My husband’s mistress decided it was time to fire me from my own life. And judging by her dazzling business instincts, she planned to do it without severance pay and with a strict two-week notice period.
Her name was Alina, a curly little force of nature who officially worked as my husband’s personal secretary. Though in her own mind, she was far more than that — the muse, the loyal partner, the woman standing beside a titan of industry.
Never mind that my Sergey understood “big business” with roughly the same grace a guinea pig would bring to advanced mathematics.
Alina belonged to that dangerous breed of overly energetic people whose enthusiasm always outruns their common sense on very short, very muscular legs. The first signs of the coming disaster had appeared about six months earlier.
At first, it was the evening phone calls — always full of urgent concern, always about “important contracts,” of course.
Then came the courier-style visits to our apartment.
And before long, she had moved into the next stage: slow, steady colonization of my personal territory.
It started innocently enough. She began bringing Sergey plastic containers packed with carefully prepared diet cutlets. One day she even showed up with a whole thermos of homemade borscht.
“Sergey Sergeyevich is completely worn out by stress,” she told me in my own hallway, with a patronizing little smile. “He needs proper home-cooked food.”
Then she added, all sweetness and fake humility:
“You’ll have to forgive me, Vera, for taking on this small act of care. With your work schedule, you probably have no time for cooking.”
I had only smiled.
My husband, for the record, had chronic gastritis. After one bowl of that rich homemade borscht, he spent the next two days swallowing pills.
Still, he bravely kept eating that culinary disaster, all for the sake of maintaining his image as a rugged provider in front of his young admirer.
I did not dump the soup over her head.
I had something much more entertaining in mind.
I watched the whole performance with the cold composure of a scientist observing some absurd species in the wild. Whenever Alina was around, Sergey puffed himself up so much he practically shed imaginary feathers across the room.
He told her lavish fairy tales about how ruthlessly he ran the company.
How exhausted he was from carrying our luxurious four-room apartment in the city center all by himself.
How the vast country estate desperately needed expensive renovations — even though it was, in reality, my mother’s perfectly ordinary dacha.
“Verochka, you simply don’t understand the realities of corporate life,” my dear husband would declare, sprawled across the leather sofa that had been purchased entirely with my annual bonus.
“Alina is deeply devoted to the company. She lives for this work.”
“Oh, I can see very clearly what she lives for, Sergey,” I would reply without even looking up from my book.
“If you keep encouraging this level of professional enthusiasm, she’s going to build herself a nest in our hallway out of your invoices and start laying eggs.”
But by then Alina was unstoppable. Having fully convinced herself that she was practically the lawful wife of some wealthy magnate, she began behaving in my home like a spoiled junior wife in a harem.
One evening she volunteered to help Sergey sort reports at our kitchen table. She scattered her bright sticky notes all over my oak countertop, then gave the large window a thoughtful, critical glance and announced:
“Vera, don’t you think these heavy curtains swallow all the light? Sheer tulle would be perfect here.”
Then, after a pause:
“And the sofa should really be moved over to that wall. It would be much more comfortable for Sergey to watch television there after stressful negotiations.”
“Alina,” I replied very gently, “these curtains do a wonderful job of shielding the neighbors from the sight of guests who overstay their welcome. And the sofa is exactly where it belongs — where it doesn’t interfere with my ability to move freely around my own home.”
She only gave a superior little laugh and adjusted her hair.
The girl honestly believed her glittering future had already parked outside my building and was in the process of taking off its shoes.
She had no idea that her personal Titanic was already speeding straight toward an iceberg.
The whole farce reached its grand finale on a dreary Thursday in November.
Alina arrived at my home uninvited. My husband was away in a neighboring city. She walked into my kitchen as if she owned it, sat down at my table, folded her hands, and looked at me with the mournful expression of someone preparing to deliver tragic news.
“Vera, let’s be reasonable,” she began in the velvet tone of a negotiator.
“You’re an intelligent woman. You can see your marriage has run its course. Sergey is too decent to say it to your face, but he promised me he would make everything official in the next few days.”
I stayed silent.
That only encouraged her.
“It would be better for you to leave quietly,” she continued. “No drama. No scenes. He’s willing to leave you some portion of the apartment’s value… out of respect for the years you had together.”
Then she drove in the next nail:
“We’ve already discussed how we’re going to redesign the place in a more modern style.”
Outwardly, I remained calm.
Inside, I was boiling.
The sheer audacity of it was almost impressive.
I felt no heartbreak. No grief. No wounded tears.
When someone is this shameless, all it awakens in me is the desire to arrange the most magnificent send-off possible.
“You know, Alina,” I said with a warm smile, “it’s best not to divide the skin of an unshot bear before the bear himself is present. And ideally, you invite a forest ranger too, just for the official record.”
“Come to the office tomorrow at two. We’ll make it formal. We can sign the transfer papers and hand my husband over into your loving care.”
She nodded eagerly, utterly convinced that she had already won.
The next day, a very interesting group gathered in the main conference room. Sergey, who had been urgently summoned back from his “site visit,” sat pale and twitchy, nervously tugging at his cuffs. Alina was glowing. I sat across from them.
And at the head of the table sat Boris Ilyich — the real, actual, one-hundred-percent owner of the company. A hard man, seasoned by life, with eyes like X-rays. He had kept my husband in the role of deputy director only out of loyalty to Sergey’s late father, an old army friend of his.
“Well then, Vera Nikolaevna,” Boris Ilyich rumbled, stroking his chin, “what exactly was so important that you dragged this little macramé club together in the middle of the workday?”
Unable to contain herself, Alina launched into the speech she had clearly rehearsed.
“Boris Ilyich! Sergey and I have decided to legalize our relationship! And since Sergey is your equal partner and co-founder, we felt you should hear it from us first.”
She drew a breath and went on triumphantly:
“And Vera and I are about to settle the property matters — the apartment in Moscow and the country house.”
Boris Ilyich froze.
Slowly, he turned his gaze from Alina to Sergey.
My still-current husband had by then turned the color of cheap chalk.
“Partner? Co-founder?” Boris Ilyich suddenly barked out a laugh — a harsh, gravelly sound, like stones being dumped into an empty metal bucket.
“Sergey, are you feeding fairy tales to girls again? The only asset you have in this company is the old stapler on your desk and a SIM card with a one-thousand-ruble limit. And I’m blocking that tonight.”
Alina blinked.
The invincible confidence drained from her face at terrifying speed, replaced by something much more primitive: panic.
“But… how can that be?” she stammered. “What about the huge apartment? The country house?”
I calmly slid a fresh property registry extract across the polished table with two fingers.
“The luxurious city apartment, Alina, was purchased by me personally five years before I ever met this great schemer. And the country residence belongs to my retired mother.”
“The only property Sergey is in a position to offer you is a car on loan and a set of limitless ambitions. You’re welcome to both. I’ll even tie a bow on the hood.”
Sergey tried to salvage the shredded remains of his dignity, but all that came out of his dry throat was a pathetic little wheeze.
“Verochka, you misunderstood… this is all some terrible mistake…”
“A mistake, Sergey,” I said, crisp and clear, “is when one sock disappears in the washing machine. But when you spend a year pretending to be a financial king in front of your secretary while planning a redesign of my living room with her — that’s not a mistake. That’s a diagnosis.”
Boris Ilyich leaned back in his chair with visible pleasure and delivered the final blow.
“You should study, Alina. Learn to read documents instead of staring at married men as if they’re prophets. You polished someone else’s lies with such devotion that you wore your own brain down to dust.”
Then he looked at both of them.
“You’re both fired. I expect two resignation letters on my desk by nine tomorrow morning.”
Alina shrank into her chair.
Every trace of swagger vanished. In her eyes was the bitter realization that she had invested her youth, her ambition, and her diet cutlets into a completely worthless project.
I rose slowly, smoothed the lapels of my blazer, and looked at the two of them with deep, exquisite satisfaction.
Then I turned and walked out of the office, my heels clicking sharply across the marble floor.
That is the strange thing about betrayal: more often than not, it does not destroy us. It simply clears our lives of trash and makes room for something better.
