“What is this?”
The question came out quietly, almost lifeless, and dissolved into the warm, humid air that still smelled of minty shower gel. Marina stood on the threshold of the living room, wrapped in a large white towel. Water dripped from her hair onto her shoulders, but she didn’t feel it. All her attention was fixed on what lay on the parquet floor.
Her laptop.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The slim silver body had been snapped in half, twisted at an unnatural, crunching angle. The screen—where just that morning the charts for her year-long project had been glowing—had turned into a dense spiderweb of black cracks radiating from a dark, dead blot in the center. It lay there like a mutilated body, and at the sight of it something inside her went cold.
Nearby stood Liza, hands shoved into the pockets of her skinny jeans. Thirteen years old, glossy bangs falling into her eyes, a look of bored superiority on her face. She didn’t try to hide. She didn’t pretend to be sorry. She stared at Marina with lazy, open defiance.
“That’s my laptop. What happened to it?” Marina repeated. Her voice sounded surprisingly even, as if it belonged to someone else. Inside, everything had tightened into a hard, icy knot—but outwardly she kept absolute control.
“I didn’t like it,” the girl tossed back with the faintest shrug. One corner of her mouth twitched in the hint of a smirk.
At that moment Oleg burst into the room. What drew him wasn’t noise, but the deafening, strained silence hanging in the air. In a worn T-shirt, hair mussed from an afternoon nap on the couch, he flicked his gaze from the mangled device to his wife, then to his daughter—and in that same second, he made his choice. He stepped forward and placed himself between them like a living shield, blocking Liza from view.
“Lizonka, why would you do that? Marina, she didn’t do it out of spite…”
“Not out of spite?” Marina looked at him, and there wasn’t a drop of her former warmth left. “Oleg, she destroyed my work. A year-long project. Everything I’ve been grinding on for the last twelve months was on there. Do you even realize that?”
“Come on, don’t start right away… She’s going through a phase, she’s impulsive. You understand? She just didn’t think!” he rattled on quickly, fussing with his hands as if he could wave away the catastrophe thickening in the room. His face showed annoyance—but not at his daughter, at the situation itself. “Liza, apologize to Marina.”
The girl snorted demonstratively and turned toward the window. Her whole posture said this farce bored her.
And then something in Marina broke—not into hysterical screaming. Her voice dropped, hardened; a metallic ring of cold, distilled fury sounded in it.
“Your spoiled little princess smashed my work laptop because she didn’t like a comment on her photo! And you think that’s normal?”
“Stop yelling at her!” Oleg exploded instantly, red blotches spreading across his face. He took another step toward Marina, closing the distance. “I won’t let you scream at my child! Fine—she broke it, so she broke it! Tech is replaceable. We’ll buy a new one!”
The word we’ll buy was the last drop, the stone that triggered the avalanche. It landed like a slap. He still didn’t get it. He never had. Marina slowly—almost ritualistically—tightened the knot on her towel.
“You will buy it. You and your daughter. And for now, both of you get out of MY house.”
Oleg froze. He stared at her as if she had suddenly begun speaking an unfamiliar, threatening language.
“What? You… you’re kicking us out? Over some piece of metal?”
“It’s not metal. It’s my life—something your treasure just tried to destroy with your silent approval. And I’m not going to live with a person who encourages that. You have exactly an hour to pack your things.”
She turned and looked at the large wall clock. Her face resembled a plaster mask—no extra emotion, not a single muscle twitching.
“If in sixty minutes you’re still here, I’ll call a locksmith and change the locks. And believe me, I will. Now go. Time starts now.”
Oleg stood rooted in place, mouth slightly open, watching as Marina—without giving him even one more glance—turned and calmly walked into the bedroom. Her wet back, vertebrae sharply defined, and the towel tied tight looked like armor. There was no rush, no nervousness in her movements—only the methodical, measured calm of someone who had made a final decision. That calm frightened him more than any scream ever could.
“Are you out of your mind, Marina?!” he finally found his voice and followed her, leaving Liza alone in the living room with the broken laptop. “You want to destroy our family over a piece of plastic? Do you even hear yourself?”
Marina walked to the wardrobe. She didn’t answer. She simply took a pair of black jeans and a gray turtleneck off a hanger. Her silence hit Oleg like hot metal. He was used to pushing her, persuading her, making her feel guilty. But now he was talking to a wall.
“I’m talking to you! You don’t have the right to do this! She’s a child! Kids do stupid things sometimes! Adults are supposed to be wiser—not throw them out into the street!”
Marina pulled off the damp towel and tossed it onto a chair. For a second her nakedness appeared not as something intimate or desirable, but as a symbol of absolute vulnerability—one she was no longer willing to hide or defend. She dressed quickly: black jeans, gray turtleneck. A simple, almost mourning uniform.
“This isn’t stupidity, Oleg. It’s an action. And every action has consequences. She should have learned that much earlier—but you did everything to make sure she didn’t.”
“What do you even know about her?” His voice began to jump toward falsetto. “You never loved her! You always looked at her like she was in the way! You just needed an excuse to get rid of her, and you found it!”
Marina turned to him. She had already slicked her wet hair back, and her face looked stern and unfamiliar.
“I’m not obligated to love her. But I demanded respect—toward me, toward my work, toward the things in this house. You couldn’t explain that to her. So now I’ll explain it to both of you.”
From the next room came the harsh sound of a drawer being yanked open. Liza had clearly heard everything. Oleg turned, his face twisting. He was about to rush to his daughter—to comfort her, protect her from the “evil stepmother”—but Marina cut him off.
“Don’t interfere. Let her pack. You have forty-five minutes.”
At that moment Liza appeared in the bedroom doorway. Earbuds in, aggressive rhythmic mumbling spilling out from them. In her hands was a bright backpack she was stuffing with things in a showy, contemptuous way. She looked at Marina, then at her father, and a blatant, triumphant smile played on her lips. She was enjoying this. The scandal was her victory, her show.
“Dad, are you coming? I’m sick of this house,” she said loudly enough to talk over the music in her ears.
Oleg looked at his triumphant daughter, then at his wife’s cold, unreadable face. The world he’d found so comfortable and clear was collapsing in front of him. He made one last desperate attempt to press on pity.
“And where are we supposed to go? Just tell me—where do we go in the middle of the night? Have you thought about that?”
Marina walked to the dresser and picked up her phone. She didn’t even look at him.
“That’s not my problem, Oleg. It’s yours. You’re the father. You’re responsible for her. So start carrying that responsibility. Right now. Forty minutes.”
Realizing his tactics—righteous anger and guilt—weren’t working, Oleg abruptly switched tone. He stepped closer; his face went from furious to pleading, almost suffering. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away as instinctively as someone jerks their hand from fire.
“Marish, listen. Please. Let’s not do this. Remember how it started. Remember us. We love each other. Can one stupid stunt by a kid really erase everything we had?”
He spoke softly, coaxingly, using her name in a pet form he hadn’t used in months. It was his old, proven trick—appeal to the past, to the days when she looked at him with admiration and would forgive anything for a smile. He was trying to wake that woman up.
But she was dead.
Her ashes lay on the living-room floor alongside the remains of her project.
“There is no past, Oleg. It was destroyed half an hour ago. There’s only the present—where you defend the person who ruined my work and try to make me the guilty one.”
“I’m not trying to! I just want you to understand! She’s part of me! If you love me, you should have accepted her too!”
Marina gave a bitter half-smile. Without another word she walked past him into the entryway. Oleg followed, a flicker of hope in his eyes. Maybe she’d changed her mind? Maybe she was just getting water, calming down, and this nightmare would end?
But she went to the key hook by the front door. On a separate hook hung the keys with the fob for her car. He’d been using it for two years; he’d sold his own long ago, promising his new project was about to “take off.”
She took the keys. The metal clinked coldly in the silence. She didn’t hand them to him—she slid them into the pocket of her jeans.
“What are you doing?” he asked, stunned.
“Taking what’s mine. You didn’t think you’d drive off in my car, did you? You have thirty minutes to call a taxi.”
His face fell. A blow below the belt. One thing to throw him out—another to strip him of the comforts he took for granted, the symbol of his status.
“But… how am I—”
“Your problems,” she cut him off. And as if remembering something, she added, “Oh—and I just canceled our vacation. The money will go back onto my card within a week. So don’t bother thinking about the sea. You’ll have more time to think about how to raise your daughter.”
This wasn’t just eviction anymore. It was a methodical, merciless severing of him from everything that made his life comfortable: home, transportation, the future. Oleg stared at her, and in his eyes there was not only despair, but an animal fear. He understood she wasn’t bluffing. She was burning bridges—calmly, with an icy steadiness that was terrifying.
While they stood in the entryway, Liza—realizing the adults’ attention was elsewhere—played her final note. She slipped out of her room holding Marina’s bright red lipstick, stolen from the vanity. She walked up to the large light wall in the living room—the same wall they had painted together a year ago—and in broad, ugly letters wrote one word:
“BITCH.”
When she finished, she snapped the cap shut, tossed the lipstick on the floor, and sauntered back into her room.
When Marina and Oleg returned to the living room, they both stopped dead. The thick crimson word burned on the wall like an open wound. It was so childish, so primitive, and so monstrous in its bluntness—an outright declaration of war.
Oleg turned to Marina. He wanted to say something, to shout, to justify himself, but the words stuck in his throat. He looked at the writing, then at the broken laptop, and realized he had lost—completely, irreversibly.
Marina stared at the wall without expression. That final insult couldn’t hurt her anymore. It only confirmed she was right. She slowly turned her head toward Oleg.
“Twenty minutes.”
The remaining twenty minutes dragged on in thick, sticky silence. Oleg no longer tried to plead or threaten. He moved back and forth from bedroom to hallway, carrying out his things in silence: an old gym duffel Marina had always hated, a couple bags of shoes. Liza, by contrast, acted with loud, showy energy. She kept coming out of her room to toss something onto the growing pile by the door: a skateboard, a speaker, a stack of comics. Each appearance came with a contemptuous glance at Marina, who remained standing in the center of the living room like a statue.
Finally, it was done. An ugly heap of their belongings rose by the front door. Oleg put on his jacket, tugging nervously at the zipper. Time was up. He glanced at the red letters on the wall, then at Marina. His face—so recently confused and pleading—hardened. His weakness, his childishness evaporated, replaced by pure, concentrated malice—the rage of a humiliated man.
“Happy now?” he hissed. “Got what you wanted? Destroyed everything. I hope you’ll be happy here alone, in your sterile apartment, with your charts and plans.”
Marina said nothing. She simply looked at him—and that empty, calm gaze drove him crazier than any scream.
“You never loved anyone except your job. You’re not a woman—you’re a robot, a machine built to reach goals. I thought I could warm you up, make you human. What an idiot I was! You don’t need a husband—you need another gadget. Well, congratulations: you just upgraded the system by getting rid of unnecessary users.”
He spat the words like poison, trying to hook something tender, strike where it hurt most. Liza, standing beside him, sensed the mood and jumped in immediately.
“I’m glad we’re leaving! I hate you and your stupid house! I broke your computer on purpose! And I’ll break it again if I see you! My mom was a hundred times better than you!” she shrieked with a childish—but no less vile—cruelty.
Oleg put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. It wasn’t comfort. It was approval. They stood together—one front of resentment and hate aimed at her alone.
“You’ll regret this, Marina,” Oleg said more calmly now, anticipation in his voice. “When you’re sitting here alone in the silence, you’ll realize what you lost. But it’ll be too late. Nobody needs a cold, soulless woman like you.”
He paused, waiting for her reaction—tears, screams, anything. But she kept silent. So he made one last jab.
“Come on, Liza. There’s nothing left to look at here.”
They turned toward the door. And only then did Marina speak. Her voice was just as even and cold as it had been at the beginning.
“You know, Oleg—I’m even grateful to her.”
Both of them froze and slowly turned back. Confusion flickered across Oleg’s face.
“She only broke a laptop. It’s metal—information you can recover. But in all these years, you never managed to break her selfishness and spoiled entitlement, to put a human being together out of her.”
She shifted her gaze from father to daughter. In her eyes there was no hatred, no pity—only the statement of a fact.
“So take your most failed project with you. And never bring it into my home again.”
She watched Oleg’s face warp as he opened his mouth to answer and couldn’t find the words. That final sentence landed perfectly—disarming him, finishing him.
Without waiting for a reply, Marina stepped to the door, opened it, and moved aside to let them pass. They walked out, dragging their bags behind them. She didn’t look after them. She simply closed the door—and in the silence of the apartment, the lock clicked clearly as she turned it with a firm hand that didn’t tremble
