“Here, Anya, take it. Just be careful out there, okay? Don’t speed,” Andrey said with a wide smile, handing his sister the car keys.
“Thanks, big bro! You’re the best! I won’t be long, honestly! There and back, I’ll stay at my friend’s for a couple of days and bring it back,” Anya happily grabbed the key fob, making it jingle in the air. “Yana, hi from Mom!”
Yana silently watched the scene, leaning against the kitchen doorway. She gave a brief nod in response to the greeting without moving. Her face was expressionless, but in the way she looked at the shiny keys in her sister-in-law’s hand, there was something heavy, immovable. Andrey either didn’t notice that look or chose to ignore it. He was too absorbed in the role of the kind and generous big brother.
“Relax as long as you need, don’t worry about it. Two weeks, then two weeks,” he said grandly with a wave of his hand.
Seeing his sister to the door and waiting until the click of the stairwell lock announced her departure, Andrey returned to the apartment looking very pleased with himself. He rubbed his hands together as if he’d just made a very successful deal.
“Well, there we go,” he said with a smile, turning to his wife. “My sis is happy. You’ve gotta help your own, right?”
Yana didn’t answer. She silently walked past him to the chest of drawers in the hallway where they kept all the important papers. Her movements were measured, almost too calm. She pulled out the top drawer, took out a thick folder with plastic sleeves and flipped through its contents. She found the sheet she needed—a fresh car loan payment slip that had arrived literally the day before. Then, still without a word, she took a large pair of office scissors from the shelf.
Andrey watched her actions with growing confusion.
“What are you looking for? Yana?”
She didn’t bother to respond. Laying the bill flat on the smooth surface of the chest of drawers, she made one clean cut straight through the middle. The sound of paper being sliced in the sudden silence rang loud and final. She left one half on the chest of drawers, took the other in her hand, walked over to her husband and held it out to him.
“This is yours,” she said in an even voice, stripped of any emotion.
Andrey stared, bewildered, first at the torn piece of paper in her hand, then at her face.
“What’s this? What are you doing?”
“This is your share. And your sister’s. And I’m not going to pay my half,” Yana explained, still holding out his half of the bill.
It began to dawn on Andrey. The pleased expression on his face slowly faded, replaced first by surprise and then by open indignation.
“Are you out of your mind? What do you mean, you’re not going to? We’ll be late on the payment, Yana! They’ll charge us interest!”
“Probably,” she shrugged. “But since it’s your family using the car, then the problems that come with it are now your family’s problems too. I’m indifferent to them.”
“What do you mean, my family? It’s OUR car! Joint! The loan is in both our names, did you forget?” He was getting worked up, raising his voice. “What kind of childish resentment is this? You begrudge Anya a favor, is that it?”
“I don’t begrudge her anything. I just don’t care,” her calmness infuriated him even more. “Up until today it was ours. And today you unilaterally decided that your sister will be using it. For free. And for a whole two weeks. So now you can just as unilaterally deal with the payment. Get the money from Anya, from your mom, I don’t care. My money won’t be in this payment.”
He snatched the half of the bill from her hand and crumpled it.
“You wouldn’t dare! That’s low!”
“Oh, I will, Andrey. And it’s not low, it’s fair,” Yana replied, turning away and heading back to the kitchen. “You can consider my half of the loan as the rental fee for your sister’s use of the car. I think the price is quite reasonable.”
Andrey stood in the middle of the hallway, clenching the crumpled half of the bill in his fist. He’d expected anything—yelling, accusations, thrown dishes—but this icy, calculated cruelty knocked him off balance. He followed his wife into the kitchen. Yana took out the cezve, scooped in coffee; her movements were precise and deliberate, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. That demonstrative calm enraged him to the point of grinding his teeth.
“Are you trying to finish me off with this silent treatment?” he exploded. “Yana, I’m talking to you! This isn’t a joke!”
“I’m not joking,” she set the cezve on the stove without turning to him. “I’ve said everything, Andrey. I see no point in repeating myself. You made a decision for the two of us without asking. Now reap the fruits of that decision.”
“What decision? I just helped my sister! My own sister! Do you have anything sacred at all?” he was practically shouting, waving the crumpled scrap of paper.
“I do have something sacred—our family budget, which you just turned into charity. And our shared future, which is now threatened by penalties and a ruined credit history because of your generosity. But if that isn’t important to you, why should it be important to me?”
He realized the wall he was pounding his head against wasn’t going to budge. A frontal assault wasn’t working. So he decided to try another angle. Andrey silently walked out of the kitchen, pulled his phone from his pocket and, making a show of it as he walked into the other room, dialed a number. Yana heard snatches of his phrases, soaked in self-pity and righteous anger: “Mom, can you imagine what she’s done?”, “Yes, because of Anya!”, “She says she won’t pay, she’s totally lost her mind.”
Five minutes later Yana’s phone rang. “Svetlana Petrovna” lit up on the screen. Yana took a deep breath, removed the rising foam from the coffee, and only then answered, turning on the speakerphone.
“Hello, Yanotchka, dear,” purred the voice of her mother-in-law.
“Hello, Svetlana Petrovna.”
“Andryusha called, he’s so upset… I’m so worried about you two. What happened there, my girl? Surely you can’t be fighting over such a trifle?”
“It depends what you consider a trifle,” Yana replied calmly, pouring the coffee into a cup.
“Well, the car… Anya really needed to go to that wedding, you know things aren’t great with her finances right now, she would’ve spent so much on the train. And here her brother helped. We’re one family, Yanotchka, we should lend each other a shoulder. You can’t be so… so calculating.”
“I completely agree with you, Svetlana Petrovna. Family is the most important thing, and you absolutely have to help each other,” there wasn’t a trace of irony in Yana’s voice. “That’s why I suggested a wonderful solution to Andrey. Since helping Anya is so important to your family, you can all help her together. You, Andrey, and Anya herself. Chip in and pay the loan. I’m sure with everyone’s efforts you’ll manage to gather the needed amount. For my part, I helped by not objecting to her taking the car.”
There was a few seconds of silence on the other end. Clearly, her mother-in-law hadn’t expected that turn.
“So… you really aren’t going to pay?” she asked, at a loss.
“No. I’ve already stated my decision.”
Not even a minute after the call ended, an enraged Andrey burst into the kitchen. His face was flushed with anger.
“I don’t get it, what did you say to my mother?! She’s shocked by your tone! You practically told her to get lost!”
“I merely suggested she take part in solving a problem created by her children,” Yana countered coolly, taking a sip of coffee.
“Are you kidding me?! You put my mother in a humiliating position! You accused her of using us! As far as you’re concerned, my family is just nothing, isn’t it? You don’t respect any of them, do you?!”
The argument was ramping up to a new level. Now it was no longer about money or the car. It was about principles, respect, about who in their tiny unit of society had the right to a voice and who was supposed to silently agree. And Yana, judging by her impassive face, had no intention of giving up an inch.
A week passed in thick, sticky silence. They existed in the same apartment like two ghosts accidentally trapped in the same space. They ate at different times. They went to bed turned away from each other, and the invisible wall of cold blanket between them was stronger than any brick. The air in the house grew dense, charged, ready to explode from the slightest spark. Andrey walked around darker than a storm cloud. Every now and then he pulled out his phone, opened the banking app, stared at the balance and exhaled loudly. The payment date, circled in red marker on the wall calendar, was approaching with the relentlessness of a steamroller.
At first he was sure Yana was bluffing, that this was just a woman’s tantrum that would blow over in a couple of days. But the days went by and her icy calm didn’t melt. He realized she wasn’t joking. Then anger took hold of him, followed by a quiet, sticky panic. He called a couple of friends under the pretext of “borrowing until payday.” One blamed the mortgage, another “unexpected repair expenses.” Andrey understood—no one wanted to get involved in someone else’s domestic drama, rumors of which had probably already crept through their circle of friends. He was trapped. The amount was too large to pull from the budget painlessly; if he didn’t pay half, he risked going into the red on all other expense lines.
In the evening, two days before zero hour, he couldn’t take it anymore. Yana was sitting in an armchair with a book, completely absorbed in reading, or at least pretending to be. Her detachment frayed his nerves more than any shouting. Andrey walked over and stopped in front of her.
“Yana, we need to talk.”
She slowly lifted her eyes from the page but didn’t close the book, keeping her finger on the line.
“I’m listening.”
“The day after tomorrow the loan is due. The full amount. You realize that if we don’t pay, penalties will start? Then fines. And the main thing—it’s a hit on our shared credit history. After that we won’t even be able to buy a needle on credit,” he tried to speak calmly, appealing to logic and common sense, to their shared future.
“This isn’t ‘our’ shared history, Andrey. It’s ‘your’ history,” she replied evenly. “Yours and your sister’s.”
His patience snapped. The mask of rationality fell, exposing a raw, vibrating nerve.
“What does my sister have to do with it?! You just needed an excuse to stick it to me! You never liked this car, you were always unhappy with it!”
At that, Yana laid the book on the side table. She slowly stood up and looked him straight in the eye. Her gaze was hard as steel. There were notes in her voice he had never heard before—notes of long-suppressed, white-hot resentment.
“So your sister gets to ride in our car, and you don’t even let me near it? Well then let her be the one to pay the loan for it, darling! You won’t get another cent from me for it!”
The key phrase sounded like a verdict. It slapped him in the face because it was true. He remembered all the times he’d refused her.
“What are you talking about? When did I ever keep you away from it?”
“You don’t remember?” she took a step toward him. “You don’t remember how I wanted to go visit my parents at the dacha last month? You said ‘the car’s not for those country potholes, you’ll kill the suspension.’ But for your sister’s friend’s wedding, two hundred kilometers away on who-knows-what road, it’s fine, is it? Do you remember how I wanted to go shopping and you told me you ‘don’t have time to sit around waiting at every boutique’? But for your sister you found two whole weeks of time. Two weeks, Andrey!”
Every word was like a nail hammered into the lid of their relationship’s coffin. These weren’t just memories. This was a bill she’d been keeping for a long time and was now presenting for payment.
“So all this time you were keeping score? Remembering every little thing just to throw it in my face now?!” he cried in desperation.
“These aren’t little things, Andrey. This is your attitude. That car was always your toy. Your trophy. You washed it, polished it, blew the dust off it. But it was part of ‘our’ family only when it came time to pay for it out of ‘our’ budget. As soon as it came to actually using it, it suddenly became exclusively yours. And you decided who was worthy of riding in it. Turns out your sister was worthier than me. Well, that’s your choice. Now enjoy the consequences.”
The day Anya was supposed to return, the apartment was so quiet you could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock—a sound no one had ever noticed before. Andrey sat on the couch staring at the dark TV screen. He hadn’t slept almost all night, playing humiliating scenarios in his head: a call from the bank, a talk with debt collectors, Yana’s scornful look. He still hadn’t managed to find the money. The last day of the loan payment deadline hung over him like a guillotine blade.
The doorbell rang, shrill and inappropriately cheerful. Andrey flinched. Anya stood on the threshold—tanned, happy, in a light summer dress. She breezed into the apartment, bangles chiming, immediately surrounding them with a cloud of sea-breeze scent and expensive perfume.
“Hey, you two! I missed you so much!” she sang, putting a bag of souvenirs on the floor. “You can’t imagine how great it was there! The wedding was amazing, the sea was so warm… I brought you a fridge magnet. Here, with a little dolphin!”
She joyfully held out the tiny piece of plastic to Andrey. Yana came out of the room and silently leaned against the wall, arms folded. She was a front-row spectator in the theater of the absurd that was about to reach its climax.
Andrey looked at the magnet, then at his sister’s glowing face. Something snapped inside him. All the panic, humiliation, and anger that had built up over the week burst out.
“Anya, give me the money,” he said hoarsely.
Her smile vanished.
“What money, Andryusha? What are you talking about?”
“For the car! For the loan!” he was practically shouting now. “Today’s the last day to make the payment! Yana refused to pay because of you! I have to pay the whole amount, and I don’t have it! Where am I supposed to get it?!”
Anya stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. She clearly didn’t understand what was going on.
“But… you offered it yourself! You said, ‘Here, take it, drive it.’ You didn’t say a word about money! I thought… I thought you just wanted to help, as a brother…”
“Help?!” Andrey roared. “Now because of your wedding I’m going into debt and ending up with a ruined credit history! Do you even realize what you’ve done?!”
“Me?!” Anya’s voice rang with tears. “I would’ve taken the train if I’d known! Why did you play the good Samaritan then? You should’ve said right away that it wasn’t help but a paid service!”
They shouted at each other, brother and sister, forgetting everything else. All of it got mixed into their fight: old childhood grievances, mutual reproaches, her confusion and his desperation. Yana watched the scene with cold, detached satisfaction. It was ugly, but it was fair. This was the bill the system presented for upsetting the balance.
“Where am I supposed to get that kind of money?!” Anya cried, sobbing. “I spent everything on the gift and the trip! I thought you…”
At that moment Yana pushed off from the wall. She calmly walked over to the small table in the hallway where Anya had dropped the car keys along with her purse. She picked up the key fob, walked over to the couch where Andrey sat hunched, and tossed it onto the coffee table in front of him with a short, dry clack.
The room fell instantly silent. Brother and sister stared at her.
“Well? Happy now?” her voice was quiet, but it cut to the quick. “Here. This is yours now. All yours.” She paused, letting her gaze move from the keys to Anya’s tear-streaked face, and finally rest on her husband’s crushed expression. “Your favorite car. Your favorite sister. Your family. Sort it out amongst yourselves. I’m done.”
She turned and went into the bedroom. Neither Andrey nor Anya said a word. They heard the click of the lock on the door and, a minute later, the distinct, methodical sound of the zipper being pulled open on a large suitcase.
Andrey sat motionless, staring at the keys. He was left alone with his sister, with the unpaid loan, with the dolphin magnet on the table, and with the deafening realization that his marriage had most likely just ended. Not because of money. But because of one single decision he’d made two weeks earlier, a decision that had turned out to cost him everything…
