“Anna, I know you’re home! Open the door right now!”
Lidiya Pavlovna’s voice cut through the front door, but Anna stood perfectly still, one hand covering her mouth and nose. Her eyes began to sting — not from hurt, but from the suffocatingly sweet perfume already drifting into the apartment. Through the peephole, she could make out the familiar figures: her mother-in-law in a fur hat, and Oksana beside her, clutching a bottle of perfume.
The pounding grew more forceful. Anna did not move. Her throat was itching, her lungs tightening under the thick, sugary scent.
“This is just rude!” Oksana complained from outside. “We’re family!”
Anna stepped back from the door, understanding one thing with sudden clarity: these were not visitors. This was an invasion.
Three years earlier, Anna had believed herself to be счастливой. At thirty-two, she had everything she had worked for: a job as an analyst at an IT company, her own apartment, and a relationship with a man who seemed to understand her.
She had bought the apartment from her brother four years before. After their parents died, the two of them had spent months trying to decide what to do with it. Her brother wanted to sell. Anna wanted to keep it. In the end, she took out a loan and paid him half the value. Every square meter had cost her effort, overtime, and sleepless nights over projects. The apartment became her fortress — the one place where she could truly be herself.
She had met Ilya at a machine learning conference. He worked in a neighboring division of a large bank, building algorithms for risk evaluation. During lunch, they discovered they both preferred Python over other programming languages and both had a deep dislike of corporate parties.
“I hate when coworkers pry into your private life and pretend it’s casual friendliness,” Anna had admitted.
“I usually say I’m allergic to alcohol,” Ilya had replied with a grin. “That makes them back off fast.”
Their relationship grew slowly and comfortably. No dramatic declarations, no moonlit promises. Just two people who enjoyed sitting quietly side by side over laptops or discussing new libraries for data analysis.
Ilya lived with his mother and younger sister in a three-room apartment across the city. He did not say much about his family.
“My mom likes to control everything. After my father died, she became even more anxious. Oksana… well, she’s creative. Works in a beauty salon. She’s always experimenting with her appearance.”
Anna postponed meeting them for six months. Her instincts had not been wrong.
The first meeting happened in a restaurant. Lidiya Pavlovna — a heavyset woman with flawless hair — looked Anna over with open appraisal.
“Ilyusha said you’re a programmer?” she asked, doubt plain in her voice.
“I’m a data analyst.”
“Oh, computers…” Lidiya Pavlovna said with a dismissive grimace. “Bad for the eyes. And bad for a woman’s health too.”
Oksana, like a smaller version of her mother but with vivid red hair, examined Anna with unconcealed curiosity.
“You don’t wear makeup at all?” she asked.
“I’m allergic to most cosmetics.”
“How inconvenient,” Oksana drawled, exchanging a glance with her mother.
Later, when Anna stepped away to the restroom, she overheard Lidiya Pavlovna whispering loudly enough to be heard:
“She’s so colorless. Ilyusha could have found someone brighter.”
After the wedding — a modest civil ceremony followed by dinner with close family — Anna’s life changed. Lidiya Pavlovna and Oksana began showing up every week.
“We’re family now!” her mother-in-law declared on the third day after the wedding as she walked into the apartment without being invited.
They came unannounced. Anna would return from work exhausted, longing for a shower and silence, only to find the “relatives” already there.
“It’s a little dusty in here,” Lidiya Pavlovna would remark, running a finger across a shelf.
“And what kind of food is this?” Oksana would ask, peering into the refrigerator. “Nothing but vegetables. Ilya needs meat!”
But the worst part was the smell.
Lidiya Pavlovna wore heavy oriental perfumes. Oksana preferred sickly sweet floral scents. Inside the closed apartment, the two fragrances mixed into a suffocating cloud.
Anna’s reactions always started the same way: first a tickle in her throat, then coughing, dizziness, and a feeling of suffocation. She tried opening the windows discreetly, but Lidiya Pavlovna would immediately protest:
“What is with all these drafts? Do you want us to catch cold?”
After every visit, Anna spent an hour airing out the apartment, took antihistamines, and rinsed her nose with saline. Sometimes the reaction was so severe she could barely eat afterward.
“Maybe you should ask them not to wear perfume,” Ilya suggested once, seeing how bad she looked.
“I don’t want to start a conflict. They’re probably not doing it on purpose.”
But each time, the scent grew stronger. It was as if Lidiya Pavlovna and Oksana were competing to see who could leave the most lasting trace behind in the apartment.
Anna began to dread going home. As she approached the building, she would instinctively smell the stairwell, trying to detect the familiar perfume before she even reached her door. Her own apartment no longer felt like a refuge.
“You’ve seemed tense lately,” Ilya noticed.
“I’m just tired from work.”
She could not bring herself to explain that it wasn’t work exhausting her. It was the constant expectation of intrusion. The strain of smiling when she wanted to scream. The humiliation of feeling like a stranger in her own home.
That Thursday, Anna left work early. She had finished an urgent project and decided to reward herself with a long walk. The weather was clear and cold. She walked slowly, thinking about the weekend ahead.
As she neared the building, she noticed two familiar figures standing near the entrance. Instinctively, she stopped behind the corner.
Lidiya Pavlovna and Oksana were talking animatedly. Oksana reached into her purse and pulled out a bottle of perfume — Anna instantly recognized the bright pink case.
“More,” Lidiya Pavlovna said.
Oksana generously sprayed perfume onto her mother’s neck, then onto her scarf, then all over herself.
“In case she tries opening the window again,” Lidiya Pavlovna said with a smirk. “She shouldn’t get too comfortable. She needs to know her place.”
“Mom, what if Ilya finds out?”
“What exactly would he find out? That we use perfume? That’s not a crime. And this so-called allergy his wife claims to have… who can prove it? Maybe she’s just hysterical.”
Anna felt the blood drain from her face.
Everything suddenly made sense.
It had never been an accident. Never simple carelessness. It was deliberate. A calculated psychological attack.
Anna quickly walked around the building, entered through the back entrance, went up to her floor, slipped into the apartment, and locked the door from the inside. Then she sat down on the small bench in the hallway and waited.
Five minutes later, the doorbell rang.
Sharp. Insistent. Demanding.
The familiar suffocating scent was already creeping beneath the door — even through the closed entrance, it was finding its way inside.
Anna did not move.
“Anna! We know you’re home!” Oksana’s voice sounded irritated.
Anna stayed where she was, one hand pressed against her chest, feeling the burn rise in her throat.
“This is outrageous!” Lidiya Pavlovna cried from outside. “I’m calling Ilya!”
The bell kept ringing. Again and again. Then came the pounding.
“Anya, open up right now! We’re family!”
Anna said nothing. For the first time in three years of marriage, she did not let them in. She sat motionless on the bench, listening to their indignant voices on the other side of the door, and felt a strange, unfamiliar calm.
The decision had been made.
They remained outside for nearly twenty minutes. Lidiya Pavlovna put on a full performance in the stairwell, loudly complaining to invisible neighbors about her rude daughter-in-law. Oksana kept calling Ilya, but he did not answer. Eventually, their footsteps faded, and the entrance door downstairs slammed shut.
Anna sat in the kitchen, methodically drinking glass after glass of water. Her throat still burned from the perfume that had seeped into the apartment, but she did not open the windows — she was afraid they might hear movement from outside.
When Ilya came home that evening, he was met by an unusual silence. Anna was sitting in the living room with her laptop, absorbed in work.
“Mom called,” he said. “She said you didn’t let them in.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why?”
Anna closed the laptop and looked at her husband.
“Sit down. We need to talk.”
She told him everything: the attacks she had hidden for months, the handfuls of pills she took after every visit, the scene she had witnessed outside the building that afternoon.
As she spoke, Ilya’s face shifted from disbelief to shock, then to anger.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I thought it would pass. That they’d eventually get used to me, maybe even accept me. I didn’t want to force you to choose.”
“Anna,” he said, taking her hands, “you are my wife. My choice was made a long time ago.”
The next day, Ilya went to see his mother alone. The conversation was not easy.
“She’s turning you against your own mother!” Lidiya Pavlovna shouted, pacing through the living room.
“Mom, Anna is not inventing this allergy. She has medical records, prescriptions, proof. This is serious.”
“Maybe she just doesn’t like how we smell! She’s looked down on our family since the very beginning!”
“So you decided to smell even stronger? On purpose?”
Lidiya Pavlovna fell silent, realizing too late that she had revealed herself. Oksana, sitting in an armchair, turned her face toward the window.
“This is our home, Mom. Anna has every right to decide who enters it and who doesn’t. And if you can’t respect her health and her boundaries, then you don’t belong there.”
“Then choose — us or her!” Oksana shouted.
“I already chose. Three years ago, when I married her.”
Ilya placed the keys to his mother’s apartment on the table.
“Call me when you are ready to apologize to my wife and behave like adults.”
The next two weeks passed in silence. Lidiya Pavlovna did not call. Oksana removed Anna from social media and began posting captions about “real family” and “blood ties.” Ilya did not react. He methodically ignored every attempt to provoke him through mutual acquaintances.
Two months passed.
Anna stood by the window, watching the snow fall. The apartment smelled like home again — coffee, fresh baking, clean air untouched by perfume.
“Mom wants to meet,” Ilya said, wrapping his arms around her from behind. “In a neutral place. She promises… to behave.”
“No perfume?”
“I made that very clear.”
Anna thought for a moment. She had no illusions — Lidiya Pavlovna would not transform in two months. But trying to establish boundaries was still worth something.
“All right. But the first time she crosses the line, I’m leaving.”
“That’s fair.”
They met in a café with good ventilation. Lidiya Pavlovna arrived without perfume, though her lips were pressed into a thin line. Oksana pointedly ignored the invitation.
“I’m prepared… to try,” her mother-in-law managed at last. “Ilya means a great deal to me.”
“He means a great deal to me too,” Anna replied calmly. “That’s exactly why I want everyone to feel safe and respected.”
Lidiya Pavlovna flinched slightly, but said nothing.
It was not reconciliation.
It was more like a truce.
Fragile, temporary, imperfect — but necessary.
