— “Vitya, I’m back! I grabbed your favorite buns for tea—want some?”
Lena’s bright, anticipatory voice flew into the apartment ahead of her. She set the grocery bag down in the hallway and, without taking off her shoes, walked into the room. Viktor sat on the couch, staring at the dark TV screen. He didn’t even turn his head, only grunted something noncommittal. Lena paid it no mind. Her thoughts were already far away—in the world of renders, complex textures, and deadlines. Today she had to submit the first part of a big project for a foreign client, and she couldn’t wait to dive into work on her new, perfect tool.
“Let me just wash my hands and get to it. I literally need a couple of hours, and then we’ll have tea with the buns and watch a movie, deal?”
She kicked off her shoes, quickly washed her hands, and practically skipped toward her workspace in the living room corner. It was her altar, her creative studio. A large monitor, a graphics tablet, a comfortable chair. And at the center of this whole setup, like a deity, sat—until a week ago—him: a powerful, silver, latest-model laptop. Viktor’s anniversary present. The best, most coveted gift of all their years together.
Lena froze. Her gaze slid over the desk once, then again. Her heart, which a second ago had been beating happily in anticipation of work, did a worried somersault and stopped. The spot where the laptop should have been was perfectly empty. Only a faint rectangular imprint from its rubber feet was visible on the matte surface. Beside it, like a snake’s severed head, lay a lone power cord.
“Vitya?” she called, and her voice sounded entirely different now. There was no trace of her earlier lightness. “Where’s the laptop? Did you move it?”
Viktor flinched, as if her voice had torn him out of a deep trance. He turned slowly, and Lena saw his face. That guilty, slightly frightened, painfully familiar look he always wore when he’d done something wrong.
“Uh… it… I thought you’d be home later,” he mumbled, avoiding her eyes.
“I’m not asking when I came home. I’m asking where my laptop is.” Lena took a step toward him. A cold wave of dread began to rise from somewhere deep in her gut. “Did you drop it? Break it? Don’t you dare keep quiet, Vitya!”
“No, what are you saying! It’s fine,” he blurted, and the haste in his reassurance was worse than any confession. “You see… here’s the thing… Natasha stopped by.”
At the mention of his younger sister, everything inside Lena went cold. Natasha was a hurricane, a natural disaster whose visits always left something missing, broken, or out of place.
“And what about Natasha?” she asked in an icy tone, feeling a tight spring begin to coil inside her.
“Well… she…” he faltered, searching for words, then blurted it out while staring at the wall. “Her boyfriend’s computer broke. Like, totally. And he… he needs to play. Some tournament or whatever. Anyway, he was really upset.”
Lena looked at her husband, and her brain refused to stitch these disjointed words into a coherent picture. Sister’s boyfriend. Computer. Play. Laptop. The absurdity was so great that for a moment she thought it must be some stupid joke.
“And?” she managed to squeeze out a single word.
“So I… I gave her your laptop,” he whispered, then added louder, as if trying to convince himself. “Just for a while! Lena, only for a couple of days! Until his PC gets fixed. You have to help family, right? And it’s so powerful—perfect for games!”
The room went very quiet. Lena stared at him as the world around her began to lose its colors and sounds. She saw his lips move, saw him try a guilty smile, but heard nothing. One thought pounded in her head, white-hot. Her work. All her projects. Fonts, brushes, countless hours of progress, a prepaid order—everything was in there. Inside that silver box her husband, her closest person, had handed over to some snot-nosed kid so he could play his stupid shooters. The spring inside her snapped with a deafening crack.
“That was my anniversary present! Mine! I was waiting for that laptop for work! And you just handed it to your sister because her boyfriend’s computer broke and he has nothing to play on?! Maybe you should give her me as well?!”
Viktor cringed under her shout as if struck. He’d expected anything—tears, reproaches, days of offended silence. But this cry, ringing with fury and disbelief, was something new. He tried to trigger the usual soothing routine that had always worked.
“Lena, stop. You’re exaggerating. I told you, it’s just for a couple of days. Natasha will return it safe and sound; I told her strictly. Why are you making such a fuss over a piece of hardware?”
Those words were gasoline on the fire. The scream cut off. Lena straightened slowly, and her face, twisted with anger moments ago, became frighteningly calm. She drew a deep breath—not to calm down, but to gather all her rage into one icy, razor-sharp shard. She no longer looked at him as a guilty husband. She looked at him as a stranger—stupid and utterly useless.
“‘A piece of hardware’?” she repeated quietly, and that whisper chilled him to the bone far more than the scream. “Did you just call my work—my projects, which we get paid for, which, by the way, put food in your mouth—a ‘piece of hardware’? The source files for a project due tomorrow morning are there. My entire correspondence with the client is there. The programs on it cost more than all the clothes you’ve bought in the last year. But to you it’s just a ‘piece of hardware’ to lend out like a kid’s shovel in a sandbox.”
She turned and walked slowly toward his sanctuary—the TV stand where his pride and joy rested. Black, glossy, with a predatory blue indicator light: the latest-model game console. He’d paid for it with his last two paychecks, just before getting laid off. He blew dust off it and wiped it with a special cloth. It was his territory, his world, his escape.
“Oh, I understand you perfectly,” Lena hissed, and Viktor tensed instinctively, seeing where she was headed. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth before she, with surgical precision and not a single wasted motion, bent down and began pulling the cables from the back panel. One. Two. The power cord. The thick HDMI cable. She didn’t rip them out; she disconnected them methodically, with cold contempt, as if amputating a useless, dead organ.
“Lena, what are you doing?! Don’t touch that!” he finally found his voice. There was no condescension left in it—only panic.
She straightened up, holding the black box and a coil of cables in her hands. Her eyes burned with a cold, dark fire.
“Me? I’m helping the family, Vitya. Following your own advice. You helped your sister. Now I’m helping our family. We urgently need a laptop, right? My work tool. And we don’t have money for a new one because you’ve been ‘looking’ for a job on the couch for six months. But we do have this.”
She stepped toward him and shoved the cold plastic into his hands. The console was unexpectedly heavy; he nearly dropped it.
“Now listen to me carefully,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes, her voice steady on every note. “You take your treasure. Take your passport. And you carry it all to the nearest pawnshop. I don’t care how much they give you. I don’t care whether you buy it back later. You have exactly two hours to come back with enough money for the exact same laptop I had. Two hours, Vitya. If in two hours you’re not here with the amount we need—don’t come back at all. Go live with your sister and her boyfriend. The three of you can play on my laptop.”
Viktor stood in the middle of the room clutching the cold, heavy console to his chest like a shield. But the shield didn’t protect him from Lena’s icy gaze as she silently sat down in her work chair and turned it toward him. She didn’t look at the clock. She didn’t need to. Her whole being had become one large, soundless timer counting down the seconds of his humiliation. He could see it in her still posture, in the hard line of her mouth.
Panic began to flood him. Pawnshop. The word sounded in his head like a sentence. To hand over his precious thing, his only source of joy these last months, to some grim people at a window for a pittance? No. There had to be another way. There was always another way. He just needed to roll everything back. Return the laptop. And everything would go back to how it was. Lena would cool off, yell a little more, and forgive him. She always forgave.
Swallowing hard, he sidled into the kitchen as though seeking cover. The console thumped heavily onto the countertop. With trembling fingers he pulled out his phone and dialed his sister. The ringing seemed to last an eternity.
“Hello?” came Natasha’s carefree voice over a background of cheerful noise that sounded like a video game.
“Natasha, this is urgent—it’s a disaster!” he whispered into the phone, glancing at the doorway as if Lena might hear. “The laptop. It has to be returned. Right now. Immediately.”
There was a second of silence on the line, broken only by the sound of virtual gunfire.
“What’s up, Vitya? We agreed on a couple of days. Sasha’s right in the middle of the tournament; he can’t stop. What happened?”
“Lena!” he blurted. “She’s back. She found out everything. Natasha, she’s furious! She… she took my console and told me to pawn it if I don’t bring her money for a new laptop in two hours. Do you understand?!”
He expected sympathy, help, immediate agreement. But his sister’s reaction was completely different.
“Oh, come on,” her voice held not sympathy but disgusted surprise. “And you got scared? Vitya, are you a man or what? Put her in her place. Tell her family matters more than her gadgets. What’s with the hysterics over nothing?”
Viktor was taken aback. He felt caught between two millstones. On one side—his wife’s icy rage; on the other—his sister’s condescending disdain.
“Natasha, you don’t understand! She’s not joking! I’ve never seen her like this. Just bring the laptop back and it’ll all be over! Please!”
“Oh, stop whining,” his sister snapped. “We can’t bring anything now. Sasha’s playing. I told you. Let me talk to her myself. Put her on or give her the phone. I’ll explain to her, like a normal person, that you don’t behave like this.”
Before he could protest, a second call came in—from Natasha. She hung up on him and called Lena directly. Viktor went cold. He rushed out of the kitchen just as Lena’s phone, lying on the table, vibrated. She looked at the screen—“Natasha”—and her lips curved in a smile devoid of any mirth. She answered on speaker.
“Lenochka, hi!” Natasha’s syrupy, perky voice chirped from the speaker. “Listen, your hubby just called me, practically in tears. What are you doing there? Making a scene over nothing.”
Lena stared silently at Viktor but answered his sister. Her voice was even and dead.
“Hello, Natasha. The ‘nothing’ you’re talking about costs one hundred and fifty thousand rubles and contains my work for the last three months. Your brother stole my property. And he now has just over an hour and a half to compensate for the damage.”
“Who stole what?!” Natasha screeched. “He just helped his own sister! We’re family! Or does that mean nothing to you? What, you can’t bring yourself to help? You sit at home all day; you could show some understanding! Sasha would finish his game and we’d bring it back! Maybe even tomorrow!”
Viktor froze, watching the phone call like an execution. He saw Lena’s face grow more impenetrable with each of Natasha’s words, the muscles in her jaw turning to stone. She let Natasha vent, pour out all her arrogant incomprehension, and then said calmly:
“First, I don’t ‘sit at home’; I work from home. And you and your boyfriend have just deprived me of that possibility. Second, your ‘show some understanding’ means I should sacrifice my reputation, miss deadlines, and lose money so your boyfriend can have fun. And third, Natasha…”
Lena paused, and her voice dropped to an icy whisper that filled the room.
“Your call changes nothing. It only proves that my husband isn’t just an idiot. He’s part of an entire system of idiots who think everyone owes them. The clock is ticking, Viktor.”
With that, she ended the call without saying goodbye. She lifted her eyes to her petrified husband.
“An hour and a half.”
Time kept running out. Not on the wall clock Lena was ostentatiously ignoring, but inside her. It dripped like poison, corroding the last remnants of their shared life. She didn’t pace the room or look out the window. She sat in her work chair, perfectly straight, and looked at the door. She wasn’t waiting for a miracle. She didn’t hope he’d come back with money and remorse. She was waiting for confirmation—proof that the person she shared a bed, meals, and future plans with was nothing but an empty space hastily draped with habit and shared photographs.
Five minutes before the deadline, the key finally turned in the lock. The door opened. But it wasn’t just Viktor who came into the hallway. Behind him, like a shadow—like a cheering section and, simultaneously, the devil’s advocate—stood Natasha. Righteous determination was written across her face—she hadn’t come to reconcile; she’d come to win.
Viktor looked terrible. Pale, hair clumped together; he smelled of a musty pawnshop and cheap tobacco. In one hand he held a crumpled wad of cash. He didn’t dare step into the room, lingering on the threshold.
“I… I brought it,” he managed, holding out the money like alms. “It’s… it’s not the full amount. They gave less. Said the model isn’t the newest, scratches… But I’ll pay the rest! With my first paycheck, Lena! I swear!”
Lena slowly stood. She didn’t look at the money. She looked at Natasha, who lifted her chin defiantly.
“He brought you money—happy now?” Natasha started without waiting to be invited in. “Because of your whims he pawned his stuff, humiliated himself there! And it’s still not enough for you? He could’ve brought you nothing after your ultimatums!”
Lena shifted her gaze to her husband. He stayed silent, letting his sister speak for him—thereby confirming everything Lena had already realized. He hadn’t come alone. He’d dragged along the very cause of all this as backup. It wasn’t just a failure—it was a demonstration of complete, absolute inability to be a man, a husband, even simply an adult.
“How much is there?” Lena asked evenly, addressing Viktor but not taking her eyes off his sister.
“Seventy-two thousand,” he whispered. “Lena, I—”
“Excellent,” she cut him off. She walked over, took the bundle of bills from his limp fingers without counting, and set it on her empty desk. Then she turned and went to the bedroom. A minute later she returned with a cardboard box that had once held an old vacuum cleaner.
Viktor and Natasha watched her actions in silence, not understanding what was happening. She went to the TV stand where Viktor had left the console before leaving, picked it up, and set it carefully in the box. Then she took two controllers from the shelf and put them in as well. After that she scanned the room, stepped to the bookcase, took down his stack of game discs, and added them to the box.
“Wha… what are you doing?” Viktor finally spoke.
“I’m solving the problem, Vitya,” Lena said, closing the box and nudging it to his feet. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to help your family. Well, I’m helping. Your family is her.” Lena nodded toward Natasha, who stared at her open-mouthed. “Your world is right here, in this box. You can’t take responsibility for anything except preserving your games. You can’t protect your wife from your family because you’re part of it. You’re not a husband. You’re your mother’s eldest child. And I don’t want to adopt a forty-year-old boy.”
She stepped back to her desk and picked up the money. “This isn’t enough for a new laptop. But it’s enough for a first month’s rent on a room. Somewhere closer to your mother. So she can keep wiping your nose, and Natasha can keep using your things. Don’t worry about paying me back. Consider it severance.”
She looked him straight in the eyes. There was no fury, no hurt—only cold, quiet revulsion. Natasha wanted to say something, but the words stuck in her throat. She saw that arguing was useless. In front of them stood not a hysterical wife, but someone who had just performed a surgical removal of a malignant tumor from her life.
“You have ten minutes to take this box and leave,” Lena added. “After that I’ll call a service to haul the rest of your belongings to the dump. Time starts now…”
