“What do you think you’re doing? Are you out of your mind?” Igor’s voice was no louder than a whisper, but the steel grip of his fingers digging into Kristina’s forearm spoke louder than any shout. He nearly dragged her out of the brightly lit, noisy living room into a narrow, dim corridor, where the smell of dusty coats and old shoes mixed with the aromas of hot food.
She jerked her arm free in one sharp, angry motion. Four red marks instantly appeared on her delicate skin, exact imprints of his fingers. Kristina didn’t rub the sore spot. She straightened, lifted her chin, and her eyes, almost black in the half-light of the corridor, burned with a dry, furious flame. Her entire stance was an answer—icy and merciless.
“Me? What am I doing?” Her voice was low and tense, like a taut string. “You’re asking me, Igor? You sat there and watched while your precious mother, Tamara Borisovna, spent the whole evening methodically grinding my parents into the dirt. Not just hinting—she said it outright, savoring every word, every reaction at the table.”
He stepped back, pressing himself against the coat rack where his own coat hung. He looked cornered. His face was pale, sweat beading on his forehead. He wanted to quiet her, to force her back into the bounds of propriety, but he had hit a wall.
“She said my parents are paupers from some provincial backwater,” Kristina enunciated each word, and the deadly precision made Igor wince as if from a toothache. “She said they raised me with no sense of taste, since I chose such a ‘plain’ wedding dress. She speculated, loud enough for the whole table, how they even managed to get to Moscow—did they sell their last cow to do it? And you, Igor? What were you doing?”
She stepped closer, trapping him between herself and the wall.
“You sat there. You stared at your plate. You poured her another glass of her favorite sweet wine while she called my father a drunk and my mother a beaten-down peasant who can’t string two words together. You smiled when her friends nodded in approval. You were complicit, Igor. You didn’t just stay silent—you condoned it with your inaction. You’re a coward.”
The word coward struck him harder than a slap. He flinched, tried to protest, to find some words that could restore his control.
“Kristina, stop. She’s my mother… She just… she has a difficult character. You have to understand…”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she cut him off. “I endured it for two hours. Two hours I sat through the humiliation, watching your stone face. I waited for the man, the husband in you, to wake up and defend his wife’s family’s honor. But you never did. And then I realized I’d have to defend it myself. And I did.”
He remembered the moment that led to their flight into the corridor. Tamara Borisovna, flushed with wine and her own importance, was standing in the doorway, seeing off guests. She had tossed another barb over her shoulder about “dowerless brides.” At that instant, Kristina, passing by, had “accidentally” stumbled. Her shoulder slammed into her mother-in-law’s face. There was a short, dull, wet thud. Tamara gasped, clutched her nose, and thick dark blood immediately seeped between her pudgy fingers. It had not been an accident. It was a calculated, merciless blow.
“You… you hit her,” he whispered, staring at his wife with superstitious horror, as if seeing her for the first time.
“I restored justice,” she corrected him coldly. “And if you think that’s the end of it, you’re gravely mistaken.”
“You hit her,” he repeated, no longer a question but a statement, uttered with childlike bewilderment, as though he had just seen the laws of physics broken before his eyes. In his carefully constructed world, such things didn’t happen. Wives didn’t hit mothers-in-law. Conflicts were resolved with quiet sabotage, meaningful silence—but not physical violence.
Kristina gave a crooked smile. It was more terrifying than open rage. There was no remorse in it, only contempt for his naivety.
“And what would you have had me do? Stand there and listen longer? Wait until she suggested the guests wipe their feet on me? Or until she decided my parents belonged among the servants? Your mother is a predator, Igor. She only understands strength. All evening she was probing me, looking for weakness. And she found it—in you. She saw you wouldn’t protect me, and it gave her free rein.”
He opened his mouth, maybe to mumble something about respecting elders, about being smarter. But the words stuck in his throat. He looked at her face—hard, resolute, unfamiliar—and knew any argument would be smashed to pieces. She was right. He had been silent. He had let it happen. And now she was presenting him the bill.
“You have exactly one chance to fix this,” her voice dropped lower, gaining weight like a surgeon’s before a difficult operation. “You’ll go back in there, stand before your mother, and tell her to shut up. Forever. Then you’ll make her apologize. To me. Not in whispers, not under her breath, but so everyone left hears it.”
Igor froze. His brain refused to process it. Force his mother… to apologize? Tamara Borisovna, who had never apologized to anyone in her life, who considered apologies a sign of weakness? It wasn’t just impossible. It was unthinkable.
“You’re insane… She’ll never…”
“That’s your choice, Igor,” Kristina cut him off, eyes boring into his until he felt completely stripped bare. “Either you do it and we try to save what’s left of us—or in two minutes I’ll go in myself. And believe me, after that there’ll be nothing left to save. I’ll finish what I started. And I won’t care about the consequences.”
A chill ran through him. He glanced at the half-open living room door, where muted voices, clinking glasses, and fake laughter drifted out. There lay his familiar life, his mother, his world. But here, in this narrow, mothball-scented corridor, stood his wife, demanding he blow it all up. His will, trained for years to submit to his mother, faltered. He couldn’t. He physically couldn’t do what she asked.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he whispered one last desperate hope. “She’s… she’s my mother.”
Then Kristina erupted. Her calmness fell away like a mask, and the fury she had bottled up for two long hours crashed down on him.
“I don’t care that she’s your mother, Igor! She insulted my parents, and I’ll treat her the way she deserves! If I have to hit her again, I will! Got it?!”
“But…”
“Choose! Right now! Either you shut her up—or I will! And after that, we’re done! Right here!”
She stepped back, giving him space. A choice. Igor stood paralyzed. He looked at her furious face, at the door to the living room, and knew he had lost. He couldn’t choose his wife, because that meant war with his mother. And he couldn’t choose his mother, because he saw in Kristina’s eyes an absolute, icy resolve. This wasn’t a threat. It was a verdict. And he was the one meant to carry it out.
The two minutes she gave him stretched into eternity in the suffocating corridor. From the living room came snippets of conversation, a woman’s laugh, the clink of cutlery. Ordinary sounds of life going on. They were the loudest proof of his betrayal. Igor didn’t move. He stood pressed against the coat rack, his face a gray, empty mask. His eyes held no struggle. Only surrender—not to her, but to the force that had ruled him his whole life.
When the time expired, Kristina said nothing. She didn’t announce his failure. She simply turned away. Calmly, without theatrics, she went to the front door, picked up her purse and car keys. She didn’t look at him. Not even one last glance. For her, he had ceased to exist the moment his two minutes ran out.
She opened the door. A rush of cool, clean air swept in from the stairwell, washing away the sticky atmosphere of Tamara Borisovna’s apartment. Kristina stepped over the threshold and closed the heavy oak door softly behind her. The dull click of the expensive lock sounded like the final period at the end of their story. He remained there, in the corridor, with his mother, her broken nose, and his cowardice.
The car was cold. Kristina didn’t turn on the heat right away. She sat in silence, fingers clenched around the leather steering wheel, staring at the lit windows of the third-floor apartment. She felt no pain or hurt. Those emotions had burned away back in the corridor. Only cold, crystalline anger and absolute clarity remained. She started the engine, the hum breaking her solitude.
The road home was nearly empty. The city at night slid past in blurred lights of billboards, streetlamps, windows. She drove steadily, mechanically shifting gears, braking at red lights. Her thoughts worked the same way—mechanically building a plan. She wasn’t thinking about what she would say to Igor when he returned. She knew there would be nothing left to say. She thought about what to take. Passport. Car papers. Laptop. Clothes. Gifts from her parents. The jewelry box from her grandmother. Everything that was hers before him. Everything that would be hers after.
Their apartment greeted her in silence. It still smelled of her perfume, his cologne. A book he was reading lay on the coffee table. Two coffee cups stood in the sink from that morning’s breakfast. Just hours ago this had been their shared home, their fortress. Now it was just a space filled with objects—some of which she would take.
In the bedroom, she flicked on the light, opened the wardrobe. His clothes hung on the right, hers on the left. She didn’t touch his shirts. Methodically, without haste, she pulled her dresses, blouses, trousers, folding them neatly on the bed. She fetched a large suitcase and began packing in careful stacks. Jeans, sweaters, underwear. Nothing extra. No sentimental souvenirs, no joint photos. She dismantled their life piece by piece, taking only her share. Then she moved to the bathroom, gathering her creams, shampoos, toothbrush. His razor, his shaving foam—all stayed behind, untouched, as if belonging to another man she had nothing to do with.
She acted not like a panicked wife fleeing, but like a liquidator. Cold, efficient, unemotional. She was reclaiming what was hers, leaving him with the world he had fought so hard to protect. When the final lock on the suitcase snapped shut, she knew she was ready. Ready for the final act.
He heard her footsteps on the stairs as he hurried up, skipping steps. His heart pounded—in fear, in dawning realization of the catastrophe. He had calmed his mother, sat her down with a wet towel over her face, endured her curses at “that witch,” and finally realized Kristina hadn’t been bluffing. She hadn’t threatened. She had delivered the sentence.
The key scraped in the lock. Igor burst into the apartment like into a burning building—and froze. She was in the hallway, already in her coat, purse on her shoulder. Beside her, like two silent witnesses to his downfall, stood two suitcases. She wasn’t preparing to leave. She was already gone. All that remained was to walk out physically.
“What are you doing?” His voice was hoarse, breaking. “Have you gone insane? Put everything back.”
She slowly turned her head to look at him. Her gaze held no anger, no hurt. Only calm detachment, as if she were watching a stranger making a scene in public.
“It’s too late to put anything back, Igor. Everything is already in its place. My things—with me. Yours—with you.”
He stepped toward her, reached out to grab her arm, to stop her, to shake her back into being his wife. But she shifted slightly, and his hand closed on air. That small movement told him more than words—physical contact between them was no longer possible.
“You’re destroying everything! For what? A couple careless words? A broken nose? You’re throwing away three years of our life over her temper?”
He shouted, trying to fill the emptiness in their home with his voice. But his words bounced off her icy calm. She waited until he finished, then spoke quietly, each word cutting him like glass shards.
“It wasn’t a couple of words, Igor. It was a public flogging. An open humiliation of the people who love me most in this world. And you sat and watched. It’s not just her character. It’s her essence—and you enable it with your silence. As for our life together… Do you think I’m erasing three years? No. I’m erasing only this evening. Because tonight I realized there never were three years of us. There was you, there was me, and between us there was always your mother. I just didn’t want to see it.”
He sagged against the wall. Her logic was merciless. She wasn’t accusing him in abstractions. She dissected his actions with the precision of a pathologist, exposing his entire core.
“But… but she’s my mother!” burst out his final, weakest, most honest argument. “I couldn’t…”
She looked him straight in the eye. And he saw in them the same dry, merciless fury from the corridor—now honed to razor sharpness.
“I don’t care that she’s your mother, Igor,” she whispered, and the whisper sent a chill down his spine. “She insulted my parents. And you, as my husband, should have stood up for me and for them. Clear? I gave you a choice. You could have been my husband. But you chose to remain her son.”
She gripped the handle of a suitcase.
“The problem isn’t her, Igor. The problem is you. She is what she is and will never change. But you could have been different. You could have had a backbone. You could have, just once, made a choice on your own instead of drifting with her will. But you couldn’t. And I won’t spend my life with a man who always checks with mommy before he breathes. I won’t be just an accessory to her son.”
She opened the front door.
“So live. Go back to her. Wipe her blood, listen to her tell you what a bitch I am, and be her good little boy. That’s all you’re capable of.”
With that, she rolled one suitcase out onto the landing, then returned for the second. She didn’t look at him. Not once. He stood there, pressed against the wall of what used to be their shared home, listening to the sound of her footsteps and the wheels of her suitcase echoing down the stairs. Then the front door downstairs slammed shut. And silence fell. He was alone. In his home. With his mother. Forever.
