“Where could they have gone?!” Yegor’s roar rolled through the apartment, making the cat dozing on the windowsill twitch its ear in annoyance. For the third time he turned out the pockets of the jeans hanging on the chair and hurled them back with force. “I clearly remember putting them in my jacket! I’m sure of it!”
He was pacing up and down the hallway like a caged animal. The wardrobe doors banged, a shoehorn clattered to the floor, a plastic bag full of other bags rustled. Yegor was in that state of cold, focused rage when any object risked becoming a projectile. The car keys and his salary bank card had disappeared. They had simply evaporated from the inside pocket of his autumn jacket hanging on the hook.
In the kitchen, at the table, his mother, Tamara Pavlovna, sat with an imperturbable look. She was slowly stirring sugar into her tea, and the thin chime of the spoon against the porcelain sounded deafening in this tense atmosphere. She wasn’t looking at her son. Her gaze was fixed on the window, but her whole posture radiated the liveliest involvement. Finally, after taking a small sip, she spoke without turning her head, in a smooth, insinuating voice:
“Well now, Yulka’s brother dropped by about half an hour ago… Brought some documents.”
The phrase fell into the air like a drop of poison into a glass of water. It did not contain a direct accusation. It was only a fact. But a fact presented at just the right moment and with just the right intonation.
Yegor froze. His face, already red from running around and raging, slowly began to darken to a deep crimson. He had never liked Yulia’s brother, the successful, self-assured Kirill, who always seemed to look at Yegor with a slight, barely noticeable condescension. The hatred and jealousy that had lain dormant inside him instantly found an outlet.
“Your little thief was here again?!” he bellowed, turning toward the doorway just as Yulia was walking out of the room.
She stopped halfway, a towel in her hands. She had just come out of the bathroom and didn’t immediately understand what was going on. But the word “thief,” hurled with such hatred, struck her across the face.
“What? Who are you talking about?”
“Who? About your precious brother, who else!” Yegor took a step toward her, jabbing a finger in the direction of the hallway. “The car keys are gone and the card! And nobody else has been here but him!”
And then everything clicked in Yulia’s head. Ten minutes ago, before going to take a shower, she had seen Tamara Pavlovna walk up to the coat rack in the corridor. With a kind of brisk, businesslike concern, her mother-in-law had slipped her hand into the inside pocket of Yegor’s jacket, taken something out and quickly put it into her own handbag that was standing on the little hall table. It had seemed odd to Yulia at the time, but she’d decided that the older woman was just taking something of her own or maybe wanted to shake the pockets out before washing. She would never have thought… not until this moment. Now that gesture took on a sinister, monstrous meaning. It hadn’t been care. It had been a planned provocation.
Her face hardened. The calm with which she’d walked out of the bathroom was replaced by an icy fury.
“Are you serious right now?” she asked so quietly that Yegor had to stop for a second just to hear her. “You actually dared to accuse my brother of stealing? Kirill?”
“Who else?!” he wouldn’t let up. “Or did they grow legs and walk off on their own?! He came by, hung around for five minutes and left! And everything’s gone! Just a coincidence, huh?!”
Yulia slowly laid the towel over the back of the armchair. She looked past her enraged husband, straight into the kitchen, where Tamara Pavlovna continued sipping her tea imperturbably, pretending that this family quarrel had nothing to do with her. And then the dam burst.
Yulia took two steps forward, walking around her husband as if he were an inanimate object blocking the way. She stopped in the kitchen doorway, her gaze drilling into her mother-in-law. Feeling the sudden change in the atmosphere, Tamara Pavlovna finally tore herself away from her tea. She raised her eyes to her daughter-in-law—clear, bright, with an expression of mild, polite puzzlement. A perfect mask.
“It was your mother who pulled your car keys and salary card out of your pocket. I saw it with my own eyes. And you’re trying to pin it on my brother, who only dropped by to bring me the papers about my grandmother’s inheritance!”
Not a single muscle twitched on Tamara Pavlovna’s porcelain face; only the corners of her lips sank ever so slightly, giving her a sorrowful, offended look. She stood up and closed the kitchen door so she wouldn’t have to meet the couple’s eyes. Yegor, stunned for a second by such a direct attack on his mother, immediately exploded with renewed force.
“Are you out of your mind?! Completely?!” He lunged toward her, planting himself between her and his mother as if shielding the latter from an assault. “How dare you accuse my mother? Of stealing? She’s a saint! She’s spent her whole life for me… And you, just to cover for your darling brother, are ready to drag the woman dearest to me through the mud!”
He was shouting, spraying spit, his face contorted with righteous indignation. He genuinely believed what he was saying. He believed in Kirill’s vileness and his own mother’s holiness.
“He has no reason to steal anything from you, Yegor!” Yulia was speaking to him, but she didn’t take her eyes off Tamara Pavlovna, who was now watching the show with interest. “He’s got so much money he could buy your car with you in it and not even notice. But your mother had every reason to do it. So that you’d be standing here now, yelling at me. So that you’d hate my family.”
“Lies!” Yegor snapped. “You’re lying! I know you’re always defending him! He’s your idol, and I’m just the guy standing next to you! My mom was just having tea! You saw what you wanted to see!”
Yulia looked at her husband’s face, twisted with rage, at his eyes burning with certainty, and realized one simple, terrifying thing: arguing was useless. Explaining, proving, presenting logical arguments—it was all the same as trying to shout to someone at the bottom of the ocean. He lived in his own reality, carefully constructed for him by his mother, and in that reality she was a liar and her brother was a thief. All her fury, all her shock at her mother-in-law’s meanness suddenly ebbed away, leaving behind a cold, ringing emptiness and absolute clarity. She was no longer going to play this game by their rules.
“All right,” she said sharply. That simple word sounded like a sentence. She took a step back, retreating from the doorway and giving him space. Her gaze was calm, almost bored. “Right now you’re going to go into the kitchen to your mommy and ask her to give back what she stole.”
Yegor blinked in confusion, thrown off balance by this sudden change of tactics. He had expected shouting, tears, anything but this icy calm.
“What? What are you talking about? I’m not going to humiliate my mother with your insane suspicions!”
“You are,” Yulia continued in the same level tone. She folded her arms across her chest, and that gesture became the final barrier between them. “You have one hour. If in an hour the card and the keys aren’t back here, I’ll call my brother. And I’ll tell him how he’s received in this house. I’ll tell him that my husband thinks he’s a petty pickpocket. And you can be sure neither he nor I will ever forget it. Ever.”
Yulia’s words hung in the air, dense and heavy as inevitability. An hour. It wasn’t just a stretch of time, it was a fuse lit on the barrel of gunpowder they were all sitting on. Yegor looked at her completely calm face and understood that she wasn’t bluffing. The threat to call Kirill was not emotional blackmail, but a statement of fact, the next point in her plan. And he could picture the consequences of that call all too well. Kirill, with his connections and his icy contempt for everyday squabbles, wouldn’t bother to sort things out. He would simply cross Yegor out of his life, and with him would go all the small but pleasant perks that came with being related to him: from help with car inspections to pulling strings at Yegor’s previous job.
His jaw clenched. He looked at his mother. Tamara Pavlovna sat there with the air of an offended innocent, lips pressed together, her look full of cosmic sorrow. She kept silent, leaving it to her son to fight for her honor. And that silent reproach worked on Yegor more powerfully than any words. He was cornered. On one side was his wife’s icy resolve, on the other his mother’s sullied honor. But he needed the keys and the card right now.
“Fine,” he spat, pulling his phone from his pocket. “I’ll ask her. But only so you can hear what nonsense you’re talking. To prove to you that my mother is a decent person, unlike some.”
In the kitchen, Tamara Pavlovna froze, her cup suspended halfway to her mouth. Yulia didn’t move, her face as expressionless as that of a poker player who has pushed all their chips into the pot.
“What is it?” Tamara Pavlovna’s voice finally sounded, deliberately weak and surprised, as if she had been torn away from something important and requiring concentration.
“Mum,” Yegor began, rough, awkward notes creeping into his voice. “Listen, here’s the thing… You didn’t happen to see my car keys and my card, did you? They disappeared from my jacket.”
There followed a pause, timed to the second.
“Keys? Card? Yegorushka, what are you talking about? I’ve been sitting here in the kitchen, drinking tea. How could I have seen them?” Her voice was full of sincere bewilderment. Yegor shot Yulia a triumphant look. “Heard that?” it said. But Yulia didn’t even blink.
“Well, maybe when you walked past… maybe they fell out?” he continued, not really knowing where he was going with this.
And then Tamara Pavlovna began her performance.
“Wait a second…” There was the sound of rustling and a chair being pushed back. “I was going to shake out your jacket, there were some crumbs in it. I thought, since you were in the shower, I’d tidy it up a bit… Oh!”
That “Oh!” was delivered with brilliant mastery. It contained surprise, annoyance and a flash of understanding.
“Oh my goodness, Yegorushka, you won’t believe it!” Her voice rang with “sudden” discovery. “They’re in my bag! Lying right at the bottom! It must be that when I shook the jacket, they fell straight out of the pocket into my bag and I didn’t notice! What a silly old scatterbrain I am!”
Yegor closed his eyes. Relief and anger were battling inside him. Relief, because the missing items had been found. And anger at Yulia, who’d caused this entire nightmare, was off the charts.
“There, you see?!” he hissed at his wife, covering the phone’s speaker with his palm.
But Tamara Pavlovna wasn’t finished yet.
“Son, what happened? Why did you get so upset?” Her voice once again became weak and full of anxiety. “Did Yulechka think something? She must have decided that I… that I took them? Oh God, how awful this all looks… I apologize for this ridiculous misunderstanding.”
She delivered the final, most accurate blow. She hadn’t just justified herself—she’d cast herself as the victim of monstrous suspicions, magnanimously forgiving her deranged daughter-in-law.
“That’s enough, Mum, just give them to me and everything’ll be fine,” Yegor said hurriedly.
He looked at his mother in silence, then took the keys and card from her bag. Tamara Pavlovna watched him with eyes shiny with suffering. He went back into the room. He didn’t walk, he strode, like a prosecutor about to read out the indictment. With a sweeping motion he threw the keys and the card onto the coffee table. Metal and plastic struck the lacquered surface with a loud, definitive thud.
“Well?! Convinced of your own rightness now?!” His voice thundered. “You accused my mother of stealing! You humiliated her! I expect you to go right now and apologize to her!”
Yulia looked at him. Not at the keys and the card lying on the table, but directly at him, into his eyes blazing with righteous anger. And in her gaze there was neither answering fury, nor hurt, nor any desire to argue. There was something much worse—complete, all-embracing indifference. It was as if she were looking at a stranger whose violent emotions had nothing to do with her. She no longer saw her husband Yegor, only a shell, a puppet who had just gleefully danced his part in a play staged by his mother.
“Apologize?” she repeated. Her voice was even and quiet, devoid of any intonation. It was as if she were clarifying the meaning of an unfamiliar word. “To her? For the fact that she stole and then staged a ‘miraculous’ discovery? For the fact that she made my brother out to be a thief and me a raving liar? That’s what I should apologize for?”
Yegor gave a self-satisfied smirk. He took her calm for capitulation, for a last weak attempt to justify herself before the inevitable.
“Exactly that! For the circus you put on over nothing! For being ready to destroy a family over your fantasies!”
Yulia tilted her head slightly to one side, continuing to study him with the cold curiosity of an anthropologist. She kept silent for a few seconds, letting his words dissolve in the air. Then, without saying anything more, she turned and walked over to the chest of drawers where her phone was lying.
Yegor watched her, waiting to see what she would do. He thought she was about to call a friend to complain, or her mother to tattle. But she calmly found her brother’s number in her contacts and pressed call. She didn’t turn on speakerphone. There was no need. In the thick silence her voice carried perfectly.
“Kirill, hi. It’s me,” she began in an absolutely matter-of-fact tone, as if she were calling just to ask how he was. “Listen, about those papers for the inheritance you brought over today. The plan’s changed.”
Yegor tensed. In the kitchen, Tamara Pavlovna also froze; up until that moment she had been listening with satisfaction to her son’s victorious speech.
“Yes, drastically,” Yulia went on, staring at the wall in front of her. Her back was perfectly straight. “We won’t be needing to open a joint account for that money anymore. And we’re not going to invest it in a shared country house either.”
Inside, Yegor went cold. This didn’t sound like a complaint. It sounded like a business directive.
“Please tell your lawyer to draw up all the documents for my share exclusively in my name. All the assets, all the accounts. No general power of attorney for management, no joint ownership. Just me. Did you get that?”
On the other end of the line, a question was clearly asked.
“Why?” Yulia paused, and for the first time since the beginning of the conversation a hint of emotion appeared in her voice—a bitter smile. “Because I’ve decided that my assets need to be protected. From everything. And from everyone. Yes, I’m absolutely sure. Details later. Just do as I ask.”
She ended the call and slowly put the phone back on the chest of drawers. Then she turned around. Her gaze slid over Yegor, who stood there with his mouth open, trying to grasp the scale of what had just happened. His “victory”—the recovered keys and card—suddenly seemed pitiful and trivial. He had won an argument over pocket change and, at that very moment, lost a whole fortune, a future, everything he had taken for granted.
She looked at Tamara Pavlovna, who was peeking out of the kitchen with a horrified expression. The mother, the director of this little production, finally saw how her brilliant staging had ended. The finale hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned.
Yulia’s last glance fell on the table, on the gleaming car keys.
“Here,” she said quietly but distinctly. “This is yours. You can enjoy it. The car, the apartment, your mother… it’s all yours. Enjoy your victory…
