father, sitting in his huge office, leaning back in his chair. He didn’t ask for details; he didn’t gasp or groan. He was a man of action.
“I understand, daughter,” he finally said. There was no surprise or gloating in his voice. Only a tired statement of fact. “What needs to be done?”
“The locks,” Katya answered just as tersely. “We need to change the locks today. And think about his car. It’s registered to your company.”
“I’ve already thought of that. The driver will pick it up in the morning. A locksmith will be at your place within the hour. Hang in there, sweetheart.”
“I’m fine, Dad. Thank you.”
The call ended. Katya set the phone on the desk. She didn’t start packing his things, didn’t pull his clothes out of the closet and toss them into suitcases. That would have been too emotional. It would have been a dialogue with him, even if only in absentia. And she didn’t want any more dialogue. She wanted cleanliness. Sterility.
Forty minutes later, the doorbell rang. A sullen man in a work jacket stood on the threshold with a large toolbox. He walked silently into the entryway, examined the door, and got to work. Katya sat in the living room and listened. The sound of a screwdriver at work, the short, sharp whirr of a drill, the metallic scrape of the mechanism being removed. These weren’t just the sounds of a lock being changed. They were the sounds of dismantling her former life. Each turn of the tool unscrewed one more piece of her present connected to Denis.
When the locksmith finished, he handed her a small sealed packet with a new set of keys.
“Please accept the work.”
Katya took the packet. The keys inside were heavy, with sharp, unfamiliar grooves. She slid one into the new lock. It went in stiffly, with unfamiliar resistance. It turned twice, and the massive bolts thudded solidly into the doorframe. She turned the key back. Then locked it again. And unlocked again. It was a mechanical, almost unconscious action. She wasn’t just checking the work. She was getting used to this new sound. The sound of her safety. Her freedom. Her territory, cleansed of him.
Denis spent two days at his parents’ apartment, breathing in the smells of fried potatoes and righteous indignation. His mother poured sympathy into his tea, and his father clapped him on the shoulder, assuring him he’d done the right thing, that “family is sacred,” and that Katya had “just gotten spoiled.” Filled up with this cheap support, Denis felt not just right but heroic, a fighter for traditional values. He decided he’d given his wife enough time to “cool off,” realize her mistake, and get ready to apologize. He even magnanimously planned how he would accept her apology—not right away, of course; he’d be a little stubborn for show first.
He stepped out of the elevator on his floor, feeling in control. The expensive finish of the hall, the quiet reigning there—all of it was part of his world, which he was coming back to reclaim. He casually pulled the key from his pocket. The familiar motion—slide it into the keyhole, turn it, hear the usual click. But the key wouldn’t go in. It caught on something inside the mechanism and wouldn’t enter even halfway.
Denis frowned. He pulled out the key and examined it, as if it might have suddenly changed shape. He tried again, this time with force. Metal scraped unpleasantly against metal, but went no further. Irritation began to boil in his chest. What nonsense was this? The lock stuck? He jiggled the handle, shoved the door with his shoulder. The door stood solid as rock. And then it began to dawn on him. This wasn’t a malfunction. It was an action. Deliberate and purposeful.
His face flushed a deep red. Childish games! She wanted to teach him a lesson? Show some character? He snatched out his phone, stabbed at the screen with angry fingers, and found her number.
“Katya, what kind of joke is this?” he barked the moment she answered. “I can’t get into the apartment. Open up, now!”
Katya’s voice on the other end was unnaturally calm. There was no anger, no hurt, not even a hint of emotion. It was the voice of a secretary reading a business protocol.
“This isn’t a joke, Denis.”
Her icy tone threw him for an instant. He’d expected shouting, reproaches—anything but this cool detachment.
“What do you mean, ‘not a joke’? You changed the locks? Are you out of your mind?”
“Perfectly sane,” she replied just as evenly. “You can tell your sister there’s an opening at my father’s company. Yours.”
Denis fell silent, trying to digest what he’d heard. The words reached him slowly, pushing their way through the armor of his self-satisfaction. Fired? Fired how? It was his company—he’d built it… with her father’s money. The thought flickered and instantly went dark beneath a new wave of rage.
“You… You can’t do that! That’s my job!”
“Already done,” her voice didn’t waver. “Oh, and one more thing. The car will be collected tomorrow morning. The driver will pull up at your parents’ building—leave the keys with the concierge. Don’t make it difficult.”
He stood in the luxurious, quiet hall, holding the phone to his ear, which had suddenly become a portal to hell. The apartment, the job, the car… The construct of his well-being, which he had considered an unshakable fortress, crumbled before his eyes, turning to dust under a few cold, steady phrases. He looked at the polished plaque with the apartment number, where yesterday he could have read his own surname. Now it was just a number on someone else’s door.
“Katya…” He didn’t recognize his own voice. There was no anger or confidence left—only a bewildered, pitiful plea.
But she wasn’t listening anymore. She spoke one last sentence, every word honed to razor sharpness. It wasn’t just the end of a conversation. It was the epilogue to their entire life together.
“Help your family yourself, gigolo.”
The line went dead. Denis lowered his hand with the phone. He stood absolutely still in front of the locked door, a useless piece of metal in his pocket that had once been the key to his life. The hall’s silence pressed on his ears. He was alone. And for the first time in many years, he realized with terrifying clarity that he had nothing of his own.
