The unfamiliar woman in the yellow apron blinked, glanced over her shoulder, and only then looked back at Elena.
“You must have the wrong floor,” she said with a cautious smile. “We live here.”
Elena said nothing. Her eyes moved to the apron. A small stain from cherry juice darkened the breast pocket. A friend had given Elena that apron for her last birthday. It had been hanging from a hook inside the kitchen cabinet when she left for vacation.
Now a stranger was wearing it.
The smell of fried onions drifted from the kitchen behind her. A television was playing somewhere deeper inside the apartment, and an irritated male voice called out:
“Lyuda, who is it now?”
The woman turned her head.
“Some neighbor, I think.”
Elena took out her phone and started recording.
“I’m not a neighbor. I own this apartment. Show me the documents that give you the right to be here.”
The smile vanished from the stranger’s face. She instinctively grabbed the door handle, preparing to close it, but Elena had already wedged the toe of her shoe between the door and the threshold.
“Don’t close the door,” Elena said. “And don’t touch me. This conversation is being recorded.”
A heavyset man in his fifties emerged from the living room wearing shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. He was holding a television remote. Elena immediately recognized both the remote and the shirt, which still had the faint mark of a greasy fingerprint on it.
She had never seen the man himself before.
He stopped in the middle of the hallway and looked first at Elena’s suitcase, then at her phone.
“What do you mean, you own the place?” he asked. “We rented this apartment.”
“From whom?”
“From the landlord.”
“Tell me his name.”
The man exchanged a glance with the woman.
“Ivan Petrovich,” she answered. “Uncle Vanya. He lives downstairs. He said the apartment belongs to his niece, that she had gone away for a long time, and that she had given him permission to rent it out.”
Elena nodded slowly.
Now everything made sense.
The downstairs neighbor, Ivan Petrovich Kudryavtsev, did indeed have a spare set of keys. Elena had given them to him herself two years earlier, when the pipes in the building were being replaced. She often stayed late at work and worried that, in the event of a leak, the maintenance workers would not be able to enter the apartment.
Ivan Petrovich had seemed trustworthy. He was a retired engineer, had lived in the building for more than thirty years, and knew every repairman, plumber, and member of the residents’ committee.
The keys were supposed to remain inside a sealed envelope and be used only in an emergency.
Elena had considered taking them back several times, but always postponed it. The neighbor watered her plants during short trips, accepted parcels on her behalf, and had once genuinely called a repairman when a pipe in the bathroom began leaking.
Until that day, she had never had a reason to distrust him.
“How long have you been living here?” Elena asked.
The man gave a short, disbelieving laugh, as though the question itself were ridiculous.
“We’re into our third week.”
“What date did you move in?”
“June fifth,” the woman replied. “Why?”
Elena had returned on June sixteenth. Her vacation in Sochi was supposed to last another nine days, but on the third day she discovered that the hotel had charged her bank card twice. The administrator promised to investigate and later asked her to wait until Monday.
Elena did not wait. She disputed the duplicate payments through her bank, changed her return ticket, and decided to spend the rest of her vacation at home.
She had told no one she was coming back early.
The morning train had arrived almost empty. Elena took a taxi home, bought a bottle of cold water on the way, and imagined taking a shower, unpacking her suitcase, and ignoring work messages until evening.
But her key would only slide halfway into the lock.
At first, Elena assumed the mechanism had jammed. She tried the second key, then carefully turned the first one in the opposite direction. From behind the door came laughter, the sound of running water, and the slam of a cabinet.
That was when she rang the bell.
Now she stood at the entrance to her own apartment, looking at two people who had lived there for nearly three weeks and apparently saw nothing unusual about it.
“Show me your rental agreement,” Elena said.
The man placed the remote on the entryway cabinet.
“You show us proof that this apartment belongs to you first.”
It was a reasonable request. Elena acknowledged that much. These were not random intruders who had climbed in through a balcony. They clearly believed they had paid for the apartment and had every right to be there.
She opened her handbag, took out her passport, and showed them a photograph on her phone of the ownership record from the Unified State Register of Real Estate. The original documents were stored in a bank safe-deposit box, but the information she had was sufficient to confirm both her identity and ownership.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said.
The woman went into the living room and returned with a transparent folder. While she searched for the correct page, Elena stepped into the hallway and placed her suitcase against the wall.
Neither stranger tried to stop her.
The apartment looked different.
The shoe rack was filled with men’s sandals, children’s sneakers, and several pairs of women’s shoes. An unfamiliar light jacket hung from one of the hooks. Beside the mirror lay a hairbrush, a package of wet wipes, and a set of keys with a red keychain.
“Does a child live here too?” Elena asked.
“Our granddaughter,” the woman answered. “She’s at summer camp right now. She’ll be back in a week.”
Elena studied her more closely.
“Tell me your name.”
“Lyudmila Borisovna. This is my husband, Sergei.”
“Your surnames?”
Sergei narrowed his eyes.
“This isn’t an interrogation.”
“Not yet.”
The man pressed his lips together but gave his surname. Lyudmila handed Elena the agreement.
The document was crude, but not entirely illiterate. It stated that Ivan Petrovich Kudryavtsev was renting the apartment to Sergei and Lyudmila Orlov for temporary residence for three months. The address was correct. The tenants’ passport details had been filled in by hand. At the bottom were both parties’ signatures and a note confirming receipt of payment.
But the agreement lacked the most important thing: proof that Ivan Petrovich had any legal right to control the apartment.
“Did you see the ownership certificate?” Elena asked.
“He showed us a copy,” Lyudmila replied.
“A copy of what exactly?”
“Some kind of document. It had the address and a surname.”
“Whose surname?”
Lyudmila looked at her husband.
“I think it was yours.”
“And it didn’t concern you that a completely different person was signing the rental agreement?”
Sergei irritably rubbed his chin.
“He said you were his niece and had given him power of attorney.”
“Did you see that power of attorney?”
“He promised to bring it.”
“And after three weeks, he still hadn’t?”
“We’re not lawyers,” Sergei snapped. “He seemed like a normal man. He lives downstairs. He had the keys. He showed us the whole apartment. We even agreed to pay the utilities separately. Why would we have suspected anything?”
Elena did not argue. Their carelessness was obvious, but blaming only the tenants would not help her. Ivan Petrovich remained the central figure. He was the one who had taken the money, handed over the keys, and invented the story about his niece.
“How much did you pay him?”
Lyudmila named the amount for three months in advance, along with a separate security deposit.
Elena calculated the total in her head. Ivan Petrovich had received enough money to assume that by the end of Elena’s vacation, the tenants would already feel settled. Then he could try to convince her that they had moved in, the money had been spent, and throwing them out would be cruel.
Perhaps he had expected to negotiate.
Perhaps he intended to pretend that it had all been a misunderstanding.
Or perhaps he assumed Elena would return on the expected date and spend the first day too shocked and confused to act decisively.
He did not know her well enough.
“I need to inspect the apartment and check my belongings,” she said. “You will not interfere. Until this situation is resolved, nothing leaves the apartment except your personal possessions.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Sergei declared. “We paid for this place.”
“You didn’t pay me.”
“That’s between you and Uncle Vanya.”
Elena looked at him without irritation.
“No. Your dispute is with the man who rented you an apartment that did not belong to him. My responsibility is to recover my home and protect my property.”
She walked into the living room. Sergei followed.
A folded blanket that Elena had never seen before lay across her armchair. The coffee table was cluttered with mugs, an open package of cookies, and an ashtray.
Elena never allowed anyone to smoke inside her apartment. A circular burn-like mark had appeared on the wooden surface beside the ashtray.
She recorded everything on video.
“Are you filming me?” Lyudmila demanded.
“I’m documenting the condition of my apartment.”
“It’s clean!”
“I’ll decide that after I inspect it.”
A framed photograph of the Orlov family stood on the shelf. Elena found her own photograph with her grandmother pushed behind several books, facing the wall.
In the bedroom, the strangers’ clothing occupied half the wardrobe. Elena’s dresses and suits had been shoved into one corner, and several items were wrinkled. Men’s underwear had replaced her towels in the bottom drawer.
Elena opened the dresser and stopped.
She kept her grandmother’s earrings, an old silver ring, and several sentimental pins inside a small wooden box. The box was still there, but the lid was slightly open.
“Who opened this drawer?” she asked.
Lyudmila stepped closer.
“I did, when I was putting away our things.”
“And the box?”
“I looked inside and closed it again. There wasn’t anything valuable there.”
Elena turned toward her.
“You decided that yourself?”
Lyudmila took half a step backward.
“I didn’t take anything.”
Elena opened the box. The earrings, ring, and pins were all present. She counted every item and recorded the contents.
The bathroom shelves were covered with unfamiliar cosmetics. Elena’s towels lay in the laundry basket after being used by the tenants. One of her bathrobes hung on the back of the door.
“I suppose you used the apron and bathrobe because they happened to be in the apartment?” Elena asked.
Lyudmila’s face reddened.
“Why are you making such a fuss about a few things? I’ll wash everything.”
“Don’t. Just stop touching my belongings.”
The kitchen was worse.
The refrigerator was filled with the Orlovs’ groceries. Elena opened the freezer and discovered that the containers of berries she had picked at a friend’s country house were gone. The empty shelves had been packed with meat and frozen convenience food.
“Where is my food?”
“What food?” Sergei asked.
“Four containers of berries, two bags of herbs, and some fish.”
Lyudmila shrugged.
“We threw some things away. Uncle Vanya said anything old could be cleared out.”
Elena took out her phone and called the neighbor.
It rang for a long time. Ivan Petrovich did not answer.
She called again.
Then a third time.
Silence.
“He’s probably at his country house,” Lyudmila said.
“A woman from the sixth floor heard his voice in the stairwell ten minutes ago,” Elena replied, making it up on the spot.
The effect was immediate.
Sergei looked at his wife. Lyudmila lowered her eyes.
So they knew Ivan Petrovich was home.
Elena walked to the front door, looked out onto the landing, and pressed the elevator button. She did not go downstairs herself. Leaving the apartment alone with two strangers inside would have been foolish.
Instead, she called the police and briefly explained the situation: she had returned home to find unknown people inside her apartment. They claimed they had rented it from a neighbor who had no authority to lease the property. There had been no threats or violence yet, but the occupants refused to leave.
Sergei waited until she ended the call.
“Why involve the police immediately?” he asked. “We can settle this like normal people.”
“You should have settled it before handing over your money.”
“We’re victims too.”
“Possibly. That still does not give you the right to remain inside my apartment.”
“We have nowhere to go tonight.”
“Book a hotel.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Elena opened a hotel booking app, found several nearby options, and turned the screen toward Sergei.
“There are available rooms within three kilometers. I can send you the links. I will not be paying for them.”
Lyudmila wiped her hands on the apron, noticed Elena watching, and quickly removed it.
“You’re throwing us out onto the street even though we paid?”
“I’m giving you the opportunity not to make the situation worse. Pack your personal belongings. When the police arrive, you can show them your agreement, receipts, and messages with Ivan Petrovich.”
“And what if we refuse to leave?” Sergei asked.
Elena sat down and placed her phone faceup on the table.
“Then you will waste more time and energy. Either way, you will not be staying here.”
She never raised her voice.
Sergei studied her face, apparently searching for some sign of weakness. When he found none, he turned away.
Lyudmila was the first to walk toward the bedroom.
“Sergei, let’s pack. We’ll deal with that old man afterward.”
“And where are we supposed to go?”
“I don’t know. But staying here is impossible now.”
Elena recognized the common sense in her words and decided not to interfere. While the couple packed their clothing, she walked through the apartment and created a list on her phone of missing food, damaged furniture, and other changes.
Then she called a friend who lived two buildings away.
“Oksana, please come over. Come alone. There are strangers living in my apartment, and the police are already on their way.”
“What strangers?”
“I’ll explain when you get here. Bring a phone charger if you have one.”
Oksana arrived seven minutes later. She stepped inside, saw the suitcases and unfamiliar people, and stopped asking questions with remarkable speed.
“How can I help?”
“Film the general condition of every room and make sure none of my things end up in their bags.”
Sergei frowned.
“You think we’re thieves now?”
“No,” Elena replied. “For the moment, I’m simply checking my property.”
“Very convenient for you,” he muttered.
“You’ve been living in someone else’s apartment for three weeks. I wouldn’t start a discussion about what is or isn’t normal.”
This time, Sergei remained silent.
The local district officer arrived with a patrol officer. Elena showed them her passport, proof of ownership, the video recording, and the Orlovs’ rental agreement.
The officers established everyone’s identities and listened to both sides.
“Where is Ivan Petrovich?” the district officer asked.
“One floor below,” Elena answered. “He isn’t answering his phone.”
One of the officers went downstairs. A few minutes later, he returned alone.
“He won’t open the door. The lights are on inside.”
Lyudmila took out her phone.
“I have our messages. Here, he sent us photographs of the apartment. Here, he told us when we could move in. And this is his son’s bank card number. That’s where we transferred the money.”
The officer carefully reviewed the correspondence.
“Save everything. Don’t delete a single message.”
“But where are we supposed to live?” Sergei asked.
“You need to discuss that with the person you paid,” the officer replied. “The owner is demanding that you leave. You have no valid documents giving you the right to remain here.”
“But we have an agreement!”
“It was signed by someone who is not the owner and has no authorization from the owner.”
Sergei continued arguing for several minutes, but soon understood that the argument changed nothing. He closed one suitcase and carried it out onto the landing.
Lyudmila packed more slowly. She checked the cupboards and returned to the kitchen several times.
Elena did not rush her. Oksana continued filming, while the officers remained in the hallway.
Before leaving, Lyudmila placed a set of keys with a red keychain on the cabinet.
“Uncle Vanya gave us two sets,” she said. “My husband has the other one.”
Sergei took the second set from his pocket and placed it beside the first.
Elena counted the keys, photographed them, and sealed them inside a bag.
“He told us you knew about everything,” Lyudmila added. “He said you didn’t want to deal with the rental yourself, so you had asked him to handle it.”
“He lied.”
“We understand that now.”
The confident, almost proprietorial tone had disappeared from the woman’s voice. Only exhaustion and embarrassment remained, and she tried to hide both by adjusting the strap of her bag.
“I left the apron in the kitchen,” she said. “The bathrobe is in the bathroom.”
“All right.”
Sergei picked up the last suitcase.
“If anything is missing, it wasn’t us.”
“The inspection will determine that.”
He seemed ready to snap back, but Lyudmila pulled him by the elbow. The Orlovs left.
The police officers asked several more questions, recorded everyone’s information, and explained what each party would need to do next regarding the neighbor’s actions. Elena signed the necessary papers without entering into a lengthy debate.
When the door finally closed, Oksana leaned against the cabinet and released a loud breath.
“I think I would have started screaming the moment I saw them.”
“And you would have lost half the evidence,” Elena said.
“Were you frightened at all?”
Elena looked at the wrinkled runner in the hallway.
“When the key wouldn’t turn. After that, I didn’t have time to be frightened.”
She did not sit down to discuss what had happened. First, she examined the front door.
Ivan Petrovich had not replaced the entire lock. He had only changed the cylinder and handed the new keys to the tenants. The original cylinder was lying inside a box on the top shelf of the storage closet. He had not even thrown it away, probably because he intended to reinstall it before Elena returned.
The plan was primitive, but it was not entirely foolish.
The Orlovs had moved in at the beginning of the month. Elena was expected back near the end. The day before her scheduled return, Ivan Petrovich could have taken back their keys, reinstalled the old lock cylinder, moved their belongings out through the rear courtyard entrance, and pretended that nothing had happened.
He would have collected nearly three weeks of rent with almost no risk.
Almost.
“Oksana, can you stay for another hour?”
“Of course.”
Elena drove to the nearest hardware store. She purchased a high-quality replacement cylinder of the correct size, a set of mounting screws, and an additional security plate.
The salesperson offered to arrange for a locksmith, but Elena refused. She had replaced a cylinder in that door before and knew the job would take no more than twenty minutes.
When she returned, she removed the existing cylinder, compared the measurements, and installed the new one. She tested the key several times from both sides.
The lock turned smoothly.
“That’s it?” Oksana asked in surprise.
“That’s it.”
“I thought the entire lock would have to come apart.”
“Ivan Petrovich probably assumed the same thing. He expected me to panic and not examine it properly.”
After replacing the lock, Elena began documenting the apartment.
Together, she and Oksana made a detailed inventory. Several food items were missing, along with two sets of bed linen and a small travel iron. A hot frying pan had left a mark on the table. A glass shelf in the bathroom was cracked. The armchair was stained, and one wardrobe door no longer closed correctly.
None of it was disastrous.
But Elena photographed every piece of damage in close detail.
That evening, Ivan Petrovich finally called her.
“Lenochka, are you back already?” he began cheerfully, as though nothing had happened. “I saw the police coming and going from your apartment. What’s going on?”
Elena activated the speakerphone and motioned for Oksana to remain quiet.
“You don’t know?”
“How would I know? I haven’t felt well all day. I’ve been lying down.”
“Then come upstairs. We’ll talk in front of a witness.”
The neighbor fell silent.
“I can’t right now. My blood pressure is high.”
“You were standing on your balcony five minutes ago.”
Another pause.
“Who were those people in your apartment?”
“The people you rented my apartment to.”
Ivan Petrovich sighed heavily.
“Lena, let’s not use dramatic language. They’re good people. They had nowhere else to stay temporarily. I thought the apartment was empty anyway.”
“You took money from them.”
“They offered to compensate me for expenses.”
“For three months in advance, plus a security deposit?”
This time, the silence lasted longer.
“They misunderstood everything.”
“I have their agreement, your messages, and proof of the bank transfer.”
Ivan Petrovich’s voice changed. The concerned neighbor disappeared instantly, replaced by an irritated man whose plan had been interrupted before he could finish it.
“Are you seriously going to create a scandal over this? I’ve helped you for years. I watered your flowers. I let repairmen inside. Just once, I decided to help some people.”
“Using my apartment.”
“What happened to it? It was sitting empty and would have continued sitting empty. They’re careful people.”
Elena looked at the circular mark on the table.
“Tomorrow at ten in the morning, you will return the Orlovs’ money. After that, you will give me every copy of my keys that may still exist. The conversation will take place in the presence of the district officer.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No. I’m explaining the only option that gives you a chance to partially repair what you’ve done.”
“I don’t have the money right now.”
“Then you can explain where it went.”
“You’re ungrateful,” Ivan Petrovich hissed. “I treated you like a neighbor, and you immediately called the police.”
“Neighbors don’t rent out other people’s apartments.”
He ended the call.
Oksana shook her head.
“Even now, he was hoping you’d feel sorry for him.”
“He wasn’t relying on sympathy. He was relying on embarrassment. He assumed I would be too ashamed to throw out people standing there with suitcases.”
“Weren’t you?”
“It was unpleasant. But discomfort is not a reason to surrender my apartment.”
The following morning, the Orlovs returned with the district officer.
Ivan Petrovich appeared in the courtyard half an hour after the agreed time. He looked disheveled, but not ill.
At first, he tried to describe the entire situation as a misunderstanding. Then he claimed that he had intended to give Elena the money when she came home.
But Lyudmila produced a message in which he had asked the Orlovs not to tell anyone about the rental and had warned them that the owner was “a nervous person.”
After that, Ivan Petrovich’s explanations became much shorter.
He could not repay the full amount immediately. He transferred part of the money to the Orlovs in front of everyone and wrote a signed acknowledgment of debt for the remainder, including a specific repayment date.
Elena did not interfere with their financial arrangement.
What mattered to her was that the neighbor officially admitted he had received the money and had never had permission to rent out the apartment.
“Are you satisfied now?” he asked after the Orlovs had left.
Elena held out her hand.
“All the keys.”
Ivan Petrovich took out one set.
“There aren’t any others.”
“I asked how many copies you made.”
The neighbor looked away.
“Three.”
“Where is the third set?”
“In my son’s car. I left it there just in case.”
“He will hand it over to the district officer today.”
“What does it matter now? They’re useless.”
“I need a complete and accurate record of what you did.”
He finally understood that he would not be able to persuade Elena to forget what had happened.
After that, the neighbor stopped greeting her. Whenever he encountered her near the elevator, he turned away or became intensely interested in the notices posted on the wall.
Within a few days, a new version of events began circulating through the building. According to the story, Elena had thrown a family with a child onto the street and accused Ivan Petrovich of something terrible for no reason.
Elena did not defend herself.
One evening, a woman from the third floor came to see her.
“Lena, I’m not trying to pry,” she began, already stepping over the threshold, “but Ivan is telling everyone that the tenants were friends of yours.”
“That isn’t true.”
“That’s what I thought. In the spring, he asked whether I wanted to rent out a room while I was living at my country house. He was far too interested in whether anyone else had my keys.”
Elena wrote the information down.
A week later, she learned that Ivan Petrovich had tried to arrange something similar with another apartment, but the owner had refused to give him a spare set of keys.
The neighbor was not a kind old man who had suddenly lost his judgment. He had been testing boundaries for a long time, selecting residents who often traveled and relying on the trust he had built over decades.
Elena did not understand that immediately.
And that realization angered her more than the damaged table or the missing food.
She had always considered herself careful. She checked contracts, never transferred money to strangers, and kept important documents in a secure place.
But the familiar image of a dependable neighbor had been convenient enough that she had left her keys with him for two years.
A month later, the apartment looked the way it had before her vacation. The armchair had been professionally cleaned, the glass shelf replaced, and a craftsman had restored the table.
Elena threw away the apron and bathrobe the strangers had used. It was not because she found them physically repulsive. She simply did not want to remember Lyudmila standing in the doorway every time she looked at them.
She did not give the new keys to anyone.
For emergencies, Elena installed water-leak sensors that automatically shut off the water supply. She also connected a security camera in the hallway and placed a spare key in her bank safe-deposit box.
The solution cost more than relying on a helpful neighbor, but it did not require faith in someone else’s honesty.
One evening, while returning from the store, Elena encountered Ivan Petrovich outside the building. He was carrying a bag containing a watermelon and hesitated for a long moment before walking past her.
“You could have handled it like a decent human being,” he finally said. “We’ve lived beside each other for so many years.”
Elena stopped.
“The decent thing would have been to call me and ask for permission.”
“You would have refused.”
“Which means you already knew my answer.”
The neighbor tightened his grip on the bag handles.
“The apartment was empty.”
“Yours is empty when you’re at your country house. I don’t hand out keys to it.”
“That’s completely different.”
“No. It’s exactly the same.”
Elena opened the entrance door and held it so Ivan Petrovich could walk inside. He passed her without thanking her.
The apartment was cool. The air conditioner was running at its lowest setting, and the sounds of the summer courtyard drifted through the open kitchen window.
Elena put away her groceries, checked the lock, and ran her fingers over the new security plate.
By coming home early that day, she had lost the comforting illusion that knowing someone for many years automatically made them trustworthy.
In exchange, she had gained something more useful: trust should never replace control when a home, keys, and money are involved.
She did not think of herself as a helpless victim deceived by a cunning neighbor. Ivan Petrovich had taken advantage of her carelessness, but Elena had stopped him herself—without hysterics, without pleading, and without sacrificing her rights to preserve a pleasant relationship at any cost.
She switched on the kettle, walked into the living room, and sat down in her own armchair. The evening sunlight reflected across the dark television screen.
The apartment belonged only to her again—not merely on paper or according to some neighborly understanding, but in every small detail, from the key in her pocket to the right to decide who was allowed to cross her threshold.
And she had no intention of ever entrusting that right to anyone again.
