Four pairs for three people. There’s an extra pair in this house!” Galina Petrovna demonstratively recounted the slippers in the entryway, bending her fingers as she went.
An extra pair? I stepped out onto the landing with relief.
Strangely enough, something that felt like joy spread through my chest. For seven years I’d waited to hear those words. I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself, but I had. The way you wait for a drawn-out performance to finally end—one where you’ve been stuck playing an extra.
“Tatyana!” a shout came from the stairwell. “Where are you going?”
“To breathe,” I answered without turning around.
The elevator hadn’t worked for three weeks. I went down the stairs, counting in my head: seven years—two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days of life under a microscope.
Every day: counting what I ate, what I drank, what I spent on utilities, what I bought.
Every towel labeled “Tanya’s.”
Every cup strictly assigned.
In my jacket pocket was a crumpled slip of paper with a real estate agent’s number. I’d copied it from an ad two weeks earlier and carried it around like a talisman. Or like an escape plan.
I reached the first floor and pulled out my phone.
“Hello, about the apartment on Parkovaya…”
“It’s available. When do you want to view it?”
“Can I today?”
“Come in an hour?”
We agreed. I had one hour to go back upstairs and pack my things. Or not go back at all. In my purse was a bank card—more than a hundred thousand rubles.
I’d saved it for over a year, hiding it even from myself. Five thousand a month, sometimes more—from side jobs Galina Petrovna called “nonsense.”
That “nonsense” had turned into a ticket to freedom.
I went back up. The apartment door was ajar—my mother-in-law must have been waiting for my repentant return. Instead she got calm, businesslike efficiency.
My husband was standing in the hallway, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.
“Are you seriously leaving?” He stared at me as if I’d announced a trip to Mars. “Mom just got upset. Her nerves aren’t in order.”
“Nerves,” I repeated, pulling a gym bag from the closet. “And mine are made of iron, I guess?”
Andrey opened his mouth and shut it again. In seven years he’d forgotten how to see me separately from the family background. I was part of the interior—useful, quiet, not requiring special attention.
I packed jeans, three sweaters, underwear. My makeup bag, documents, phone charger. Everything fit into one bag—that was all I owned after seven years of married life.
“Listen,” Andrey tried to take my hand, “why are you acting like a kid? Over nothing.”
“Nothing?” I pulled my hand away and zipped the bag. “Andrey, your mother counts my slippers. Mine. Slippers. You call that nothing?”
“She just likes things orderly…”
“Orderly is when things are in their places. When someone counts every cup of tea, that’s called something else.”
Galina Petrovna appeared in the doorway with the face of offended virtue. Robe, curlers—an honest-to-God household general.
“Well, here we go,” she said. “Son, do you hear her? She’s making a scene.”
“Galina Petrovna, I’m not making anything,” I said, lifting the bag. “I’m just leaving.”
“Where are you going to go?” Triumph crept into her voice. “You have nothing. No money, no place to live.”
“I do.”
She blinked.
“What do you have?”
“Money and a place.” I walked past them toward the exit. “I have everything.”
“That’s impossible!” Galina Petrovna rushed after me. “Where did you get money? We control everything!”
“Exactly,” I smiled. “Everything—except my evening side work.”
“What side work?”
“Tutoring. Math for schoolkids. Online. While you were watching your TV shows, I was earning my freedom.”
Andrey’s eyes darted helplessly from his mother to me.
“Tanya, wait… we can talk this through…”
“We’ve been talking for seven years,” I said, taking the doorknob. “Enough.”
“You can’t just leave like this!” my mother-in-law screamed. “We’re family!”
“We were family,” I corrected her. “Now you’re a family—and I’m the extra pair of slippers.”
I stepped onto the landing and closed the door. Behind me, muffled voices—my mother-in-law urgently explaining something to her son, him answering in confusion.
For the first time in seven years, they were sorting things out without me.
The apartment on Parkovaya greeted me with the smell of fresh paint and silence. The agent—a woman in her forties with tired eyes—indifferently led me through the rooms.
“All the furniture stays. The owner moved in with her daughter outside Moscow. Forty-eight thousand for the first month plus a deposit.”
I went into the room, sat on the sofa, and froze. Outside the window, trees rustled, but inside—silence. The kind that hadn’t existed for seven years.
No one blasting the TV at full volume, no one commenting on my every action, no one counting how long I sat “doing nothing.”
“Good,” I said.
“Do you want to see the kitchen? The bathroom?”
“No need.” I took out my phone and transferred the money.
The agent shook her head in surprise, but took it. The keys landed in my palm, warm, almost alive.
“We’ll sign the contract tomorrow. For now, you can settle in.”
I was alone. I walked around the apartment slowly, like the owner. Someone else’s furniture, someone else’s curtains—but the freedom to choose when to get up, what to eat, what to think—that was mine.
I was sitting in the kitchen eating cottage cheese straight from the packet when my phone rang.
“Where are you?” Andrey’s voice trembled with indignation.
“Home. In my own home.”
“Tanya, stop this nonsense! This is stupid!”
“What exactly is stupid?”
“Well… everything! Renting an apartment, spending money…”
“My money,” I said calmly. “Earned by me.”
“But we’re husband and wife! We have shared money!”
“Andrey, do you remember the last time you asked my opinion about spending?”
Pause.
“I don’t…”
“I do. Never. You and your mother decided everything. I got instructions.”
“Mom says you made a disgrace of yourself. She says you need to be taught a lesson.”
“A lesson?” I laughed. “I’m a grown woman, Andrey. I’m fifty-three.”
“Then act like an adult. Come back home.”
“I am. I’m living where no one counts me as a burden.”
I hung up and fell asleep in a stranger’s bed. I slept like a baby—deeply, without anxious dreams.
In the morning, calls started coming from relatives.
“Tanechka,” Andrey’s sister sang sweetly, “what nonsense is going on? Mom’s in tears.”
“Irina, your mother asked me to move out. I fulfilled her request.”
“But she didn’t mean harm! She’s just nervous.”
“Nervous for seven years?”
“Well… that’s her age…”
“I have an age too. And I’m tired of spending it on excuses.”
By lunchtime my sister Lena arrived with pastries and the look of a battle-ready ally.
“Good for you,” she said, looking around the apartment. “Finally you came to your senses.”
“Lena, what if I’m wrong?” I doubted myself for the first time in a day. “Maybe I really was too harsh?”
“Tanya, remember what you told me last New Year’s?”
“I don’t.”
“That you envy me. A single divorcée. You envy that I can wake up at noon on Sunday instead of getting up at seven to cook breakfast for everyone.”
“I said that?”
“Word for word. And I thought then: when someone envies loneliness, it’s time to change something.”
That evening Andrey came with a bouquet of roses and the expression of a man ready for long negotiations.
“I talked to Mom,” he said solemnly. “She’s willing to apologize.”
“Good. Let her apologize.”
“So you’ll come back?”
“No.”
“But why?! She’ll apologize!”
“Andrey, and what happens in a week? She’ll start counting my slippers again?”
“She won’t! I talked to her seriously!”
“And what did you say?”
He hesitated.
“Well… that it can’t be like that. That family is more important.”
“And did you say I’m a person too?”
“Well… that goes without saying…”
“It doesn’t, Andrey. Seven years says it doesn’t.”
He left upset, the roses on the table. I put them in a jar and thought: pretty. It had been a long time since anyone gave me flowers. Even him.
The next day Galina Petrovna called herself. Her voice trembled with righteous fury.
“I gave my whole life to this family!” she shouted. “And you! You’re destroying our home!”
“Galina Petrovna, I simply left your home.”
“Where did you leave to?! Nowhere! You think your pennies will last long?”
“They’ll last as long as they need to.”
“And Andrey? Did you think about him? He’s suffering!”
“For seven years I suffered. Now let him think about whether it was worth it.”
“You’re heartless!”
“Maybe. But free.”
She made a show of sobbing into the phone and hung up. And I brewed coffee and sat by the window to read a book. A detective novel about a woman investigator who untangled complicated cases—smart, strong, independent.
A week later Andrey came again. This time with a concrete proposal.
“I found us a two-room place. In a new building. Away from Mom.”
“A good decision,” I agreed. “For you.”
“For us, Tanya!”
“Andrey, do you want to know what I think about in the morning when I wake up?”
“I do.”
“About what the weather will be today. That’s all. Before, I thought: what to cook so no one gets upset, how to dress so there are no comments, what to say so a lecture won’t start. And now—just the weather.”
“And that’s better?”
“It’s honest.”
We fell silent. Outside, children shouted, a dog barked—life went on.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said quietly. “Maybe we really need a break.”
“Maybe.”
“And if I change? Learn to hear you?”
“I don’t know. But we can try.”
“How much time do you need?”
“I don’t know that either. For the first time in seven years, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. And that doesn’t scare me—it makes me happy.”
When he left, I brewed tea and opened my laptop. Three tutoring requests were waiting in my email: math, Russian, exam prep. There was plenty of work.
And there was also plenty of silence, freedom, and the right not to explain my every step.
At fifty-three, it was the perfect time to learn how to live for myself.
