“I can’t live with a pensioner anymore,” Igor announced as he buttoned his jacket in the hallway. His suitcase was already waiting by the door, packed in advance while I was at work. I was holding his mug—the one with the chipped rim that he had drunk tea from for thirty years. My hand didn’t tremble.
“We’re the same age, Igor. We’re both fifty-five.”
“Exactly.” He didn’t even turn around, as though he were speaking to the coat rack rather than to the woman he had shared his life with. “And I still want to live. I don’t want to spend every evening sitting in front of the television with a blanket over my knees.”
I placed the mug carefully back on the shelf so it wouldn’t make a sound.
“Since when did you start talking about me like that?” I asked. My voice came out calmer than I had expected.
“Since I realized we only get one life,” he replied, finally looking me in the eye. “Marina, try to understand. I’m not blaming you. It’s just that when I’m with you, I already feel retired. And I still want to live normally.”
The door closed behind him without drama. It was almost quiet, as if he had gone out to buy bread instead of walking away from a thirty-year marriage.
For the first few weeks, I arrived at my floral studio earlier than usual and left later. Work saved me. Flowers don’t ask who divorced whom. They only need water, care, and the right amount of light.
Four months later, Igor invited me to a café on neutral ground. He wanted to introduce Kristina to our daughter—and to me as well, since the divorce papers required my signature.
Kristina was twenty-nine.
She kept flipping through the menu without looking up, making short, nervous movements as if something vitally important might be hidden between the pages. Igor watched her as though he had discovered an oil field.
“Marina, you have to understand,” he said that day. “It isn’t about age. With you, I felt like I’d already retired. With her, I feel thirty again.”
I signed the papers.
Thirty years of marriage were reduced to four signatures at the bottom of three sheets of paper.
Then, a month before their wedding, Kristina called me herself.
“Marina Viktorovna, I’ve heard you have the best event-decorating studio in the city. The girls and I are looking for someone to decorate my wedding to Igor. Would you possibly be willing to help us… for old times’ sake?”
Her voice was polite and slightly ingratiating—the tone people use when they know they are asking for a favor.
I stood there holding the phone, looking across my studio. For fifteen years, I had built everything around me: the shelves, the collection of vases, the client base, the reputation. Piece by piece, without anyone carrying me.
Fifteen years was more than a line on a résumé. It meant thousands of orders, hundreds of sleepless nights before other people’s celebrations, and a record of never letting a client down.
A delivery truck passed outside. The windows vibrated slightly.
I almost ended the call.
“What’s your budget?” I asked evenly.
“Well… Igor said we’re not exactly strangers to you. Maybe forty thousand?”
The market price for what she wanted was ninety-five thousand. I knew that better than multiplication tables because I had spent years calculating those prices myself.
Forty thousand meant doing the wedding at a blatant loss. My studio would lose money just so Igor couldn’t go around telling mutual acquaintances that his ex-wife was petty and vindictive.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it for forty.”
Even now, I’m not sure why I agreed.
I could have simply refused without explanation.
Perhaps thirty years of being accommodating had become a habit. Or perhaps I wanted to see her up close—the woman for whom my husband had decided I was already an old pensioner.
Kristina turned out to be pleasant. A little shallow, perhaps, but pleasant. She asked about peonies, carefully chose the shade of the tablecloths, and thanked me three times during a single conversation.
There were only about thirty guests. I designed all the floral arrangements myself, and everyone praised the decorations without realizing that the woman responsible for them was the groom’s former wife.
I worked at their wedding from early morning.
I arranged flowers, adjusted ribbons, and made sure the ceremonial arch wouldn’t shift in the airflow from the air conditioner.
My hands moved automatically through familiar work, while my mind seemed to detach itself from everything happening around me.
Igor spent the entire day passing me with the satisfied expression of a man convinced that he had finally made all the right choices in life.
“Thank you, Marina,” he said at the end of the evening while carrying away the last box of leftover decorations. “You know how to keep your dignity. That was always one of your good qualities.”
I smiled and said nothing.
I wanted to answer, but the words lodged somewhere in my throat.
Inside me, something thin and tightly stretched—like a wire—twisted one turn tighter.
In the autumn, Igor called again. This time it had nothing to do with flowers.
It was Sunday, and I was arranging a bouquet for a client when my phone rang right in the middle of working with floral wire.
“Marin, listen, I feel awkward asking, but there’s nobody else I can turn to. Kristina and I are renting an apartment, but we want to make a down payment on our own place. We’re short three hundred and forty thousand. I’ll give it back in three months at most. I’m almost certain I’m getting a bonus at work.”
I put the scissors down.
Rain was falling outside, tapping against the windowsill with the steady rhythm of a metronome.
“Are you seriously asking me for money so you can buy an apartment with your new wife?” I asked.
My voice wavered slightly on the last word.
“Marin, who else am I supposed to ask? My parents don’t have the money, and my friends all have problems of their own. You’ve known me for thirty years. I always pay people back.”
Thirty years earlier, I wouldn’t even have thought twice.
And apparently, even now, habit was stronger than resentment.
That same evening I transferred the money to him using his phone number. No contract. No written agreement.
After all, he wasn’t a complete stranger. He was still the father of my daughter.
Kristina was beside him when he called. I could hear her voice in the background.
“Tell her thank you. Tell her we’ll pay it back quickly.”
Igor immediately repeated it into the phone.
“Kristina says thank you. We really will return it, I promise.”
Three months passed.
Then another two.
By November, I sent him a polite message. No accusations, no anger. Just a reminder.
He answered two days later.
“I remember. Things are difficult right now. A little later.”
I read the message three times, searching for some sort of date hidden between the words.
There wasn’t one.
Around that time, the studio became extremely busy. The holiday season had begun—garlands, wreaths, Christmas arrangements for offices.
I buried myself in work.
I only remembered the debt late in the evenings, when everything around me became quiet.
In December, my daughter Vika called from the city where she lived.
“Mom, Dad told me you helped him with the apartment. Good for you for not being greedy.”
“I helped him,” I replied. “He hasn’t paid anything back yet.”
“He will,” Vika said, though she didn’t sound entirely convinced.
Then she quickly changed the subject.
I didn’t call Igor.
I didn’t send another message.
I simply continued running my studio, accepting orders, counting flowers and money—only now, none of it was his.
The debt sat somewhere at the bottom of my memory like a heavy stone. I didn’t drag it out or wave it in anyone’s face.
I waited for the moment when Igor would remember it himself.
That moment came at the beginning of March.
Igor called on a Wednesday evening.
His voice sounded cheerful, almost festive, as though nothing significant had happened between us during the previous eleven months.
“Marin, I urgently need a favor. Kristina’s friend Nastya is getting married on Saturday, and her decorator cancelled at the last minute. Can you imagine? Could you save them? You’re the best in the city—I tell everyone that.”
I was standing in the kitchen with the phone pressed between my shoulder and ear. My hand automatically reached for the stove and turned it off, as though my body already knew this conversation was about to become more serious than dinner.
“Saturday?” I repeated. “Today is Wednesday.”
“Yes, I know. Only two days. Nastya is devastated. Her whole plan has fallen apart. But you saved us before. You know how to handle these things.”
Then I heard Kristina’s muffled but clearly understandable voice in the background.
“Tell her we’ll pay what we can. Just get her to agree already. We’re running out of time.”
I stood there surrounded by shelves of ribbon, floral wire, tools, and supplies, feeling a heavy pressure building at the back of my head.
Two days for a wedding of that scale meant calling suppliers late at night, assembling structures without sleep, and redirecting the entire studio toward an emergency job that hadn’t even existed the day before.
“Igor,” I said, “do you remember the money you owe me? Three hundred and forty thousand. Since last March.”
The silence on the phone lasted so long that I almost wondered whether he had forgotten I knew how to count.
“Marin, what does that have to do with this? Someone is in trouble. Her wedding is falling apart.”
“It has everything to do with this. You’re asking me to work for practically nothing for two days without sleep, while you still haven’t returned the money I lent you for your apartment eleven months ago.”
“Are you seriously keeping score now?” His voice sharpened. “Marina, I thought you were above that.”
My hands turned cold.
Something tightened painfully inside me.
In the background, I could hear Kristina repeating impatiently:
“Just solve it already. My friend is crying.”
“Give me until tomorrow to think,” I said.
Then I ended the call first.
My hands were still cold when I put the kettle on and forgot to switch it on.
I stood in the kitchen staring into the dark window, listening to a neighbor’s television through the wall.
I didn’t sleep that night.
I lay awake remembering the chipped mug in the hallway, Igor calling me a pensioner, the wedding I decorated for forty thousand, and the three hundred and forty thousand I had transferred without asking him to sign a single piece of paper.
Each number appeared separately in my mind, like entries in an account book—not one written with ink, but one recorded directly into my skin.
By morning, I had finally understood something very simple.
In the past, I agreed because I was afraid of appearing petty.
Now I no longer cared what Igor or his new wife thought of me.
I called him myself the next morning.
My voice was steady.
“Igor, I’m not decorating the wedding on Saturday.”
“Marin, are you serious? You’re letting us down. People are counting on you.”
“People were counting on you to repay your debt too,” I replied. “You promised three months. It’s been eleven. I decorated your wedding for forty thousand when the real price was ninety-five because you asked me to do it as a favor. Now you expect me to take an emergency job with two days’ notice and practically work for free. Enough.”
“So now everything is about money for you?” he shouted. “You weren’t like this before.”
“Before, you weren’t the husband who left his wife after thirty years because she made him feel retired, then came back asking that same woman for money,” I said.
My voice didn’t shake once.
“Find another decorator, Igor. There are plenty of them in the city.”
He fell silent.
Then, quietly, almost as though he were talking to himself, he said:
“I never expected this from you.”
“There are quite a few things I never expected either,” I replied.
And I ended the call.
The studio was completely quiet.
I could hear water dripping from a faucet in the back room.
I sat down on the chair by the window and felt my shoulders slowly relax, as though someone had finally removed an invisible weight from them.
My hands were no longer cold.
People walked past the studio carrying shopping bags.
It was an ordinary Wednesday outside, as if nothing important had just happened in my life.
I poured myself some tea into that same chipped mug—the one I had kept after the divorce because Igor hadn’t even remembered it existed.
That evening, Vika called.
“Mom, Dad is furious. He says you embarrassed him in front of Nastya.”
“I didn’t embarrass anyone,” I replied. “I simply stopped working for free.”
Vika was quiet for a moment before giving a small, surprised laugh.
“I don’t even know what to say. You’ve never been this tough before.”
We continued talking for a little while about nothing important—her job, the weather in her city.
But that conversation didn’t resolve the conflict. It merely pushed it aside for the evening.
One unresolved problem remained hanging in the air: Nastya’s wedding was already the next day, and she still had no decorator.
Three months passed.
Igor still hadn’t returned the debt.
Not a single ruble.
Not even a phone call about it.
In the end, Kristina’s friend decorated her own wedding with help from family and friends, rushing around at the last minute and buying balloons from the nearest supermarket. One of our mutual acquaintances told me about it later.
Apparently, Kristina now refers to me in company as “that ex-wife whose personality got worse with age.”
Igor doesn’t speak to me at all anymore. Occasionally he sends some message through our daughter.
And I sleep peacefully.
For the first time in thirty years, I go to bed without someone else’s requests circling around in my head.
Did I go too far by refusing to help just two days before someone else’s wedding?
Or did I have every right to say no after Igor failed to return the three hundred and forty thousand he owed me—and after I never received even a fraction of the same consideration and courtesy that everyone had always expected from me?
