I agreed to let your sister live with us while she was studying, but she graduated six months ago, so she can get out of here! I don’t need this freeloading do-nothing in my home anymore!”
Veronica said this in a flat, emotionless voice, but the sound of her putting her plate in the sink next to Nastya’s greasy dish smeared with sauce was more eloquent than any scream. Slava flinched at the sharp clatter of china against stainless steel and slowly raised his eyes from his dinner. He had been doing his best to pretend he didn’t notice the growing tension of the past weeks, but that sound pierced the armor of his complacent calm.
“What’s wrong now?” he asked, reluctantly tearing himself away from a juicy piece of meat. There was no sympathy or real interest in his tone, only weary irritation, as if she was once again distracting him from something important.
“Wrong?” Veronica turned toward him. She leaned her hip against the kitchen cabinet and crossed her arms over her chest. Her gaze was hard and prickly. “And you think everything’s fine, Slava? Your degree-holding sister ate, dumped her dishes like she was in a restaurant, and ran off to the club. I just pulled a mountain of her wet towels out of the bathroom and wiped up a puddle on the floor where she smeared in her foundation. And now I’m supposed to wash her dishes, because in the morning Her Highness will feel uncomfortable drinking coffee next to a dirty sink. You think that’s normal?”
He chewed, put down his fork and let out a deep, martyred sigh. This conversation was unpleasant to him. He wanted peace, coziness, and to be left alone after a long workday. He did not want to be the referee in women’s quarrels.
“Come on, Veronika, don’t start. She’s looking for a job. Looking for herself. It’s hard for her now, she needs time to adapt to adult life.”
His words were so predictable, so worn out, that Veronica didn’t even flinch. She just gave a short smile, with not a hint of amusement in it. It was the smile of someone who’d heard this record a hundred times and knew every scratch on it.
“It’s hard on me, Slava. I’m the one who has to come home every day to an apartment that’s turned into a cross between a cheap hostel and a beauty salon. I’m the one who cleans, cooks, and does laundry for three people while your sister ‘looks for herself’ in nightclubs and shopping malls. She’s not looking for a job. She doesn’t even pretend to. She just lives at our expense, taking advantage of your spinelessness.”
“That’s going too far!” he raised his voice, his lips tightening resentfully. “She’s my sister! I can’t just throw her out on the street!”
“But I can,” Veronica cut him off. Her calm was frightening. She wasn’t snapping, not shrieking—she was passing sentence. “She has exactly one week. Seven days to find herself a new place for her self-discovery. An apartment, a room, a girlfriend, I don’t care. If in seven days she’s still here, then I’ll be the one moving out. And you can decide who you’re going to support from then on. Her or me.”
The morning after the ultimatum began not with a scandal, but with silence. A thick, viscous silence that filled every corner of the apartment, making the air heavy. Veronica got up as usual, at seven. She made coffee for exactly two cups, two toasts, and put one plate of omelet on the table. When Slava, rumpled and gloomy, came into the kitchen, his portion was already waiting for him. He sat down in silence, avoiding his wife’s eyes. He had hoped she would cool down overnight, that it had just been an emotional outburst. But the sight of the perfectly clean table set strictly for two killed that hope.
Nastya appeared an hour later, yawning and stretching, in short silk shorts and a tank top. She headed for the coffee machine on autopilot, only to find it washed and empty.
“Oh, are we out of coffee?” she tossed into the air, expecting Veronica to immediately rush to fix this annoying oversight.
Veronica, who was washing her cup, didn’t even turn her head.
“I don’t know. I already had mine,” she replied as if Nastya were some random passerby asking for directions.
Nastya froze for a moment, then snorted and demonstratively slammed the fridge door. She pulled out a yogurt, ate it standing right there, straight from the cup with a spoon, and left the empty container with the spoon on the counter. That was the first shot in the war that had begun. Veronica ignored it. She finished washing her dishes, wiped down the sink, and went to the bedroom to get ready for work, leaving the yogurt cup standing there like a small, sticky monument to someone else’s bad manners.
And so the days went by. The apartment turned into divided territory with an invisible but palpable border. Veronica made dinner for two. She bought groceries for two. She loaded only her and Slava’s clothes into the washing machine. The pile of Nastya’s laundry in the hamper grew, but Veronica couldn’t care less. She cleaned the living room but deliberately avoided the corner of the couch where Nastya left her mugs and candy wrappers. The bathroom became the main battleground. Veronica polished the mirror and sink to a shine but ignored the tubes, caps, and hair Nastya left behind.
When Nastya realized that her passive aggression wasn’t working, she launched an offensive. She started talking loudly on the phone, telling her friends how “certain people” were losing their minds from jealousy and their own failures. She began bringing home noisy friends when Veronica and Slava were there, flooding their quiet space with loud laughter and foreign smells. She stopped leaving her dishes in the sink and instead placed them right on the table, next to the spot where Veronica ate dinner.
Slava found himself caught between two fires. His attempts at peacemaking were pitiful and clumsy.
“Veronika, maybe you could cook a little more soup? I feel awkward in front of her,” he began ingratiatingly on the third day.
“If you feel awkward, then you cook. The pots are in the same place they’ve always been,” she answered coolly, not looking up from her book.
When he tried talking to his sister, she immediately put on the helpless act.
“Slavochka, I can see how she looks at me! She hates me! I’m in her way! If you feel the same, I’ll pack my things right now and go sleep at the train station!”
And he backed down. He started secretly washing her dishes when Veronica wasn’t looking. He ordered pizza for everyone to avoid awkward dinners for two. He tried to fill the silence with silly jokes and stories about work, but ran into an icy wall from his wife and a condescending, cocky smirk from his sister. He didn’t solve the problem. He just put off the inevitable, making the atmosphere at home even more poisonous and unbearable. The countdown that Veronica had started was ticking, and with each passing day its ticking grew louder.
On the sixth day, Saturday evening, Slava made his last, desperate attempt. He came home from work with two heavy bags from an expensive supermarket. Inside were marbled steaks, asparagus, a bottle of wine—everything he and Veronica used to buy for their special, cozy evenings. It was his white flag, his clumsy peace offering. He found both women in the living room: Veronica was reading, hidden from the world behind her book, and Nastya was painting her nails, the acrid smell of polish hanging in the air.
“So, I decided to treat us all!” he announced with forced cheerfulness, laying the groceries out on the kitchen table. “Let’s have a nice family dinner, sit, talk.”
Veronica slowly raised her eyes over the top of the book. She understood everything. This wasn’t a reconciliation attempt; it was preparation for a trial where she would be cast as the defendant, whom they planned to placate with good food before delivering the verdict. Nastya, on the other hand, brightened. She saw her chance, her stage.
“Oh, Slavochka, how lovely! We haven’t done this in ages!” she cooed, throwing a quick, triumphant glance at Veronica.
Dinner passed in oppressive silence. Slava bustled around, pouring wine, cutting the steaks, trying to joke. His jokes fell into the silence and shattered against the stone faces of the two women. Finally, unable to bear the tension, he cleared his throat and began.
“Girls, why are we acting like strangers? We’re family. We need to come to some kind of agreement. Veronica, Nastya… Let’s find a compromise.”
Nastya immediately put down her fork, her face taking on a tragically injured expression. This was her cue.
“I don’t even know what there is to talk about, Slava! I told you from the start—I’m in her way! I’m a bone in her throat! She just wants you all to herself, so you have no one but her! I’m your own flesh and blood, and she… she’s just trying to drive me out of here!”
She spoke loudly, for effect; her target audience was one person—her brother. Veronica didn’t even look at her. She slowly dabbed her lips with a napkin and turned her head toward her husband. Her voice was quiet, but in the dead silence of the kitchen it sounded clearer than any shout.
“Slava, I’m not going to discuss anything with her. This conversation is between you and me. You asked me to wait, to give her time. It’s been six months. In these six months she’s been to four job interviews, two of which she overslept. She has never cleaned this apartment beyond the threshold of her room. She has never bought so much as a loaf of bread for the house. Last month, on your credit card that you gave her for ‘small expenses’, she racked up fifteen thousand on taxis and cafés. I’m not even mentioning the broken hairdryer and the bathmat soaked in perfume. Those are facts. Everything else is just empty words.”
Each of her words was like a nail she was methodically hammering into the coffin of his pathetic hopes for reconciliation. She wasn’t insulting or attacking—she was stating facts. And this cold, undeniable truth was more terrifying for Slava than any hysterics. He looked at his sister; her face was twisted with hurt. He looked at his wife; her face was calm and unreadable. He was trapped.
And he made a choice. The choice of a weak man, who always chooses the easier path. It was easier not to resist his sister’s manipulations and instead blame his wife for being “too rigid.”
“But why are you so… so harsh?” he forced out, his voice full of reproach. “Can’t you just treat her more humanely? Help her, try to understand? You see how hard it is for her! Why won’t you budge even a little? You’ve turned our home into a battlefield!”
That was all Veronica needed to hear. He hadn’t just defended his sister. He had accused her. In that moment she realized that the one-week deadline had been unnecessary. The decision had already been made for her.
Sunday morning was deceptively quiet. The seventh, final day. Nastya, confident in her complete and unconditional victory, spent an ostentatiously long time splashing in the bathroom, then came out into the kitchen humming some club tune under her breath. She felt like the mistress of the situation. Slava sat at the table with his phone, pretending to read the news but really just hiding behind the screen from the awkwardness. He expected that Veronica would either submit, having realized the pointlessness of her little rebellion, or start packing her things, slamming the door on her way out. He was prepared for either outcome.
He was not prepared for what happened next. Veronica came out of the bedroom. She was already dressed in neat jeans and a cashmere sweater, her hair tied back tidily. She wasn’t carrying anything in her hands. She was simply rolling two suitcases behind her. Two large, neatly packed suitcases on wheels, softly whispering over the laminate floor.
“Wow, someone really did decide to move out!” Nastya drawled with a mocking smirk, sipping her coffee. “Did Daddy fail to talk you out of it?”
Slava looked up from his phone, his face a mix of relief and guilt. So, it was happening. This would be the final scene, and then it would all be over. He braced himself for a stream of reproaches.
Veronica stopped the suitcases by the front door. She looked at the two of them with a calm, appraising gaze, as if seeing them for the first time.
“These aren’t my things,” she said quietly. Her voice was absolutely even, without a hint of drama. “They’re yours, Slava.”
Slava blinked. He put his phone down on the table. Nastya’s smile slid off her face. They both looked at the suitcases and then at Veronica, unable to reconcile her words with reality.
“What?” he repeated, thinking he had misheard.
“I gave you a week to make a choice,” Veronica went on in the same detached tone. “Last night at dinner, you made it. You chose your sister. That’s your right. You think she needs to be taken care of, that you have to understand her situation. I’m not arguing with that anymore. Take care of her.”
She paused briefly, letting her words soak into the thick morning air.
“Only now you’ll be doing it together. Somewhere else. I’m not throwing Nastya out, I have no right to—she’s your relative. But you are my husband. And if you can’t live without your sister, then the two of you will live together.”
She walked over to the front door and opened it, letting in the cool air from the stairwell.
“You… you’re throwing me out?” Slava finally managed to say. There was no anger in his voice, only bewildered confusion. He still couldn’t believe it. He was the man of the house. The man. He was the one who made decisions.
“I haven’t forgotten anything. Your work shirts are in there, your laptop, chargers, gym clothes. Everything you need for the first time. My parents put more into the down payment for this apartment than you managed to earn in three years of our marriage. So I’m staying,” she looked him straight in the eye, and there was no hatred or resentment in her gaze, only a cold, final statement of fact. “You made your choice about whom to support. Now start.”
Nastya froze with her cup in hand. The world in which she was a princess under the protection of her big brother collapsed in an instant. She looked from her brother to his suitcases by the door, and sheer, genuine horror spread across her face. She wasn’t getting the apartment at her disposal. She was getting a homeless brother who would now, obviously, be living wherever she was.
“Nastya, help your brother,” Veronica said, without raising her voice. She didn’t shove them out, didn’t shout, didn’t make a scene. She simply stood by the open door, holding it the way a doorman holds it for departing guests. And that detached politeness of hers was more terrifying than any rage. She just cut them out of her life like a dull, finished book…
