My name is Dasha. I work as a financial auditor, which means I’m used to seeing through not only tangled accounting reports, but people as well.
My husband Igor, on the other hand, sincerely believed he possessed the cunning of Professor Moriarty and the elegance of James Bond. In reality, his talent for espionage ended exactly where my ability to add two and two together began.
About three years ago, our family suddenly entered what Igor called a Great Economic Crisis on a domestic scale. He started coming home every evening with the face of a man who had personally been holding up the collapsing national currency with his bare hands.
“Dashunya, times are hard,” he would sigh heavily, spreading a generous layer of farm butter on his sandwich — butter bought, by the way, with my money.
“They’ve cut bonuses at work. No more premiums. My salary has shrunk. We’ll have to tighten our belts somehow.”
Igor’s version of tightening belts was very peculiar — and extremely comfortable for him.
First, he gracefully stopped contributing to the utilities.
“Well, you already pay them automatically from your card,” he said. “What difference does it make? Let it stay that way.”
Then he forgot the way to the supermarket.
“I get lost with all those discounts and special offers. You’re better at that. You have an eye for it.”
Soon after that, he generously handed me the honorable right to pay for our vacation as well.
Meanwhile, his own salary disappeared into thin air with the skill of David Copperfield. In simple terms, my husband had started quietly hiding money from me.
The situation was made worse by my dear mother-in-law, Zinaida Pavlovna. This woman was made of reinforced concrete principles, a persistent smell of heart drops, and a deep, almost religious conviction that I was robbing her precious boy.
Her visits resembled a medieval invasion. She arrived without warning, conducted a strict inspection of the fridge, and collected tribute in the form of my nerve cells.
“Darya,” Zinaida Pavlovna would announce tragically, holding a piece of Parmesan between two fingers as if it were radioactive waste. “Why such extravagance? Igorek is working himself to death. He’s pale as a moth! And you buy cheese at the price of a gold bar. In our day, a good wife protected her husband’s every coin.”
I would only smile sweetly without looking up from my laptop.
“Zinaida Pavlovna, I’d be happy to feed Igor nothing but barley and holy air, but his delicate soul requires Parmesan. Besides, this cheese was paid for with my card. So your son’s little coin is perfectly safe, wherever it may be hiding.”
Then my mother-in-law would turn to her son and finally get to the real purpose of her visit.
“Igorek, my dear boy… the roof at my dacha is falling apart. The slate is crumbling completely. One good rain and everything will be flooded. My whole harvest will rot. Couldn’t you help your mother with a little money for repairs?”
Igor’s face would instantly change. He would assume the expression of an orphan from a Charles Dickens novel.
“Mommy, I’d help with all my heart,” my husband would whisper tragically, avoiding eye contact. “But we’re going through a dark period ourselves. A crisis! We barely scrape together enough for food. What roof? We’re just trying not to starve. There’s no money at all. I couldn’t even save up for new winter tires.”
Zinaida Pavlovna would press her lips together so tightly they turned into a barcode, then glare at me as if she could burn holes through my forehead.
“A husband and wife share one wallet! You could help your mother, you selfish man!”
I would only nod, mentally placing a fat checkmark in my head. So, Igorek was crying poverty to his mother too — and refusing to help her by implying I was eating up all the money. Very interesting.
The truth came out in the most ridiculous way possible.
One beautiful Saturday, Igor went fishing, and I decided to hang a new picture in the hallway. I climbed up to the storage shelf to get my husband’s sacred little toolbox.
I pulled down a dusty box from a power drill — the same drill Igor had used exactly once in his life, to make one hole in the wall and several in my patience.
There was no drill inside.
Instead, there was a thick, tightly packed envelope.
I sat down on the stepladder and opened it.
Inside were fat stacks of cash smiling up at me. Rubles, dollars, and even a little pile of euros.
As a true auditor, I quickly counted the capital.
The amount was enough not only to replace the roof on Zinaida Pavlovna’s dacha, but to buy the entire dacha itself — along with Zinaida Pavlovna, the chairman of the gardening association, and half the neighborhood.
My beloved little swindler had been hiding money on a Hollywood scale.
While I paid for utilities, groceries, his dentist appointments, and cat food, Igor had been carefully stacking his salary inside a plastic case.
Should I throw a tantrum? Smash plates? Meet him at the door with that envelope and scream?
Absolutely not.
I know very well that revenge is a dish best served not just cold, but frozen in liquid nitrogen.
I carefully placed the envelope back where I had found it, closed the box, and began developing a plan.
If my husband wanted to play poor, then we would play poor so convincingly that Stanislavsky himself would have stood up, applauded, and shouted, “I believe it!”
On Monday, Igor came home from work and, as usual, headed straight to the fridge. He opened the door and froze.
Inside, it was as empty as the head of a reality-show contestant. On the middle shelf stood one lonely aluminum pot.
“Dasha? Where’s the meat? Where’s the sausage?” His voice trembled.
“Igoresha,” I said, stepping out of the room wrapped in an old down shawl purely for dramatic effect. “You were right. The crisis has hit us with full force. My clients are delaying payments. I’ve reviewed our budget.”
I paused and sighed.
“We must survive. In the pot, there are plain noodles. No butter. Butter is now an unaffordable luxury.”
Igor ate those plain noodles with the face of a man chewing his own tongue.
The next day, I canceled the cable TV and home internet.
“We’re saving on electricity, darling,” I reported cheerfully under the light of one dim bulb in the hallway. “I didn’t even turn on the washing machine today. I washed your work shirts by hand in the sink with laundry soap. The smell is unusual, of course, but just think how much we’re saving for the family budget!”
By the end of the week, Igor had genuinely lost weight.
He couldn’t go to cafés with his colleagues because “there was no money,” and asking me for lunch cash would have contradicted his own legend.
He couldn’t open his secret stash either, because then he would have had to explain where it came from.
He had fallen into the very trap he had built with such care.
On Sunday, Zinaida Pavlovna arrived without declaring war.
When she saw her son gloomily chewing plain buckwheat and washing it down with tea from a bag I had personally brewed for the third time just for color, she clutched her heart.
“What are you doing to my son, you monster?” she howled across the kitchen. “He’s become transparent! Nothing but cheekbones!”
“Zinaida Pavlovna!” I cried, throwing up my hands dramatically and forcing out an incredibly convincing tear. “We’re in trouble! Igor told you himself — there’s no money at all! His salary has been cut to pennies. I’m carrying us as best I can, working two jobs. Yesterday, I almost took my winter coat to a pawnshop just to buy him some vitamins…”
Zinaida Pavlovna stared at Igor in shock.
“Son… is this true? Have you become so poor that your wife is pawning her coats? And you told me these were only temporary difficulties? How could you bring your family to such shame?”
Igor sat there red as a boiled lobster.
He physically could not say to his mother, “Mom, calm down, I’ve got a fortune hidden in a drill box.”
“But do you know what the worst part is?” I lowered my voice to a tragic whisper, making my mother-in-law lean closer until her nose almost touched the empty sugar bowl. “Zinaida Pavlovna… you called him selfish. You scolded him for not helping you with your roof. You thought he was lying about having no money. But I accidentally discovered the truth.”
I rushed into the hallway, took the same thick envelope from the storage shelf, returned to the kitchen, and placed it on the table in front of my speechless mother-in-law.
“Igor is a saint,” I declared with theatrical emotion worthy of the stage.
“He is not poor. He is a martyr! All these years, he has been depriving himself. He went hungry. He wore old shoes. He let me pay every bill. He lived almost in poverty… and for what? For YOU!”
Igor’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
He jerked toward the table, reaching for the envelope, but my icy warning look nailed him to his chair.
“Here,” I said, slapping my palm loudly on the stacks of money, “is the money. His secret savings. He has been putting it away for almost three years. Little by little, denying himself everything.”
I turned to Zinaida Pavlovna with a trembling voice.
“He wanted to surprise you. He wanted to fix that suffering roof at your dacha, send you to the best spa resort in Karlovy Vary, and pay for those Swiss dental implants you’ve been dreaming about.”
Zinaida Pavlovna began to tremble all over.
Her hands, guided by some ancient instinct of accumulation, grabbed the envelope with a death grip. She looked at her son with eyes full of tears, shame, and motherly remorse.
“Igoresha…” she sobbed, pressing the fat envelope to her chest. “My golden boy! And I, old fool that I am, kept reproaching you! I thought you were greedy, that you didn’t want to help your own mother. But you… you sacrificed your youth on the altar of your mother’s happiness! Forgive me, my son!”
Igor’s face looked like a plaster mask of antique suffering.
If he opened his mouth now and said, “Mom, give that back right now, I was secretly saving for a new SUV behind my wife’s back,” he would destroy forever the image of the perfect son and reveal himself as a complete monster.
He was trapped in a dead end built from his own lies and greed.
“Well then,” I said, smiling radiantly as I brushed an invisible speck of dust from my blouse. “Peace and family harmony have been restored. Zinaida Pavlovna, I suggest you start repairing the roof tomorrow, so Igor can enjoy seeing the fruits of his long suffering.”
Then I walked to the hallway closet, rolled out the suitcase I had packed in advance, and gently patted its plastic handle.
“And what… what is that?” Igor croaked, suddenly impoverished and morally destroyed, staring at the suitcase in horror.
“This, my dear, is your luggage for a light start into a bright future,” I answered casually.
“My mission in this marriage is complete. I helped you become the perfect son. I’ll file for divorce tomorrow. As you remember, the apartment is mine and was bought before the marriage. So leave the keys right there on the little table.”
I opened the front door wide.
“And one more thing, Igoresha… take the empty drill box with you. Who knows? Maybe you’ll want to start saving for something else.”
Then I closed the door behind him, leaving Igor on the other side of the landing — finally alone with his happy mother, her brand-new roof, and the ruins of his little Machiavellian plans.
