In the evening, Anya came home after a 24-hour shift and was on the phone with her mother. Her mother’s voice sounded weak; her blood pressure had shot back up to two hundred. The old pills weren’t helping, and the new imported ones the doctor prescribed were too expensive for an ordinary pensioner.
Oleg, whom she’d been dating for only a month, was sitting in her tiny kitchen listening. When she hung up, he stood up quietly.
“I’ll be right back,” was all he said, and, throwing on his jacket, he went out.
Anya didn’t think much of it—she was too wrapped up in her anxiety. She started doing the math in her head: how many days until payday, who she could borrow a couple thousand from. She, a cardiology nurse who saved other people’s mothers, felt completely helpless when it came to her own.
He came back an hour later. Without a word, he walked into the kitchen and put a pharmacy bag on the table. Inside was that very medication—the expensive one.
“Oleg… where did you get it? It costs… almost five thousand.”
“Anya, it’s your mom. This isn’t up for discussion.”
In that moment, he won her over completely and irrevocably. She was used to carrying everything herself—being everyone’s support, rescuer, shoulder to cry on—and for the first time in her life she saw a man who didn’t ask for help, but simply showed up and helped.
A few months passed. Oleg had lost his job because of an “economic crisis and betrayal by partners” and had thoroughly settled into her one-room apartment. He was looking for a new job—at least, that’s what he said. His days were filled with the illusion of frantic activity: important calls, “Skype negotiations,” meetings with “the right people” who were supposedly about to offer him a “project of the century.”
He took over the household. Cooked dinners, kept the apartment spotless. Told her captain’s tales—about faraway ports, nine-point storms, million-dollar deals he sealed with a single handshake.
He was charming, smart, interesting, and Anya, exhausted after brutal shifts, sank into his world. She’d come home to a hot dinner and a gripping story. She was happy—and didn’t notice how her small apartment was gradually turning into his.
Her salary card quietly became the “shared ship’s fund.” At first, he only took it to “buy supplies for the cook.” Then he started paying utility bills and the internet from it.
“Anyuta, I write everything down in the ship’s log. As soon as my new ship sets sail, I’ll pay it all back with interest. A captain always settles his accounts.”
He didn’t look like a kept man—more like a temporary financial manager. He ran everything, and she, enchanted by his charisma, believed in his “project of the century,” his “ship full of gold,” in the idea that she was simply helping a strong, noble man ride out bad weather. She didn’t realize the storm had already started.
The first alarm didn’t ring on the phone—it appeared in her banking app. Anya was sitting in the doctors’ room during a night shift, checking her balance so she could figure out how much she could send her mother next week. Suddenly she saw a charge: fifty thousand rubles.
Her first thought was fear—scammers. She immediately called Oleg.
“Olezhka, I think money was stolen from the card!”
“Easy, sailor—no panic on deck. Nobody stole anything. I bought it.”
“What did you buy? For fifty thousand?”
“Anyuta, what’s wrong with you? I hinted that Mom’s anniversary is coming up—sixty years. I decided to get her a gift she’s dreamed of her whole life. Tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre, for The Nutcracker. Best seats in the stalls.”
He said it with such pride, such excitement, as if he’d performed a heroic deed. Anya stayed silent, trying to take it in. Fifty thousand was almost her whole paycheck—the money she’d already mentally divided up: food, utilities, help for her mother.
“Oleg… but that’s… that’s huge money. We can’t afford that.”
“Can’t afford it? Anya, what are you talking about? My mother gave her youth to me—she sold the dacha, the only thing she inherited from her parents, so I could study at nautical school. She’s seen nothing in her life but work and home, and I can’t give her one single evening of a fairy tale? This is our shared debt to her, Anya. I thought you understood that.”
She swallowed her hurt and anxiety, and felt guilty for daring to doubt the purity of his impulse.
After that, Tamara Pavlovna—his mother—seemed to sense weakness and went on the offensive. An experienced strategist, she didn’t strike at her son, but at Anya.
She called her during the day.
“Anyuta, dear, hello. Sorry to distract you. I’m not telling Olezha, I don’t want to upset him—he’s going through such a difficult period, worrying about everything, my boy…”
“What happened, Tamara Pavlovna?”
“Oh, it’s nothing… Just small things… My old refrigerator is really bad now. The freezer doesn’t work, everything leaks. I bought some meat on sale and it spoiled… But it’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll manage somehow—bread and water, as long as Olezha doesn’t get nervous.”
It was manipulation. Anya, with her habit of treating and saving everyone, bit right into the hook.
That evening she told Oleg about the call anyway.
“What?! She complained to you?! God… what have I done to my own mother! She’s afraid to ask her own son for help and complains to his wife! Anya, this is disgraceful! I’m not a man, I’m a rag if my mother is living on bread and water because of me!”
Now buying a new refrigerator wasn’t Tamara Pavlovna’s whim—it was the only way to save Oleg from guilt. Anya, his loyal rescuer, couldn’t refuse.
“We have to fix this immediately!” Oleg said.
The next day, a new refrigerator was bought—on a loan taken out in Anya’s name, because Oleg had no official job. The down payment was made from her credit card because the “shared ship’s fund,” as it turned out, had already been completely spent on the Bolshoi tickets.
Anya stood in the appliance store signing a loan agreement equal to three of her salaries. The rocking of their “family ship” was getting worse, and she realized in horror that the helm hadn’t been in her hands for a long time.
The 24 hours had been brutal. During the night they brought in an elderly man after a massive heart attack. Anya and the doctor fought for his life for nearly three hours—reviving him, restarting him, again and again—but at five in the morning his heart stopped for good.
She walked home like a ghost, the world existing somewhere apart from her. The only thing she wanted was to reach her apartment. She opened the door with her key; cheerful voices drifted from inside. She walked into the room and froze in the doorway.
In an armchair, lounging with one leg crossed over the other, sat Tamara Pavlovna in a new silk dress. On the small table next to her were cups and a plate of pastries. And in front of her sat Oleg with Anya’s laptop, showing his mother something on the screen.
They looked like a happy, well-off family.
“Oh, Anyuta, hi! We’re picking out a birthday gift for Mom!” Oleg announced brightly. “I decided she deserves more than just some theatre—she deserves a real, royal vacation! We’re sending her on a cruise! Around the Mediterranean!”
He turned the laptop screen toward Anya with pride. The picture showed a gleaming white liner, and beneath it— the price: 250,000 rubles.
Anya knew that number. She saw it every morning when she opened her banking app—those were her “mortgage” savings. The money she’d put away for years, a thousand here, two thousand there, from every paycheck, every extra night shift. It was her cherished dream: to get her sick mother out of the cramped communal apartment where she’d lived her whole life.
All of Anya’s long-term exhaustion—her habit of giving in, her rescuer syndrome, her love for this charming, lying man—burned to ash in a single moment.
She didn’t scream. She simply walked up to Oleg, and without a word, closed the laptop.
“What are you doing?! We’re choosing!”
“You’ve already chosen, Oleg.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. ‘We’ is over. There are my two hundred and fifty thousand that I saved to get my mother out of a communal flat. And there’s my apartment, where you decided to arrange yourself a very comfortable voyage at my expense. So starting this second, you will pay back your captain’s debt to your mother—on your own.”
“Why you… you… ungrateful! I did everything for you! I showed you life! And you—because of some cursed money! Petty, small-minded little soul!”
“Leave, Oleg. Your ship has finally come to your pier. Only it’s not a liner full of gold—it’s a little lifeboat with room for just the two of you: you and your eternal debt.”
He rushed into the bedroom and started angrily throwing his things into a bag. They left, slamming the door loudly.
Anya stayed standing alone in the middle of the room and cried for the first time in many, many years. She wasn’t crying from grief—she was crying from relief.
That same evening, Anya called a locksmith and changed the locks. She didn’t lie down in their shared bed, which still held his smell. She curled up in her old armchair, covered herself with a blanket, and fell into a deep sleep. She had taken back her quiet harbor.
Six months passed. Life slowly but surely returned to its course. Anya still worked in cardiology, still took extra shifts, still saved other people’s fathers and mothers.
One day, stopping by the pharmacy after work for vitamins, she ran into a mutual acquaintance—Lyuba from the next building.
“Anyuta, hi! I didn’t even recognize you! You look fresher, prettier! Divorce did you good!”
Lyuba poured out all the news. Oleg never found his “great voyage.” Pride wouldn’t let a former “captain” take a job as an ordinary logistics manager. He was sitting at home with his mother, telling her fairy tales about a “global crisis” and “short-sighted employers.”
And Tamara Pavlovna, cut off from Anya’s money flow, aimed all her pent-up energy at her son.
“She nags him morning till night!” Lyuba giggled. “Every single day she reminds him about the dacha she sold. And now about the cruise that never happened too! Says that Zinka went and brought back photos, while she sits like a fool in her little Khrushchyovka! He’s climbing the walls from her!”
Anya listened without gloating, with a sense of detached relief. She wished Lyuba a good day and went home.
Her mother was waiting for her there. A month earlier, Anya had moved her in without hesitation. Yes, her one-room apartment had become cramped. The dream of a new, bigger place was pushed off into an uncertain future. But when Anya walked in and saw her mother dozing in her favorite chair, she gently approached and covered her with a blanket.
Anya looked at her dear face, her gray hair, and for the first time in long, long years she felt not cramped, but full. Her small, modest ship had weathered a nine-point storm and finally entered its quiet harbor. And the captain of that ship was Anya alone.
