Yulia remembered how, as a child, she once begged her mother to buy her colored pencils—not just any pencils, but the kind sold in an embossed tin case. The stationery shop had several different sets, but she fell in love with that particular box because the pencils inside were arranged in two neat layers, like a tiny army waiting to do something grand. Her mother picked it up, checked the price, put it back, and bought the cheapest set instead—eight pencils in a flimsy cardboard sleeve.
“We have enough,” she said.
That word—enough—became the defining word of Yulia’s childhood. One hat for the whole season was enough. Old boots were enough, they still had some wear in them. Stop asking—you’re not little anymore, you should understand.
And yet her father worked at a factory, and her mother handled accounting for a small business. The money was there. Not a lot, but it was there—Yulia understood that once she grew older and began putting the facts together. The neighbors lived about the same way, but somehow they still managed to buy new clothes now and then, take trips to the sea every few years, celebrate birthdays like normal people. In Yulia’s family, everything disappeared into savings.
“You never know what might happen,” her mother would say with that special expression Yulia privately called the face of catastrophe. “What if someone gets sick, what if we lose our jobs, what if something happens to the car?”
The car, by the way, was old and broke down regularly. They never bought a new one—they were saving. Repairs, however, didn’t count, because those were necessary.
At ten, Yulia made peace with the pencils. At thirteen, she made peace with the fact that there would be no birthday cake, only a homemade pie. At sixteen, she made peace with having to wear a secondhand dress to graduation instead of a new one from the store. But when she turned eighteen and it was time to apply to university, she could not make peace with that.
She wanted to study education. Not at the local institute in their town—the small, dreary one with hallways the color of spoiled mustard. She wanted to go to the regional capital, where there was a real university, a real life, a real chance to become a real person. It meant renting a room and paying tuition—there were almost no state-funded places left, and the competition was brutal.
“Mom, you’ve been saving all these years. Please help me. I’ll pay you back.”
Her mother sat at the kitchen table sorting through papers—receipts, bills, the endless household bookkeeping she always seemed to be doing.
“Yulia, it’s not that simple. We have an emergency fund. That money cannot be touched.”
“Then what is it for?”
“For an extreme situation.”
“And me getting an education isn’t one?”
Her mother looked at her with that soft, almost sympathetic expression Yulia hated most of all.
“Apply here. Or get a job and save up yourself. At your age, we achieved everything on our own.”
That was the end of the conversation.
She got into the university in the regional capital. Tuition-based. She passed her exams well, but missed a funded place by just a little. She rented a corner of a room from an elderly woman who let her stay almost for nothing in exchange for help around the house. She got a job at a coffee shop—two evenings a week and every Sunday. Then she found extra work typing documents for some office, editing students’ papers for small amounts of money. She slept six hours a night. Most of the time, she ate whatever pastries were left unsold after her shift at the café—they let the staff take those home.
In her first year, she lost so much weight that when her mother came to visit, she was frightened and suggested bringing her back home.
“No,” Yulia said. “I’m managing.”
By her second year, she was no longer losing weight—she had learned how to stretch a budget down to the last ruble and found better side work. By her third, she was tutoring school students for exams. By the fourth, she graduated with honors and immediately received three job offers.
She chose the one that paid the most: a methodologist position at a large online school. A year later she was promoted. Another year after that, she was already running a small department. The money finally became real—not the kind you count coin by coin. Yulia let herself eat properly, then dress properly, then rent a decent apartment. Every month she put money aside. Not out of fear like her mother, but out of strategy. She knew exactly what she wanted: a place of her own, a space no one could ever take from her.
Her brother Kostya, three years older, drifted through life in his own way. His relationship with their parents was strange: he would show up loud and self-satisfied, then disappear for six months. He had launched some kind of business—Yulia never fully understood what it was, something to do with wholesale trade. Kostya always knew how to speak beautifully about prospects and vaguely about actual results.
They were never especially close. They didn’t fight—they were simply too different. Kostya had clearly grown up as the favorite, though their mother would never have admitted it. He was forgiven for things Yulia never would have been forgiven for. His failures were blamed on circumstances; her successes were treated as something expected.
The call came on a Friday evening while Yulia was sitting with her laptop, comparing apartment listings. She had almost made up her mind—she had found a place in a new building, not downtown but in a good neighborhood with a practical layout. The down payment was ready. All she had left was to take the final step.
“Yulenka,” her mother said, her voice carrying the tone it always had when she needed something and hated asking for it. “Could you come? Or at least… we need to talk.”
“What happened?”
A pause.
“Your father is unwell. He needs treatment. Expensive treatment.”
Yulia closed the laptop.
She came the next day. The family apartment greeted her with the smell of old furniture. Her father was sitting in an armchair—thin, gray-faced, but smiling at her the way he always had: a little guiltily, a little warmly. Her mother bustled about, setting the table, not meeting her eyes.
Over tea, she told her everything. Her father needed medication—costly imported medication. And tests. Consultations with specialists in the region. Possibly procedures.
“Mom,” Yulia said, “you had savings. You spent your whole life putting money away.”
Her mother set her cup down on the saucer.
“We gave it to Kostya.”
Yulia thought she had misheard.
“What?”
“He needed money for his business. Start-up capital. We… we couldn’t say no. He’s our son.”
“I’m your child too,” Yulia said. She said it quietly, without anger, and that made the words sound even sharper. “When I needed money for school, you said it was untouchable. Emergency savings. It couldn’t be touched. In case something happened.”
“Yulia…”
“In case something happened, Mom. Well, something happened.”
Silence stretched between them. Her mother stared at the table. From the next room, her father coughed softly in his chair.
“Kostya should help,” Yulia said at last. “You gave him the money. He owes you now.”
“He doesn’t want contact,” her mother said, and there was something strange in her voice—not hurt, but embarrassment, as if she herself no longer knew how to feel about it. “He says we have… a poor person’s mindset. That we drag him down. That he needs to grow, and we get in the way.”
Yulia looked at her mother. Then she stood, took out her phone, and stepped onto the balcony.
Kostya answered on the third ring.
“Oh, Yulka. Hi. Long time.”
His voice was smooth, slightly patronizing—the way successful people speak when they expect everyone else to acknowledge it.
“Hi. Do you know about Dad?”
“Mom said something. He’s sick, yeah.”
“Not just sick. He needs expensive treatment. Money. The same money our parents gave you.”
A small pause.
“Yul, I get that it’s an unpleasant situation. But you understand how business works, right? I can’t just pull money out of circulation. It’s not a wallet. Everything is tied together—processes, cash flow…”
“Kostya.”
“What?”
“They gave you everything. Everything they saved over twenty years. Because you’re their son, because they love you, because they believed in you. And now your father is sick.”
“Yulia, I’d like to help, honestly. But right now I objectively don’t have any free money. I just bought a car, I have a loan, the monthly payment is huge. And I can’t pull anything out of the business—that would wreck what I’ve built.”
“A car,” Yulia repeated. “You bought a car. With the money our parents gave you for your business.”
“The car is for the business too. Executive class, meetings with partners…”
“Kostya, shut up.”
He fell silent. Apparently he had not expected that tone from her.
“You say they drag you down with their poor person’s mindset. Meanwhile, you’re living off their money. You bought a car with their money. And now your father is ill, and you’re giving me speeches about cash flow.”
“Yulia, don’t do this…”
“You should be paying for his treatment. All of it. That is your debt. Morally and financially.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything! They offered it themselves! I didn’t ask!”
“They offered because they love you more than they love themselves. That doesn’t make it acceptable to use them.”
The conversation went in circles. Kostya defended himself, offered arguments—market conditions, how not everything should be measured in money, how he had a life too. Yulia didn’t shout, but she spoke coldly, firmly, with no softness left. In the end, she managed to force the only concession she could get from him: they would help their parents equally. Half from him, half from her.
“That’s fair,” Kostya said in the tone of a man convinced he had made a generous compromise.
“No,” Yulia replied. “Fair would be you covering all of it. But fine. Agreed.”
She hung up and stood for a while looking down into the old courtyard below—the swings that had creaked there since her childhood, the poplar tree now taller than the third floor, the bench where she and her friends used to sit on summer evenings dreaming of something large and undefined.
When she came back into the kitchen, her mother looked at her with an expression full of hope and something close to shame.
“Well?”
“We agreed,” Yulia said. “We’ll help half and half.”
Her mother exhaled and reached across the table for her hand.
“Yulenka, thank you. I knew you…”
“Mom.” Yulia did not pull her hand away. “There’s something I need to say. Not to hurt you. Just so you understand.”
Her mother withdrew her hand. Braced herself.
“Mom, we spent years living in scarcity so you could hand everything to my brother, is that right? And now you want me to help you pay for medication?”
It did not sound like a scream. More like a statement—an accusation, yes, but spoken without hatred, with that exhausted precision people use when they finally call things by their proper names because they no longer have the strength to pretend.
Her mother didn’t answer at once. She stared at the tablecloth, at her hands, at the cup of tea gone cold.
“I know,” she said at last. “I know that we… that I…” She trailed off. Either the words would not come, or she did not dare to say them.
“I’m going to help,” Yulia said. “Not because I have to. Because Dad is sick and I can’t do otherwise. But you need to understand what that means for me. I was saving for an apartment. I was going to buy one. Now—I don’t know when.”
“Yulenka…”
“No. Don’t pity me now. Just know it.”
She took the evening bus home. Outside the window the outskirts of town slipped by—garages, vacant lots, the lights of gas stations, scattered figures at bus stops. Yulia stared out into the dark and thought about the apartment. About how she had scrolled through listings and imagined where the furniture would go, where the bookshelves would stand all the way to the ceiling, how in the morning she would sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and look out her own window.
Now it would have to wait. For how long, she didn’t know.
Of course it hurt. It would have been strange if it didn’t. It hurt because of the embossed tin pencil box, because of the corner she rented from the old woman, because of Sundays at the coffee shop, because of endless evenings spent editing other people’s term papers. Because she had done all of that alone—and now, once again, she would have to step back from her own life.
But she wasn’t angry. Or not much. Mostly she was tired. Tired in that very particular way that comes when you stop expecting justice and simply continue living.
She took out her phone and opened the spreadsheet with her financial calculations. She changed a few numbers, pushed the dates further out. The apartment had not disappeared. It had only moved farther away, like a horizon you still keep walking toward.
Kostya would probably pay irregularly. She knew that already. Which meant she would have to monitor it, remind him, sometimes cover his share herself and send him the bill afterward. It would be exhausting. But she had learned long ago how to keep moving even when she had nothing left in her. She had learned that in a rented corner, with piles of other people’s papers and unsold pastries for dinner.
The bus stopped. A woman stepped in with a child—a girl of about seven holding a large embossed tin box of colored pencils. Exactly that kind of box.
Yulia looked at it and could not decide whether it was funny, sad, or simply life being cruelly precise in its small ironies.
The girl noticed her glance and hugged the box a little tighter.
Yulia smiled and turned back toward the window.
On Monday, she called the real estate agency and asked them to pause the apartment search. The manager asked whether everything was all right. She said yes, just the circumstances had changed, she would come back later.
Then she called the pharmacy where they had already explained how to order the medicines her father needed. She placed the first order. Transferred the money.
Then she opened her work email. New tasks were waiting. New messages. A new ordinary week.
She poured herself some coffee, sat down at the table, and began to work.
The apartment could wait. She knew how to wait—and she knew how to get what she wanted. That much she knew about herself with certainty, and no circumstance could take it away.
Outside the window of her rented apartment, a thin February snow was falling. Yulia looked at the screen and thought that when she finally had a window of her own, she would put a large flowerpot on the sill with some stubborn plant inside it. The kind that grows in spite of everything.
She already knew exactly which one.
