— “Knock yourself out, Vera Igorevna,” the son-in-law handed her a flat tablet box. “At least you can hang out on Odnoklassniki.”
Stanislav Belozyorov smiled his signature condescending smile—the one reserved for children, dogs, and, apparently, mothers-in-law.
“Either way, the real internet is off-limits to you, with your… experience.”
He didn’t know that Vera Igorevna Sokolnikova’s thirty years of experience weren’t with knitting needles but with server racks in a classified research institute. She accepted the gift without a word.
The tablet was light and cold. A perfectly assembled piece of glass and metal. There was no soul in it—only functions.
Just like in her son-in-law.
Katerina, her daughter, stood next to him—pale, lips pressed tight. She watched the scene and stayed silent, as always. She was used to it.
That evening, when the young couple retreated to their bedroom, Vera Igorevna turned the device on. The screen flared with a bright, lifeless light. She did not register on Odnoklassniki.
Her fingers—accustomed to very different keyboards—began to move soundlessly over the screen. She wasn’t looking up recipes or TV shows. She was deploying a secure network, laying a tunnel into someone else’s smug little reality.
Finding the password was a matter of technique and observation. Stanislav was too arrogant to come up with anything complicated.
In his office, on a corkboard among charts and business cards, there was a little sticky note that read: “Main asset ’91 + Main project ’15.” Nonsense to an outsider.
But Vera Igorevna knew his “main asset” was his beloved Audi, and his “main project” was his daughter Alisa, born in 2015. A combination of vanity and sentimentality—the most vulnerable kind.
The very first message she opened wasn’t from a friend or about work.
It began: “My tiger, I’ll be waiting for you on Friday. Katya’s off again to her mummy-mom…”
Vera Igorevna felt absolutely nothing. A surgeon doesn’t feel pain when making a precise incision. She simply created a new folder on the desktop—neat, inconspicuous.
And named it “Diagnosis.”
The days flowed by like thick, murky water. In the mornings, over breakfast, Stanislav loudly bragged about his successes at work.
Katerina poured him coffee and nodded. Her eyes were tired.
“Mom, have you figured out your new gadget yet?” he would ask Vera Igorevna. “Katya says you’re up at night. Careful you don’t catch any viruses.”
He laughed. He always laughed at what he didn’t understand.
And every night, when the house went quiet, Vera Igorevna plunged into his digital life. The “Diagnosis” folder grew. It wasn’t just correspondence with one woman. It was a whole ecosystem of lies.
There was “Olenka–kitten” for those “fishing trips.” There was “Marina-business,” a colleague with whom he shared ideas stolen from subordinates. And there was “Svetlana_fitness.”
He wasn’t merely cheating. He was living several lives at once, feeding every facet of his overinflated ego.
Vera Igorevna worked without emotion. She copied, systematized, archived. She opened up his cloud storage, credit-card statements, browser history.
One evening Katya approached her husband with some papers.
“Stas, we got a huge electric bill. Do you know why?”
He tore himself away from his phone, and his face twisted with distaste.
“Katya, I handle global issues. And you come at me with your little invoices. Don’t be petty.”
“But the amount really is large… Maybe there’s a leak somewhere?”
“The leak is in your head,” he snapped. “I told you not to burden me with domestic stuff.”
Katerina shrank, nodded, and left without a word.
Sitting in her armchair with a book, Vera Igorevna knew about the crypto-mining rig Stanislav had set up in the basement to “make easy money.” Money that went to the “Olenkas” and the “Svetlanas.”
She had watched her daughter—an intelligent, educated woman—turn into a shadow, a person trained to doubt her own sanity.
Simply telling her the truth would have broken her. She didn’t need words. She needed evidence—cold and indisputable, like a medical report.
That night, Vera Igorevna finished her work. She gathered everything into a single file—messages, photos, tickets, receipts, money-laundering diagrams. Every betrayal was cataloged.
It was a detailed protocol of a personality’s collapse. His personality. And the near-collapse of her daughter’s.
She renamed the final file. Now it was called “Epicrisis.” All that remained was to schedule the operation.
The operation was set for Saturday morning, at breakfast.
“By the way, Stanislav,” Vera Igorevna stood up from the table with the tablet in her hands. “I wanted to thank you for the gift. Very useful thing. I even learned how to cast the image to the TV.”
He snorted indulgently. Katerina raised her brows in surprise.
Vera Igorevna tapped a couple of buttons. The big living-room screen lit up white. In the center was a single word: “Epicrisis.”
“What the hell is this?” Stanislav frowned.
“It’s a case history,” Vera said calmly. “Yours. I took the liberty of compiling a brief anamnesis.”
She swiped. A photograph appeared on the TV: Stanislav kissing a blonde at a hotel entrance. At the bottom—a date and a copy of the bill.
Katya’s face froze. That day flashed in her memory. Stas had called to say he’d be late for “critical negotiations.” And she, worried, had been making his favorite dinner.
The smile slid off his face.
“This… this is Photoshop! Mom, have you lost your mind in your old age? You can’t even use the internet, you don’t understand any of this! Katya, you can see it’s nonsense!”
But Vera had already moved to the next slide. Screenshots of the chats with “Olenka–kitten.” The discussion of the “mummy-mom.”
Katya remembered how that weekend Stas had convinced her to go visit her mother, saying he needed “quiet to work.”
Next slide: a spending report. “Charity” transfers to “Marina-business.”
Another: a diagram of the mining rig. The line “the leak is in your head” rang in Katya’s ears with deafening clarity.
Vera flipped through the slides methodically, without commentary. Stanislav shifted from denial to rage. He leapt up, knocking over a cup.
“Stop this! You hacked my email! That’s illegal! I’ll sue you!”
“Go ahead,” Vera shrugged. “Just bear in mind the materials will also be forwarded to the tax authorities. I’m sure they’ll be interested in your ‘charity’ and your mining income.”
He froze, breathing hard. Then he turned to Katya.
“Katya! Are you just going to sit there while this… woman destroys our family? You believe her and not me?”
Katya had sat motionless the whole time. Every photo, every line of text wasn’t just information.
It was a key to dozens of situations in which she’d felt guilty, stupid, unbalanced. It wasn’t just the truth about him. It was the truth about herself, about years of self-deception.
When she finally raised her eyes, there were no tears, no hysterics. Only a cold, crystalline clarity.
“I believed you, Stas,” she said very quietly. “Every word. Every excuse. I believed even when I told myself I was making it all up.”
She stood slowly.
“Thank you, Mom,” she said, still looking at her husband. “For the diagnosis.”
She picked up her purse and car keys.
“The treatment will be simple. Amputation. You have one hour to pack your things.”
That hour turned into concentrated chaos. Stanislav didn’t pack—he raged through the house like a wounded animal.
“You’ll regret this, Katya. Without me you’re nothing. You don’t even know how to pay these bills.”
He yanked out cords, flung shirts on the floor. It wasn’t an attempt to gather necessities; it was an act of desecration against a space that had ceased to obey him.
Vera watched in silence. Katya stood by the window, her back to him. Her silence was more frightening than any shouting.
When he finally dragged his suitcases out the door, he turned one last time.
“You’ll crawl back to me. Both of you. The old witch and her stupid daughter.”
The door slammed behind him.
An unfamiliar emptiness settled over the house. Katya slowly turned from the window. She didn’t burst into tears. She just sat down on the floor right there in the hallway and hugged her knees. Her shoulders trembled.
Vera came over and sat beside her on the cold parquet. She was simply there.
“Mom… I’m such an idiot,” Katya whispered. “So many years…”
“You’re not an idiot,” Vera answered just as softly. “You simply knew how to believe. He exploited that. It’s not your fault. It’s his illness.”
Almost a year passed.
The house changed. The hum of the mining rig disappeared from the basement. Katya threw out everything that reminded her of him.
She dyed her hair. Enrolled in landscape design courses. Her small firm, Green Logic, was picking up steam.
One evening, Vera found her in the living room. Katya stood before the big screen, a complex 3D-modeling program open.
“Wow,” Vera said. “Looks complicated.”
“Not really,” Katya smiled. “I figured it out. It’s all logical. Much more logical than trying to understand why someone who swears he loves you lies to your face. Mom, what about the… materials?”
“In a safe place. In an encrypted cloud. It’s not blackmail. It’s an insurance policy.”
She walked up to her daughter.
“You know the main paradox? He thought the internet was a place for his dirty games. Turns out it’s just a place where everything leaves a trace. You just have to know where to look.”
Katya nodded, saving her project.
“Thanks for finding it.”
“I didn’t ‘find’ anything,” Vera shook her head. “I just entered the right query. And now you’re learning to build. Not search for other people’s mistakes, but create your own. That’s much more interesting.”
Vera sat on the terrace. On the table before her lay that same tablet.
On the screen was a chess game against a grandmaster from Argentina. Laughter drifted in from the garden—Katya’s laughter.
Stanislav tried to sue. But when his lawyer received an anonymous email with a file named “Epicrisis.zip,” all claims were dropped. He simply vanished.
Katya came out onto the terrace.
“Beating Argentines again?” she smiled.
“Trying,” Vera nodded, making a move.
“Mom, I never asked back then… Why did you do all of this? So coldly, so methodically.”
Vera thought for a moment.
“Because a lie isn’t a feeling. It’s a structure. And you can’t destroy it with emotions—only with a stronger, more logical structure. I wasn’t taking revenge on him. I was correcting a systemic error.”
She set the tablet aside.
“He gave me this thing to make me feel old. In the end, it was the tool that gave you your world back. Ironic.”
Katya took her hand.
“It’s not about the tablet, Mom. It’s about you. Thank you.”
Vera looked at her daughter—confident, calm, happy. The error had been corrected. The system was running stably.
