When Natalya came home, she found her husband Nikita in a very worried state. He was nervously pacing from corner to corner, constantly dialing a number on his phone.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Natalya said lightly, pretending not to notice how wound up he was. “What’s for dinner?”
Nikita seemed not to hear her and kept calling someone. Natalya shrugged and went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and examined what was inside. Nikita followed her in.
“Nata, I can’t get through to my parents…”
“You could’ve cooked something if you’d been home all day,” Natalya said irritably, ignoring what he’d just said.
“Are you even listening? My parents haven’t answered for over an hour,” Nikita said tensely.
“Well, things happen,” Natalya replied. “Mobile service doesn’t work well everywhere.”
“But they went to pick up their things from that apartment,” Nikita remarked darkly. “Is there, what, a complete signal vacuum there?”
“How would I know, dear?” Natalya said just as calmly. “I haven’t lived there a single day. I only bought it recently, so I have no idea what the situation is.”
As she spoke, she kept sorting through the food in the fridge, figuring out what she could throw together quickly for dinner. Finally, she chose eggs, cheese, tomatoes, onion, and milk and started making a cheese omelet. While the main dish was frying in the pan, she quickly chopped a salad. Nikita’s nervousness didn’t bother her at all. Meanwhile, he opened an online map.
“Tell me the address of that apartment again,” he asked.
Natalya said it out loud without stopping her cooking. Nikita sat down at the table, completely absorbed in searching the location. Natalya calmly plated herself an omelet, set a dish of salad beside it, and began eating with appetite, watching funny videos on her phone.
“I don’t get it,” Nikita said in surprise. “It looks like a well-developed neighborhood. I need to look more closely.”
At last he glanced at his wife, who was still eating alone.
“Listen, you’ve been there at least once,” he said. “What’s it like in that apartment? What’s the area like—shops, transport, how far is the метро, all of it…”
“Wow, what perfect timing for these questions,” Natalya smirked. “I’m sure your parents will tell you everything themselves.”
She finished her dinner without leaving her husband any of what she’d cooked, got up from the table, and headed out of the kitchen.
“Wash the dishes, dear,” she ordered and left.
From the other room she heard Nikita’s phone start ringing, and then his loud exclamation:
“Mom—finally! Thank God! So, what’s going on there?”
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Natalya settled onto the couch and switched on the TV with the remote, anticipating an entertaining reality-show performance. She wasn’t really interested in what was on the screen. She was pure expectation. Any second now… just a little more… and—
“Whaaaat?!” came from the kitchen.
A second later Nikita practically burst into the room.
“Natalya, you—”
But his words drowned in his wife’s loud, uncontrollable laughter.
“Husband works, wife is pretty” is a fairly popular family-life setup that almost everyone knows. Why not, if it suits both spouses? The husband takes on the classic breadwinner role, and the wife decorates his life.
In Natalya and Nikita’s family, everything was the other way around.
Natalya had been born downright unattractive, and from infancy she’d gotten used to the fact that instead of cooing admiration she provoked, to put it mildly, surprise. Her mother, Olga Georgievna, wasn’t exactly a supermodel either. Once upon a time she’d fallen for the courtship of a huge good-natured man—generous, strong… though outwardly he looked like the now-famous character named Shrek.
Wrapped in care and hyper-protection, Olga Georgievna at first didn’t even notice how plain her husband was. For men, that was forgivable. Besides, life felt very cozy under his powerful wing.
But then a daughter was born… One look at the baby was enough to understand: the girl had fully inherited her father’s rough-hewn face. Instead of the joy of new life, Olga Georgievna wept bitter tears, already imagining how much mocking and cruelty awaited her daughter in the future.
“Oh, come on, she’ll grow into it,” a nurse tried to reassure her.
But the years passed, Natalya grew, and things only got worse.
Still, the girl eventually learned to accept her looks philosophically. She was smart, bold, brave, and reliable. And for that reason she felt perfectly at ease among boys—because she was friends only with them.
The boys saw her as “one of the guys.” Natalya tried to purge romantic fantasies from her brain back in her teens. But Olga Georgievna understood that sooner or later nature might take its course.
“Natushenka, no matter what, try to have a child by a handsome man,” her mother begged.
“Mom, I’m not getting married at all,” Natalya snapped. “What would I even do there? I’ve got other interests.”
She poured all her energy into education and career. She said she dreamed of saving a pile of money for old age, so that right after retirement she could set off on a round-the-world trip.
But Natalya was being sly. Deep down, she dreamed of plastic surgery. That obsessive idea appeared after the total collapse of her first love, which happened when she was sixteen. The object was Kostya, a guy from her friend group. At some point she realized she got terribly nervous whenever he showed up. She stopped eating and couldn’t sleep at night, constantly floating in daydreams.
That was when Natalya began staring at herself in the mirror for long stretches, searching for at least one hook in her appearance that a boy might bite on. But she found nothing. Still, she decided to confess her feelings to Kostya—and he laughed in response.
“Natalya, are you out of your mind or what?” he said, surprised. “I never thought you’d suffer from this kind of nonsense. You’re ours.”
She hurriedly turned it into a joke, though her heart was ready to jump out of her chest. She never returned to that conversation, but soon she had to end her friendship with Kostya altogether. Seeing him with the local beauty Marina was unbearable.
Natalya graduated with honors, earning a degree as an “Engineer in the oil-and-gas sector.” The profession was rare, valuable, and hugely in demand. She easily got a job at a large company and became one of the highest-paid young specialists.
At first her work involved constant business trips, but that didn’t bother her—if anything, it appealed to her. It was more interesting that way. Soon she bought herself a two-room apartment—not with a mortgage, but with real money. And she could afford plenty more, unlike her peers.
Her parents were genuinely proud of their daughter and supported her in everything. Still, her mother never stopped lamenting her failed personal life.
By then Natalya had already managed to save up the necessary amount for plastic surgery—correction of her nose, jawline, and brow ridges. But she changed her mind.
Natalya’s parents lived in a one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city. Then the girl happened to see an ad for a new modern residential complex. The deal was very good, and she decided to give her parents a gift…
Barely had the purchase been finalized when Natalya met Nikita. They were the same age—both were twenty-seven then. Nikita was handsome… objectively. And Natalya found it very strange that a guy like that paid attention to her.
She fell in love, and she no longer cared what motives drove him. In her memory, her mother’s words hammered insistently: “Have a child by a handsome man!” Natalya understood perfectly well that the results of plastic surgery aren’t inherited.
The young couple moved into her apartment.
Nikita quickly got oriented in his chosen one’s financial situation. And almost a week after the wedding, “urgent needs” began appearing for Nikita’s parents, who lived in a village—needs that Natalya paid for.
“Sweetheart, you understand I have a serious situation at work,” Nikita told her. “As soon as I sort it out, I’ll take this burden on myself.”
But Nikita’s problems at work never ended. And Natalya understood she was being led by the nose…
“It’s not hard to deceive me; I’m glad to deceive myself,” a classic wrote. Natalya’s situation was exactly like that. She was ready to pay, just so she wouldn’t lose this long-awaited pleasure of a man’s closeness—handsome and beloved…
Her in-laws’ appetites grew… and one day Nikita stunned his wife outright.
“My parents sold their house in the village and decided to move to the city,” he announced.
“So they decided to live with us?” Natalya asked, surprised. “But it’s too cramped here for four people.”
“I have a better idea,” her husband declared. “I’ll settle my parents in your second apartment. They’ll rent out one room, so they won’t keep pulling money from us.”
“Rent out a room?” Natalya didn’t understand. “They want to live with tenants?”
“Why not?” Nikita replied breezily. “There are three rooms there, if I’m not mistaken. They’ll live in two and rent out one. Housing plus extra income—awesome!”
“Wait, I bought it for my parents,” Natalya objected. “I worked toward that for a long time…”
“Stop right there!” Nikita’s tone turned sharper. “Your folks have an apartment, and mine are homeless now.”
“But they sold their house, so they have money. Why don’t they buy—”
“That money is their rainy-day fund. You don’t want them to be left with absolutely nothing in their pockets, do you? Natalya, come on—no arguing!” Nikita concluded harshly. “My parents will live in your second apartment, and you’ll transfer it into their name. Don’t forget—we’re a family! Or do you want to change that?”
Natalya thought for a second. Nikita didn’t notice the nasty sparks that flashed in her eyes.
“Fine, dear. Whatever you say,” she smiled.
“That’s my good girl,” Nikita abruptly softened. “They’ll be here tomorrow.”
Nikita didn’t know that the day before, Natalya had overheard his phone conversation with his mother…
On the day his parents arrived, Nikita was urgently called to work, so he had no choice but to send them the address of the new apartment and have the keys delivered by courier straight to the train station.
“Yeah, that ugly freak will do anything with one snap of my fingers! Let her pay in full for the time I was forced to climb into bed with her and imagine other women just so I wouldn’t have to look at her mug,”—that was the very conversation Natalya recalled as she sat on the couch, waiting for the explosion from the man who’d once been her beloved husband.
Seeing his wife laughing, Nikita snapped and rushed to the address himself to find out what was going on. The thing was, the apartment intended for his parents was in shell condition, with not even basic utilities installed, so it was impossible to live there. Natalya was only saving up money to take it on seriously.
When the furious family came back, they found Nikita’s suitcases waiting for them on the stairwell, and new locks on the door. Neither begging nor persuasion had any effect on Natalya. And she didn’t care where the scheming family would go now.
Natalya firmly decided that as soon as she finished everything with the apartment for her parents, she would start saving again for her round-the-world trip in old age. Because by the time she retired, her child would already be of age.
Yes—Natalya’s marriage to Nikita turned out to be profitable for her too. Far more profitable than for her handsome but greedy husband
