The morning began with the familiar pounding on the bathroom door.
“Alice, have a heart! I have to leave in half an hour!”
It was Nastya—her roommate in the rented apartment, her best friend, and her trusted partner in the daily struggle of adult life. Alice quickly rinsed the foam from her face, dried herself with a fluffy towel, and hurried into the hallway.
The apartment was cramped. Just an ordinary old two-bedroom flat on the edge of the city, with a tiny kitchen and creaking parquet floors. They shared one shelf in the refrigerator for milk and eggs, while everything else each of them bought separately. Bathroom time was scheduled with military precision. And yet, in that little kitchen, they drank thyme tea in the evenings, laughed until they cried, and felt completely free.
Alice was twenty-four. She worked as an accountant at a furniture factory. Her salary was modest—forty-eight thousand rubles a month. Twelve thousand went straight to rent for her room, another fifteen or so disappeared on basic groceries and transportation. The rest she divided carefully, making sure there was enough left for clothes, inexpensive cosmetics, and embroidery supplies—she loved cross-stitching. Money was always tight, but she took pride in the fact that she depended on no one.
The main rule in the apartment she shared with Nastya was simple: no boyfriends staying overnight. Personal space was sacred.
Maxim had entered Alice’s life a year earlier.
He was twenty-eight, a successful sales manager at a large car dealership, earning close to a hundred thousand rubles a month and carrying himself with the easy confidence of someone who believed he had life figured out. He rented a spacious one-bedroom apartment with a good renovation in a new residential complex closer to the city center.
They were different. Alice was used to saving, planning, and stretching every ruble. Maxim liked comfort, good steaks on weekends, and craft beer bars. But during the honeymoon phase, those differences had seemed insignificant. They had gone to Sochi together on vacation, met each other’s parents, and slipped easily into the illusion of compatibility.
Alice did feel a sense of stability with him, but she was in no hurry to rush things. She liked returning after dates to her little room, where she could throw on an old stretched-out T-shirt and spend half the night bent over her embroidery hoop.
Everything changed one evening in early November.
They were sitting at a corner table in a cozy coffee shop. Wet snow drifted past the windows outside. Alice was warming her chilled fingers around a latte cup. Maxim looked unusually composed and serious.
“It’s time for us to move in together,” he said, looking directly at her. “We’ve been together for a year. What’s the point of running back and forth to each other’s places every weekend?”
Alice smiled uncertainly.
“Maxim, I’ve got Nastya, my things, my whole routine…”
“Let’s look at this logically,” he interrupted, slipping into his manager mode. “From your place to the factory takes more than an hour and two transfers. From my complex, it’s one tram stop. Or a twenty-minute walk.”
It was a strong argument. Alice hated the packed buses in the morning.
“I’ve already done the math,” Maxim said, pulling a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and dragging a paper napkin closer. “Living together isn’t just more convenient—it’s cheaper. We can use a five-envelope system.”
Alice tilted her head, genuinely curious.
“Look,” Maxim said, sketching five squares on the napkin. “The first envelope is rent. My apartment costs thirty-six thousand a month. Split in half—that’s eighteen each. The second is utilities and internet. Four thousand more. Two thousand each. Third—food. Let’s budget thirty thousand a month. Fifteen from you, fifteen from me. Fourth—cleaning supplies and little household things. Let’s say two thousand. A thousand each.”
He was adding it all up in his head as he spoke.
“And the fifth envelope is entertainment. Movies, cafés, bars on weekends. Let’s put ten thousand there. Five thousand each. So the total required contribution is forty-one thousand rubles a month. Everything left over, each person spends on themselves—clothes, loans, hobbies. Fair, right? Fifty-fifty. We’re modern people.”
Maxim set the pen down with satisfaction.
Alice stared at the napkin, and inside her, a slow unpleasant chill began to spread. The numbers did not create the cheerful picture he seemed to think they did.
The first thing that stung her was the fifth envelope. Maxim went out to expensive pubs with his friends almost every weekend, ordering snacks for the whole table. Alice’s version of entertainment was buying a new embroidery pattern for five hundred rubles and walking in the park. She had absolutely no desire to chip in five thousand a month for someone else’s beer.
The second was food. Alice didn’t eat much. Oatmeal in the morning, a lunch container with buckwheat and chicken from home, yogurt or a light salad in the evening. Maxim, meanwhile, was used to a refrigerator always stocked with meat, cheese, good sausage. Thirty thousand for food for two people sounded much more like his menu than hers.
But the worst part was something else entirely.
Forty-one thousand rubles.
Out of a salary of forty-eight.
“Max,” she said quietly, “if I put forty-one thousand into the shared budget, I’ll have exactly seven thousand left to live on. For transportation, clothes, makeup, and a doctor if I get sick.”
Maxim frowned.
“Well, you’re already paying for housing now.”
“I pay twelve thousand for my room,” Alice replied. “And I spend fifteen on food, not thirty. Right now I still have over twenty thousand left after my basics. What you’re suggesting is that I move in with you, become broke, and help fund your nightlife on top of that. At the very least, let’s get rid of the fifth envelope. Everyone can pay for their own entertainment.”
Maxim sighed the way people sigh when talking to a child who just doesn’t get it.
“Fine. No fifth envelope. Then it’s thirty-six thousand from you. But think about the comfort of it. Falling asleep together. Homemade dinners. Watching shows in the evenings.”
Alice didn’t reject the idea immediately. She folded the napkin in half and slipped it into her bag.
“I need to think about it, Maxim. I’m used to calculating everything carefully. Give me a week. I’ll make you a counterproposal.”
He smiled with smug confidence, certain the matter was already settled.
The next day, during a cigarette break outside the dealership, Maxim told his friend Denis about his plan.
Denis, a tall guy in a wrinkled shirt, gave an approving grunt and took a drag.
“Splitting everything fifty-fifty is the way to go, man,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing. Me and Lena have been living like that for a year now.”
“And how is it? You don’t fight about money?” Maxim asked.
“Not at all. On payday we each transfer our share to one card and that’s it. And honestly, bro, it’s nothing but advantages. I come home in the evening—hot dinner is waiting. My shirts are always ironed. The bathroom is clean. Lena’s good at running a home. And I don’t have to cover all the rent myself, so I’m saving money. I’m paying off the loan on my car twice as fast. The trick is to set the rule right from the beginning: the budget is shared, everything is equal. Women like stability.”
Maxim nodded with satisfaction. Denis was right. It really was the perfect system.
At that same time, at the furniture factory, Alice was sitting in Nina Pavlovna’s office.
The chief accountant, a fifty-two-year-old woman with a severe bun pinned tightly at the back of her head, was drinking tea from a saucer during her lunch break. Alice often came to her for advice—sometimes about work, sometimes about life.
After listening to the story of the “five envelopes,” Nina Pavlovna carefully set the saucer down on the table.
“So your gentleman knows how to count,” she said with a dry smile. “Good for him. But tell me, Alice—do you?”
“What do you mean? I already told you, it’s a bad deal for me. I’d lose money.”
“You’d lose more than money. You’d lose time. And health.”
Nina Pavlovna took off her glasses and looked at her sternly.
“Equality, Alice, is when you both get home from work at seven exhausted, order pizza, and collapse on the couch to watch a movie. But if you both get home at seven, and he lies down expecting dinner while you head to the stove, then to the sink, then grab a rag to mop the floor—that’s not equality. That’s a second unpaid shift. He wants to live with you so he can save money on rent and get himself a free maid at the same time.”
Alice blinked. She had not looked at it that way at all. In the apartment with Nastya, household life had always sorted itself out naturally: one of them washed the dishes today, the other did it tomorrow. No one was serving anyone.
“Go online,” Nina Pavlovna advised. “Look up how much cleaning services and home cooking cost in our city. Then make your own calculations.”
A week later, they met again.
This time Maxim invited Alice to his apartment. He had ordered sushi, and as agreed, each of them paid for their own portion in the app.
Maxim lounged on the sofa, waiting for Alice to finally say yes.
Instead, she took her work planner out of her bag.
“I ran all the numbers,” she said evenly. “Your five-envelope plan—without the entertainment fund—could work in theory. We’d each contribute thirty-six thousand for the essentials. But I want to add a sixth envelope.”
Maxim leaned forward, interested.
“For what? A vacation fund? A car?”
“For domestic help.”
The smile slid off his face.
“I’m sorry—what?”
Alice opened her notebook. In neat accountant’s handwriting, she had written out an itemized estimate.
“Look. Cleaning a one-bedroom apartment costs about two and a half thousand rubles. If it’s done once a week, that’s ten thousand a month. Next—cooking. A cook who comes for an hour and prepares simple meals for two or three days charges around fifteen hundred per visit. We’d need that at least twice a week. That’s twelve thousand a month. Add ironing shirts and linens—another five thousand. Total: twenty-seven thousand rubles a month.”
She paused and looked directly at him.
“If we’re splitting all expenses exactly in half, then each of us should contribute thirteen and a half thousand to the sixth envelope. Either we hire people, or, if I do all that work myself, then you pay me that amount out of your own pocket.”
Maxim stared at her as if she had suddenly started speaking Chinese.
“Are you out of your mind?” he finally said. “What cooks? What cleaners? My apartment is thirty square meters! There’s barely anything to clean. And cooking is a woman’s responsibility. My mother worked her whole life and still managed to cook borscht for a family of four. No one paid her for that.”
Alice calmly turned the page.
“As far as I remember, your father fully supported the family. And your mother only worked part-time at a library. But you and I are supposedly entering this relationship as equals. You work nine to six. I work nine to six. If we split money equally, then housework has to be split equally too.”
“I’ll help!” Maxim protested, his wounded pride pushing his voice higher. “What, you think I can’t take the trash out? Or go to the store?”
“Taking out the trash takes three minutes,” Alice shot back. “Making soup, roasting meat, cleaning the stove, and scrubbing the bathroom takes three hours. Maxim, do you actually know how to mop a floor? Honestly. Without streaks. Moving the chairs aside and cleaning properly?”
He hesitated.
“Well… you run the mop over it, and that’s fine. What’s so complicated?”
“And do you iron your own shirts? Or do you take them to the dry cleaners?”
“To the dry cleaners,” he muttered. “But if we’re living together, why waste money when you could just do it? Is it really that hard for someone you love?”
Alice closed the notebook. The sharp snap of the cover echoed through the room like a shot.
“It’s not hard,” she said. “What I don’t understand is why your idea of ‘splitting things equally’ only applies when it benefits you. When it comes to money, you want total equality, even though I earn much less. But when it comes to housework, suddenly you remember tradition, the sacred hearth, and your mother’s borscht.”
Maxim got up from the sofa and began pacing the room.
“You make everything too complicated, Alice. Everyone lives like this. Denis and Lena live like this. No one sits around with a calculator counting plates and chores. This is family, not bookkeeping.”
“That’s exactly why I do understand it,” Alice replied calmly, standing up as well. “Because I am an accountant. I know how to calculate a bad investment. Nastya and I live truly fifty-fifty. On Saturday she mops the floor, and I clean the bathroom. We split money, and we split labor. What you’re offering isn’t a family. It’s a convenient little scheme to save your own budget by using my time and my money.”
She picked up her bag from the ottoman in the hallway.
“We are not moving in together on your terms. Looks like you’ll have to learn how to take care of yourself.”
Maxim stood in the hall with his arms crossed over his chest. Hurt flashed plainly in his expression. He still didn’t understand what had gone wrong with his perfect business plan.
Outside, the air was bitterly cold. The tram stop was empty. Alice climbed into a minibus when it arrived. It would take about forty minutes to get back to her neighborhood through traffic, but she didn’t feel tired at all. On the contrary, she felt astonishingly light inside, as if she had just shrugged off a heavy backpack she had never needed to carry in the first place.
City lights flashed across the window. Alice sat there thinking about how easy it was to get trapped by beautiful words like equality and modern partnership.
She opened the door to her apartment. From the kitchen came the rich, comforting smell of fried potatoes with onions.
Nastya stood at the stove in an oversized house hoodie, stirring the potatoes with a wooden spatula.
“Oh, look who’s back!” she said brightly, turning around. “Wash your hands, we’re about to eat. Did you buy the cheese?”
“I forgot,” Alice said with a guilty smile. “I’ll run downstairs to the twenty-four-hour store in a minute. And I’ll wash the dishes after dinner. Deal?”
“Deal.”
After dinner, Alice brewed thyme tea. They sat at the tiny kitchen table. Alice took out her embroidery hoop and instinctively began counting stitches across the fabric. The green thread lay down smooth and neat.
Her phone vibrated once on the table. The screen lit up with Maxim’s name.
Alice looked at the glowing display. Then she shifted her gaze back to her embroidery, took a sip of hot tea, and calmly switched the phone to silent.
She no longer wanted to calculate anyone else’s envelopes.
She had a life of her own.
And it was worth far more than that.
