Just a little more,” Inga whispered—whether to herself or to the old shoebox from her winter boots that she was reverently pulling down from the top shelf.
Her lips stretched into a smile all on their own. It was her monthly ritual, her small sacred ceremony. Counting the money calmed her better than any meditation. She didn’t see mere banknotes—she saw the outline of her dream: a silver city crossover, the smell of a brand-new interior, the feel of a smooth steering wheel under her fingers, and the freedom it promised. She set the box on the bed and, savoring the moment, ran her palm over the dusty lid.
Usually the box had a satisfying weight to it, but today… her hand slid too easily.
Her heart gave one extra, anxious thud—and then seemed to stop. Nonsense. She’d imagined it. She yanked off the lid.
Empty.
The bottom of the box—polished glossy by stacks of bills—stared back at her with its cardboard, indifferent yellow. Inga blinked. Once. Twice. The world didn’t darken, her head didn’t spin. On the contrary, everything around her became unbearably sharp and clear: the pattern on the wallpaper, a speck of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight, the ticking of the clock on the wall. The engine inside her—the one that had been humming with eager anticipation a second ago—simply stalled.
Slowly, she lowered her hand into the box and ran her fingers along the bottom. Nothing. Only cold, smooth cardboard. Four hundred thousand. Almost four hundred thousand she’d been saving for a year and a half—denying herself new clothes, café outings, vacations. They had simply evaporated.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t run around the apartment searching. There was no room for panic inside her; instead, an icy, crystalline fury rose up instantly and froze in place. She picked up the empty box, carried it to the kitchen, and set it precisely in the center of the table.
Like evidence. Like a gravestone.
Then she poured herself a glass of water, sat down in the chair opposite, and waited. She didn’t look at the clock or check her phone. She just sat there, straight as a wire, staring at the empty box while dusk thickened outside the window.
Roman came home around eight, whistling some simple tune. He kicked off his shoes, tossed his keys on the little table, and headed for the kitchen, already talking as he walked.
“Whew, what a day. I’m hungry as a wolf—what’ve we got for—”
He stopped mid-sentence when he saw her. Inga sat motionless, and her posture, her gaze, the empty box on the table—everything about it looked like a scene from a gangster movie where someone was about to answer for their choices.
“Did something happen?” His voice turned cautious.
She slowly raised her eyes to him.
“Where’s the money, Roma?”
For a moment his face went blank with confusion, then he tried to look offended.
“What money? What are you talking about? Looking for your little stash? But you said yourself that—”
“The money. From the box. Four hundred thousand,” she said crisply, without raising her voice. Each word was like the tap of a tiny ice hammer.
He fell silent. His eyes darted around the kitchen, avoiding hers. He opened the fridge, closed it. Rubbed his neck. That fidgeting said more than any confession. She wasn’t angry—not outwardly. She studied him like an entomologist examining an unfamiliar insect, trying to understand its primitive reflexes. Finally, he couldn’t hold up under her drilling stare.
“I gave it to Denis…” he forced out, looking somewhere at the floor. “You see, he needed it more. Things with Lera were on the verge of falling apart—she wanted Thailand so badly… and he’s really broke right now. I just wanted to do the right thing, for the family…”
He kept talking—about brotherly duty, about how relationships mattered more than metal and machines, about how he’d pay it back someday. Inga didn’t listen. She stood up. Roman instinctively hunched his shoulders, expecting yelling, a slap, a full-blown scene.
Instead, she walked past him to the front door and flung it wide, letting in the cool air from the stairwell.
“You have exactly twenty-four hours to bring back every last ruble,” her voice was perfectly even, not a single tremor. “Go to your brother. Beg. Plead. Sell his kidney—I don’t care. That’s your problem. But if tomorrow at this same time that money isn’t in this box, you don’t come back here.”
Roman froze, staring at her with wide eyes. He finally understood this wasn’t a tantrum.
It was a verdict.
“Inga, what are you… You can’t be serious…”
She didn’t answer. She just held the door open and looked at him. He took a step, then another, and ended up out on the landing. A second later the door shut with a quiet, final click right in front of his nose. He heard the key turn twice from the other side.
In the ringing silence of the stairwell, that click sounded like a gunshot. Roman stood there for a few seconds, stupidly staring at the smooth surface of the door—there wasn’t even a peephole. He didn’t feel the cold cutting through his thin house T-shirt.
He felt resentment.
Hot, unfair, childlike resentment. Not remorse—no. His brain, in self-preservation mode, had already built a defensive wall: he wasn’t a thief, he was a savior. He had saved his brother’s relationship. He’d acted like a real man, the head of the clan, moving resources to where they were needed most. And Inga… she just didn’t get it. She was being petty.
He went down the stairs, and with every step his resentment hardened into righteous anger. How could she do that? Throw him—her husband—out like a naughty puppy? Over money! Pieces of paper she hid in a shoebox like some miserly old crone. His thoughts raced, but all of them came down to one thing: he was right, and she was wrong.
He got into his car. The cold leather seat brought him a little back to himself. Where to go? Twenty-four hours. She’d given him twenty-four hours. The thought didn’t cause panic—it made him smirk. Did she seriously think he’d go tear into his brother, who was probably already mentally lying on a beach in Thailand? Ridiculous.
Roman started the engine and drove to Denis’s place. Not for the money.
For understanding. For confirmation that he was right. He needed to hear from someone else that he was a hero, not a criminal.
Denis’s apartment greeted him with warm light and the scent of something new—perfume, maybe, or freshly unboxed things. Lera’s laughter and music drifted from the room. In the hallway, a half-open suitcase sat on the floor, a bright corner of a pareo sticking out.
Roman walked into the room. Denis and Lera were sitting on the floor, surrounded by a mountain of new shorts, tops, and swimsuits, snipping off tags. When Denis saw Roman, he grinned broadly.
“Oh, hey, brother! We’re putting together a wardrobe for paradise. Look what shades Lera scored!”
Lera waved her new sunglasses—fashionable frames—with a happy flourish. Their carefree ease, their happiness bought with his money—or rather, Inga’s money—didn’t spark a drop of envy or anger in Roman. On the contrary, he felt proud. There it was: the visible proof of his noble act.
“Inga knows,” Roman said quietly, and Denis’s smile slid off his face.
“What do you mean, ‘knows’?” he asked, setting the scissors down. Lera stopped laughing and looked at Roman with curious interest.
“I mean it. She found the empty box. Threw me out. Said I shouldn’t come back without the money. Gave me twenty-four hours.”
Denis whistled. He glanced at Lera, then back at Roman. There was no fear in his eyes, no guilt—only mild irritation, like a sudden rain threatening to ruin a picnic.
“Oh, come on, relax,” he clapped Roman on the shoulder. “Women. It’s always like this. She’ll freak out and then calm down. What is this, your first day married? She’ll yell, slam some dishes, and then she’ll come crawling back to make up.”
“She didn’t yell, Den,” Roman shook his head. “That’s the thing. She just… threw me out. Said to sell your kidney if I have to.”
Denis burst out laughing—loud and genuine.
“A kidney! That’s a good one. Listen, the main thing is don’t fall for that manipulation. Are you a man or what? You helped your brother—you saved a family. That’s a real act. And she’s whining about some scrap of metal. Can’t she just be happy for us?” He wrapped an arm around Lera, and she nodded right away.
“Of course, Rom,” she added timidly. “We’re so grateful. Inga’s just… tired, probably. She’ll cool off.”
Denis and Lera’s words were balm to Roman’s soul. He didn’t just get support—he got absolution. His act, in his mind, finally transformed from theft into heroism. And Inga, from a wronged wife into a selfish, hard-hearted shrew who couldn’t feel empathy.
“So what do I do?” he asked, already knowing he wasn’t going to do anything.
“Nothing!” Denis said confidently. “Crash here if you want. And tomorrow you go home like nothing happened. Talk to her man-to-man. Explain that there are things more important than money. Family, for example. She’ll get it. Where’s she gonna go?”
The twenty-four hours ran out.
Roman stood in front of his door, feeling like a stranger. The night on Denis’s couch and a whole day of his brother’s encouraging but hollow speeches had turned yesterday’s resentment into granite certainty. He wasn’t going to apologize. He was going home to restore justice and explain the basics of the universe to his misguided wife.
He put the key in the lock—surprisingly, it wasn’t locked from the inside. The door opened. He took it as a good sign. She’d cooled off. She was ready for constructive dialogue.
He stepped inside. Silence. The same silence as yesterday, but now it felt not ominous—waiting. Inga sat on the same chair in the kitchen. And in the same place, in the middle of the table, stood the empty shoebox. In a full day it hadn’t moved a millimeter. Inga didn’t look at him. She was reading a book, her face perfectly calm, as if he weren’t a husband returning after a blowup but just a piece of furniture that had suddenly decided to move.
He went into the kitchen and deliberately set a bag on the floor—spare clothes Denis had lent him. He waited for a reaction.
None came. She didn’t even turn the page. This game of ignoring him started to irritate him.
“I’m back,” he said, trying to make his voice sound firm and weighty.
She slowly lifted her eyes from the book, slipped a bookmark inside, and closed it.
“There’s no money,” she said. Not a question. A statement.
“There’s no money,” he confirmed, squaring his shoulders. “And I didn’t come to give it back. I came to talk to you about things more important. About family. About priorities.”
He expected her to explode, but Inga only tilted her head slightly, studying him with cold, detached curiosity. It threw him off, but he gathered himself, recalling all the points Denis had helped him assemble.
“Try to understand, Inga. There are things you can’t measure in money. My brother’s happiness—his relationship that was hanging by a thread—that matters. I helped him. Like a man. Like a brother. Family means you’re ready to give your last for someone close. And you… you put some car, a chunk of metal, above all that. All you care about is paper in a box.”
He spoke, and he liked how it sounded. It sounded right—grown-up. He wasn’t a thief; he was a guardian of family values. And she was petty, grounded, unable to see beyond her nose.
“You don’t get it,” he went on, working himself up. “That trip is their chance to fix everything! And you made it into a tragedy. Over a car we would’ve bought someday anyway!”
Inga was silent. She listened to the whole tirade without interrupting, without a change in her expression. When he finally stopped—waiting for remorse or at least understanding—she slowly stood up. She took the empty box from the table and held it out to him.
“Until you return every ruble you took from my savings and gave your brother, you don’t come home,” she said. “I didn’t save that money for him—I saved it to buy myself a car. So go to him and take it back however you can.”
Her voice wasn’t loud. It was quiet, steady—and a thousand times more frightening than any scream. There were no emotions in it.
There was steel.
The sentence he expected to hear in the middle of hysterics, delivered with such icy calm, completely shattered his defensive line.
“So you still don’t understand anything?” Despair broke through his voice. “I’m explaining to you—this isn’t about money!”
“It’s exactly about that,” she replied just as calmly. “About my money. About a year and a half of my life. About every small thing I denied myself. You didn’t ‘help your brother.’ You stole my dream to pay for his whim. You didn’t just take money, Roma. You took my time, my effort, my hope—and handed it to him. Because his ‘I want’ mattered more to you than my ‘everything.’”
She set the box back on the table. The cardboard clicking against wood sounded like a judge’s gavel. In that moment it began to sink in for Roman that the gap between them was much deeper than four hundred thousand rubles. It was a gulf in the way they saw the world. He looked at the wife he thought he knew and saw a complete stranger—cold, hard, impenetrable.
And that frightened him far more than the idea of sleeping on his brother’s couch again.
Roman came back an hour later. But not alone. Behind him—two pillars holding up his collapsed confidence—stood Denis and Lera. He didn’t dare walk in by himself; he needed backup, a living shield. Denis looked self-assured, even cocky, as if he’d come to put an uppity servant in her place. Lera, on the other hand, was tense. She awkwardly fidgeted with the strap of her new handbag and tried not to look deeper into the apartment, as though afraid her gaze might defile it.
Inga saw them in the doorway and said nothing. She simply stepped aside to let them into the kitchen. She knew this would happen. Weak people always need witnesses—to their weakness dressed up as strength. The three of them bunched up by the entrance, while she stood by the window, separated from them by space. The empty shoebox on the table drew their eyes like a crime scene.
Denis, of course, spoke first. He took on the role of arbiter and wise elder, even though he was younger.
“Inga, let’s stop this performance,” he began in a patronizing tone. “We’re family. Rom was trying for us—for me and Lera. He wanted the best. And you’re making this huge drama over some pieces of paper. Come on. We’re not strangers. We’ll rest, come back, and then somehow we’ll sort it out.”
Roman behind him nodded eagerly, grateful. See? Someone understands. Someone sees it the right way.
Inga slowly turned her head. But she didn’t look at Denis, and she didn’t look at Roman. Her calm, direct gaze pinned Lera instead. The girl flinched and instinctively took half a step back.
“Lera, do you like your trip to Thailand?” Inga asked softly, but so clearly that the ringing silence seemed to crack.
“I… well… yes,” Lera stammered, not understanding where this was going.
“That’s good,” Inga nodded. “You deserve it. I want you to know what it costs. Not in rubles—in something else. It costs one hundred and forty-six subway rides instead of taking a taxi late at night when I was dead on my feet. It costs eight months without new clothes, even though my old ones were completely worn out. It costs the decision not to buy good winter boots—so I spent all last winter in old ones with soles coming unglued, always afraid I’d soak my feet. It costs every lunch packed from home in a container while my coworkers went to cafés. All of that was in this box.”
She spoke evenly, without melodrama, simply listing facts. And each fact hit Lera like a slap. Her face went from embarrassed to pale, then blotched red with humiliation. She glanced from Inga to her fresh manicure, and her lips began to tremble.
“That trip costs my dream,” Inga continued, not taking her eyes off her. “I didn’t want a car to show off. I wanted to drive my aging mother out to the dacha instead of dragging her onto crowded trains. I wanted to feel free. And your boyfriend,” she nodded toward Denis, “decided his desire to entertain you mattered more. And my husband,” her gaze slid to Roman, “decided my dream was just a resource he could take without asking and hand over to someone else’s whims. So enjoy your vacation, Lera. You’ll be lying on a beach paid for with my wet feet and my empty stomach.”
That was it.
The bomb went off.
Lera looked at Denis in horror. There was no love or vacation excitement left in her eyes—only shame and disgust.
“You… you told me he borrowed it! That it was just help!” her voice cracked. “You didn’t say he stole it—from her!”
“Oh, stop listening to her!” Denis barked, losing his fake calm. “She’s manipulating you!”
“Manipulating?!” Lera screeched. “I’m not going to Thailand! Not on stolen money! I don’t want anything to do with you!”
She spun around and ran out of the apartment. The slam of the front door rang out like a final chord. Denis stared after her for a few seconds, then turned on Roman, his face twisted with rage.
“Happy now?! Idiot! Why’d you drag us here?! Couldn’t you handle your woman yourself?! You ruined everything! Everything!”
“Me?!” Roman blurted. “I did it for you! So you wouldn’t break up with her!”
“For me?!” Denis shouted, jabbing a finger at him. “You dragged me into this mess, made me look like crap in front of Lera, and now it’s my fault?! Screw you!” He stormed out of the kitchen, and a moment later a second door slammed.
Roman was left alone in the middle of the kitchen. Completely alone. Thrown out by his wife, humiliated by his brother, turned into the reason someone else’s relationship collapsed. He swept his eyes over the empty room, stopped on the empty shoebox, and then looked at Inga.
She stood at the window, staring into the dark courtyard, as distant and unreachable as another planet.
She had destroyed his world without breaking a single plate. She had simply told the truth.
And that truth was more terrifying than any scandal.
