“Your sister stole from me.”
For a few seconds the line filled with a dense, heavy silence in which only the background noise of someone else’s office could be heard. Then Maxim’s uncertain voice, distorted by the phone speaker, came through.
“Olya, maybe you’re mistaken? What are you even talking about?”
Olga stood in the middle of the bedroom, flooded with indifferent morning sun. Her gaze was fixed on the open jewelry box on the vanity. Carved dark wood, Maxim’s gift for their first anniversary. The red velvet inside was mercilessly empty in its two main compartments. Where a thin gold chain with a teardrop pendant and tiny stud earrings had lain as recently as yesterday morning, two dull, lonely dents now gaped. She was not mistaken. She had worn those earrings practically nonstop; yesterday, for the first time in a month, she had put them in the box, deciding to wear others. It had been almost a ritual, and she remembered every detail.
“I’m not mistaken,” her voice sounded even and cold as metal. There was no panic in it, only measured, icy fury. “My gold chain is gone. And the earrings. The ones your mother gave us for our wedding.”
“Wait, maybe you put them somewhere else? You know how it is, automatically…”
“No, Maxim,” she cut him off, not letting him finish this absurd attempt at an excuse. Her fingers tightened around the phone. “I didn’t move them. And that’s not all. Remember the new bottle of Chanel you brought me from your business trip? That’s gone too. I only took the plastic off it yesterday. And the cherry on top—five thousand disappeared from my wallet in the hall. Exactly one bill. Yesterday there was only one guest in this house. Your sister.”
Now she was moving through the apartment, and each step was like a hammer blow driving nails into the coffin of their peaceful life. She went to the entryway, opened her bag, pulled out her wallet. Opened it as if conducting a forensic experiment. Yes, just so. Small bills, bank cards, and an empty compartment where, just last night, a new, crisp five-thousand-ruble note had lain—the one she’d withdrawn from the ATM for the weekend. She remembered how Lera, walking past the chest of drawers, had cast a fleeting glance at her bag. At the time it seemed like ordinary curiosity. Now that glance took on a sinister, predatory meaning.
“Lera? Olya, come on, no way. Sure, she’s flighty and might blurt things out without thinking, but stealing… that’s too much. Are you sure that—”
“She could, Maxim. And she did,” Olga didn’t shout, but she raised her voice to a ringing, ear-cutting pitch. It was unbearable. He didn’t believe her. He doubted her words, trying to protect, to whitewash his sister. In his tone she heard not a desire to get to the bottom of it, but an instinct to smooth the scandal over, to pretend nothing had happened. “She sat here, drank my tea, smiled to my face, and meanwhile was scouting what she could pocket. She knew I wouldn’t check her every step in my own home!”
She stopped at the window, looking down at the fussy life of the city below. People hurried about their business, unaware that in this particular apartment a whole world was collapsing. It wasn’t about the money. Not even about the gold or the perfume. It was a brazen, cynical invasion of her territory, a spit in the face of her trust. And now her husband, her closest person, was effectively becoming an accomplice to that spit by refusing to believe the obvious.
“I’ll call her now, talk to her…” he mumbled helplessly.
“I don’t care what you do,” Olga cut in. The cold had returned to her voice, pushing out the brief flare of anger. Now she was absolutely calm because she had made a decision. “I don’t need your talk or her lying excuses. I don’t care how you do it. Shake it out of her, or go buy everything new down to the last kopek. But if by the time you get home today my things aren’t back in their places, don’t even come up to the apartment. Turn around and go live with your thief. The choice is yours.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She simply hit the end button, and the hum of the unfamiliar office cut off. The apartment fell silent. But it wasn’t the silence of an empty house. It was the silence of a taut string. Olga set the phone on the windowsill. She wasn’t going to cry or smash dishes. She would simply wait. Wait to see whose side he chose. Whose truth. Hers or his sister’s.
Maxim threw the phone onto the passenger seat so hard it bounced and hit the door. He sat in his car in the office parking lot, and for a moment the world beyond the windshield lost its focus. Olga’s voice, cold and clear, kept sounding in his head, repeating the last phrase over and over. “The choice is yours.” It wasn’t just an ultimatum. It was a kill shot. He started the engine, and the car lurched forward too sharply. He wasn’t driving home. He was driving to his sister’s.
Thoughts fluttered in his head like a startled flock of birds. Lera. A thief? The thought seemed wild, absurd. His kid sister—impulsive, always getting into some scrape, living paycheck to paycheck—but… to steal? From them? He tried to find another, logical explanation. Olga was mistaken. She had put the jewelry in a different box. She had spent the money and forgotten. The perfume… maybe the bottle broke and she just didn’t want to admit it? But he knew his wife. Olga was meticulous to the core. If she said things were missing, then they truly weren’t where they belonged.
He turned into the courtyard of an old five-story block where Lera rented her tiny studio. The stairwell met him with the smell of damp and sour cabbage. He climbed to the third floor, his heart thudding somewhere in his throat. He didn’t know how to start the conversation. He felt both like a judge and a traitor. He pressed the doorbell. Behind the door the TV went silent, shuffling steps approached. The door opened.
“Oh, Max! Hi! What are you doing here, not at work?” Lera stood in the doorway in home shorts and a stretched-out T-shirt, hair in a messy bun. She looked surprised but not scared. She was smiling. “Hey, Ler. We need to talk,” he walked inside, into the cramped entryway. The air held a sickly-sweet scent from cheap incense, trying to drown out tobacco. “Tea can wait. This is serious.”
She turned. The smile slowly slid off her face, replaced by a wary look.
“What is it? Is Mom okay?”
“Mom’s fine,” he paused, mustering his strength. “Lera. You were at our place yesterday. After you left, Olga couldn’t find several things.” He looked straight into her eyes, trying to catch even a shadow of guilt, the slightest sign of a lie. But Lera only raised her brows in surprise.
“What do you mean ‘couldn’t find’? Was I supposed to keep track of her stuff?”
“Her gold earrings are gone, the chain, the perfume, and five thousand from her wallet,” he said the words dryly, as if reading them into a report.
Her reaction was instantaneous. She recoiled as if he’d hit her. Outrage twisted her face; a bright flush flooded her cheeks.
“What?! Are you hinting at something, Maxim? You came here to accuse me of theft? Your own sister?”
“I’m not hinting at anything. I’m saying the things vanished after your visit. No one else was in the house.”
“Oh, that’s what this is! I knew I shouldn’t have dragged myself over there! Your queen invited me just so she’d have someone to blame afterward? She stared at me all evening like I was contagious! Picked on every word! And now I’m a thief! Brilliant!”
She wasn’t shouting, but her voice rang with indignation. She paced the tiny kitchen from corner to corner like a tigress in a cage.
“Lera, let’s be calm. If you took something, maybe by accident…”
“By accident?!” She stopped short and drilled him with her gaze. “Do you think I’m senile? I ‘accidentally’ slipped gold and cash into my pocket? Max, are you out of your mind? She put this in your head, didn’t she? And you, as usual, lapped it up! She’ll drive you away from all of us soon, don’t you see? First she didn’t like Mom, now it’s me. Who’s next on her blacklist?”
He stayed silent, thrown by the ferocity of her counterattack. He had expected anything—tears, denial—but not this aggressive reframing. Lera deftly shifted the blame, casting herself as the victim and Olga as a spiteful, suspicious shrew. And the seeds of doubt he had tried to stamp out began sprouting again. What if it was true? What if Olga disliked her so much she was ready to accuse her of theft to banish her forever?
“So what do you want from me?” Lera crossed her arms, her look sharp and prickly. “Want me to turn my pockets inside out? Conduct a search of my apartment? Go on, don’t be shy! You came here as an investigator, not a brother!”
He rubbed his hand over his face wearily. His head was buzzing. He’d hit a dead end. He had come seeking a solution and found only more chaos. He looked at his sister—angry, offended, righteous in her fury. And he remembered his wife’s voice on the phone, cold as steel. He was between a rock and a hard place. There was no way out.
“I just want the things found,” he said quietly.
“Then look under your wife’s pillow!” Lera spat. “And don’t come here with this again. I’m not your punching bag. Get out, Maxim.”
The lock clicked with a dry, lifeless sound. Maxim stepped into the apartment as into a hostile, alien space. Silence. Not the soothing silence of waiting for a loved one, but thick, suffocating, like cotton. From the kitchen came the faint aroma of fried garlic and meat, and that ordinary, homely smell clashed violently with the icy atmosphere hanging in the air. He took off his jacket, hung it on a hook, and walked on stiff legs to the kitchen.
Olga stood at the stove with her back to him. She wore a simple T-shirt and pants; her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail. Her movements were mechanical, precise. She stirred something in the pan with a wooden spatula, and the soft, steady sizzle of oil was the apartment’s only sound. She didn’t turn around. She knew he’d come in but didn’t show it. It was worse than shouting. It was deliberate, humiliating disregard.
“Olya…” he began; his voice sounded unsure and hoarse. She didn’t turn. “Are you going to have dinner?” her voice was utterly even, devoid of any emotion, as if she were asking a passerby.
“I went to see Lera,” he went on, ignoring the question and stepping closer. He felt like an idiot, forced to explain himself in his own home. “She swears she didn’t take anything. She… she’s furious. Said you’re slandering her, that you’ve always hated her.” He fell silent, waiting for a reaction. But Olga kept silently stirring dinner. The pan hissed, ticking off the seconds of his failure. Her imperturbability infuriated him far more than if she had started smashing plates.
“Where are the things?” she asked just as quietly, without turning her head. That simple question devalued all his words, his trip, his soul-searching. It reduced the complex, tangled situation to a single fact he couldn’t provide.
“They’re not there, Olya. She won’t admit it. She…”
“I understand,” she turned off the stove and finally faced him. Her face was calm, almost serene, and that made it frightening. There was no anger in her eyes, only a cold, considered assessment. She looked at him the way one looks at a faulty mechanism that no longer performs its function.
“Listen,” he stepped closer again, a wheedling, conciliatory note creeping into his voice. “This is all nerves, a misunderstanding. To hell with the stuff! I’ll buy you new ones. A chain, earrings—any you want. Even better than the ones that were. We’ll order the perfume today. Forget about the money. Let’s just end this circus.”
That was his biggest mistake. He saw it in the brief narrowing of her eyes. He had offered her a deal. He had tried to buy his way out of her humiliation, out of her truth. He hadn’t just failed to believe her—he had priced her principles at a few grams of gold and a bottle of perfume.
“You’ll buy new ones?” she slowly, deliberately repeated his words. Her voice was no longer calm. A bright, cutting metal rang in it. “Do you really think this is about money? That I staged all this over a piece of gold? You went to her, listened to her lies, her filth about me, and now you’re offering to pay me to shut up?”
She stepped almost right up to him. Now he could see everything in her eyes: contempt, disappointment, and that same icy fury she had held back for so long.
“Do whatever you want, but by tonight the things your sister stole had better be home. If not… then don’t bother coming home anymore. Go live with your sister.”
She said it not as a threat, but as a sentence. Final, not subject to appeal. She left him no room to maneuver, for compromise, for his attempts to sit on two chairs at once. She simply put up a wall. Turning away, she took a plate, served herself dinner, and sat at the table. She picked up her fork and began to eat. Calmly, methodically, as if he no longer existed in that kitchen. And he stood in the middle of the room on the scorched ground of his compromises, deafened by the smell of fried meat and his own helplessness. He understood that his attempt to smother the war had only led to its formal declaration. And he was already losing it.
Maxim didn’t last ten minutes in that torture. The silence in which Olga calmly and methodically ate her dinner was louder than any scandal. In every movement—in the way she raised the fork to her mouth, in the straightness of her back—he felt a silent but crushing rebuke. He was a stranger in his own home. In a desperate, idiotic attempt to break the blockade, he did the one thing that could make it worse. He took out his phone and stepped onto the balcony. His fingers dialed his sister’s number.
“Lera, it’s me. Listen, come over. Right now,” his voice was tense and low.
“Are you crazy? After what you said to me today? So I can step over the threshold of your viper’s lair again? Never.”
“Please,” a plea slipped into his voice that he hadn’t expected from himself. “She won’t hear anything. She’s throwing me out. Just come. Look her in the eye, tell her how it is. She has to see you’re not lying. Help me, Ler.”
He wasn’t lying. He truly was on the edge. He believed that a face-to-face, a direct look, live emotions could break down the wall of cold contempt Olga had erected. He hoped for a miracle. Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang, sharp and demanding.
Olga raised her head from her plate. Her eyes met Maxim’s, and there was neither surprise nor anger in them. Only the statement of a fact. The fact of his final betrayal. He had let the enemy into their fortress. He had opened the gate himself. Maxim let Lera in. She entered, sweeping the room with a defiant look, ready to fight. She wore jeans and a bright top, and the bold, cheap perfume she always loved wafted from her. She stopped in the middle of the living room, arms crossed. Olga slowly rose from the kitchen table and came into the room. She didn’t look at Lera. She looked at her husband.
“What is she doing here?” she asked as if Lera weren’t in the room.
“We have to sort this out together!” Maxim blurted, feeling cold sweat down his back. “Lera, tell her. Tell her you didn’t take anything.” Lera turned her prickly gaze on Olga.
“I wasn’t planning to report to you. I came to help my brother, the one you’ve got under your heel. Think I don’t see how you twist him? First you drove him away from his mother, now you’re after me. What, decided to bend everything to your will? So he has no one left but you?”
“You didn’t need to steal for me to know what you are,” Olga answered evenly, taking a step forward. She moved smoothly, like a predator closing the distance. “But it turns out you’re not only jealous—you’re a petty thief as well.”
“Who do you think you are?!” Lera squealed, losing control. “Look at yourself, queen! Sitting in your golden cage that Max built for you and thinking you can do anything? Think I don’t see how you look at me? Like I’m dirt under your nails! You just enjoy humiliating me!”
They stood facing each other. Maxim flitted between them like a helpless witness to a duel.
“Girls, stop…”
“Shut up!” both women snapped at him in unison.
And in that moment Olga went still. She stood so close she could pick out every note in the smell coming from Lera. It wasn’t her usual cloying-sweet perfume. Beneath it, faint but unmistakable, another scent pushed through. Deep, heady, with notes of jasmine and patchouli. The scent of her new bottle of Chanel. Olga drew in a subtle breath. That was it. No doubt.
She slowly raised her eyes to Lera. Her gaze grew heavy, like molten lead.
“You smell like my perfume.” Lera jerked; for a second her face lost all its aggressive confidence, animal fear flickering in her eyes.
“What? You’re crazy. It’s mine! I always buy it!”
“You’re lying,” Olga’s voice was quiet but piercing. “You told me yourself yesterday that Chanel is a smell for ‘stuffy old ladies’ and you’d never douse yourself with it. Did you forget?”
Lera turned pale. She was caught. Stupidly, ridiculously—by a smell. She opened her mouth to say something but found no words. In that ringing pause Olga turned her head and looked at Maxim. It was a silent question. It lasted an eternity. There she is—your sister. There is your truth. Now what?
Maxim looked at Lera’s white face, at her frightened, darting eyes, and everything finally fell into place. With a deafening crack, all his hopes, his doubts, his brotherly affection collapsed. He had been deceived. Used. His sister—his own flesh and blood—had lied to his face, hiding behind his back. He stepped forward. His face turned to stone. He gripped Lera by the elbow so hard she cried out.
“Out,” he growled, and it was the voice of a stranger, a frightening man.
“Max, what are you…” she stammered, trying to wrench free.
“Out of here!” He dragged her to the door, his fingers clamping her arm like a vise. “I don’t ever want to see you again. Ever. Do you understand me? I don’t have a sister.”
He yanked the front door open and literally shoved her out onto the landing.
“You’ll regret this! Both of you will!” came her spiteful, near-shriek. Maxim slammed the door and turned the lock. Twice. He was breathing hard, pressing his forehead to the cold metal. Absolute silence settled in the apartment. He turned. Olga stood in the same spot. She looked at the empty space where Lera had been, then shifted her gaze to him. There was no victory in her eyes, no gratitude. Nothing. She silently turned, went to the kitchen, sat down at the table, and picked up her fork to continue her cooling dinner. The war was over. The territory had been won back. But there were no victors.
