Ilya burst into the room looking as though he was about to declare war. Dasha didn’t even lift her eyes from the magazine. She had long ago learned to recognize his moods by the sound of his footsteps, and the heavy stomping she heard today promised nothing good.
“So, here’s how it’s going to be,” he began from the doorway, his voice already strained. “I’ve been thinking. We sell this dump and buy a proper apartment. Together. In both our names. Like normal married people.”
Dasha slowly turned the page.
“Interesting. Have you decided anything else for me while you were at it? Maybe I should change my hairstyle? Or my last name?”
“Stop making fun of me!” He jerked angrily. “I’m serious! How long am I supposed to live in your apartment? I feel like some kind of freeloader here!”
Dasha finally looked up. There was something in her eyes that should have warned Ilya to be careful, but anger had already clouded his judgment.
“A freeloader? Interesting choice of word for someone who lives here, eats here, sleeps here, and doesn’t pay a single ruble toward the utilities. Go on. I’m enjoying your logic.”
“Are you mocking me?” Ilya started pacing around the room. “I’m your husband! Your husband! Do you understand what that means? I should have some right to the place where I live!”
“You do have a right to housing. The Constitution guarantees that. But a right to my apartment? That’s an entirely different story.”
“What difference does it make whether it’s yours or mine?”
Dasha put the magazine aside and looked at him with such calmness that he involuntarily stopped moving.
“It makes an enormous difference, Ilyusha. When your grandfather left you an inheritance—oh, wait, he didn’t. Your sister got his apartment. How much did she give you? A hundred thousand out of pity? And what did you do with it? Bought a car you wrecked six months later?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything. My grandmother sold land that had been in our family for three generations. Land her great-grandfather once worked with his own hands. My mother sold a one-room apartment she had inherited from her father. And with that money, I bought this apartment. Not you. Not ‘we.’ Me. Do you understand the difference now?”
He was trembling with anger, but he had no argument.
“So I’m nobody to you?” His voice cracked. “Five years of marriage, and I’m still nobody?”
“You’re my husband. Or at least you were acting like one until you started behaving like a raider trying to seize someone else’s property.”
“I’m not trying to seize anything! I’m asking for fairness!”
Dasha stood up. She was a full head shorter than him, yet at that moment it somehow seemed as though he was the one shrinking.
“Fairness? Fine. Let’s talk about fairness. Your grandfather left everything to Katya. Why? Maybe because she visited him every week? Maybe because she was the one who brought him home from the hospital after he broke his leg? When did you last visit him? A year before he died? Two?”
“That’s none of your business!”
“I agree. It isn’t. But the moment you decided to compensate yourself for that disappointment using my property, it became very much my business.”
Ilya stepped toward her, and something desperate flashed in his eyes.
“You don’t understand! My mother has been driving me crazy about this. She keeps saying that I should…”
“And now we’ve reached the most interesting part.” Dasha gave a short smile. “Your mother. Did you know she already came to see me?”
Ilya froze.
“What?”
“A week ago. While you were away fishing with your friends. She came in looking all concerned, sat right there on that sofa, and started explaining how unfairly life had treated her poor little boy. Then she suggested that I should ‘make a compromise for the sake of the family.’”
“She… she only wanted…”
“She wanted my apartment, Ilya. Not your happiness. Not our marriage. My square meters. And do you know what’s funniest? She’s the reason you inherited nothing in the first place. She fell out with your grandfather twenty years ago. She was the one who forbade you from visiting him when you were fifteen. And now it’s convenient for her to make me the guilty one.”
“Don’t you dare talk about my mother like that!” Ilya exploded. “She did everything for me!”
“She did. I’m not denying it. But what she’s doing now isn’t for you. It’s for herself. Because if you get a share in this apartment, she gets another way to control you. Another guarantee that her precious son will never escape her influence.”
“You’re talking nonsense!”
Dasha walked over to the wardrobe and opened it. Then she pulled out a suitcase—the same suitcase Ilya had brought with him five years earlier when he had moved in with her, in love and happy.
“Do you know what surprises me most?” she asked, placing the suitcase on the bed. “It isn’t even that you want a piece of what I own. People get greedy. It happens. What shocks me is how shameless you were about it. ‘We’ll sell it and buy another one together.’ That’s almost childish. Do you really think I’m stupid?”
“What are you doing?”
“Packing your things. You can stay with the woman who cares so much about your financial future. Maybe she’ll sign her apartment over to you. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
Ilya stood watching as one shirt after another disappeared into the suitcase.
“Dasha, wait…”
“It’s too late, Ilya. You chose this road yourself.”
“But I didn’t… I just wanted…” He stumbled over the words, and for the first time there was confusion in his voice rather than anger. “Katya got an entire apartment. An entire apartment! And I got a hundred thousand like some humiliating handout!”
“That wasn’t humiliation. Those were consequences,” Dasha replied without stopping. “The consequences of your own choices. You could have kept in touch with your grandfather. You could have visited him, called him, helped him. You chose not to. And now you want compensation from someone who had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“But we’re a family!”
“Family means sharing life together. You came here trying to take, not to share.”
Ilya’s voice changed. The anger drained out of it, replaced by something almost pleading.
“I lost my temper. You know how it is. My mother kept pressuring me, my sister kept acting superior… I snapped.”
“You didn’t snap. You showed me who you really are.”
Dasha closed the suitcase and clicked the locks shut.
“When people get angry, they don’t suddenly become someone else. They simply stop pretending. For years you pretended to be a loving husband, and now I’m wondering whether you were just waiting for your chance to get your hands on someone else’s property.”
“That’s unfair!”
“Do you know what’s unfair?” She looked straight into his eyes. “That I spent five years living with someone who may have been quietly waiting for the right moment to present me with a bill. Someone who looked at me and thought, ‘What can I get out of this woman?’ That’s what’s unfair.”
Ilya tried to hug her.
Dasha stepped back.
“Don’t. That doesn’t work anymore.”
“But I love you!”
“You love the idea of me. A wife who comes with an apartment. A convenient package.”
She lifted the suitcase and held it out to him.
“Go stay with the person who put all these ideas in your head. Let her comfort you. Maybe in a week we can talk again, when your mind is clearer.”
“Dasha…”
“Go, Ilya. Really. It will be better for both of us.”
He took the suitcase. There were tears in his eyes—whether from hurt pride or from the realization that he had lost far more than he had hoped to gain, even he probably didn’t know.
At the door, he turned around.
“Can you really just throw me out?”
Dasha leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms.
“I’m not throwing you out. I’m giving you time to think. And I’m going to think too. About whether I need a man who, when things became difficult, didn’t come to me for advice but came after my property instead.”
“I can change.”
“Maybe. But you won’t change while you’re living here. You’ll keep looking at these walls and thinking, ‘Half of this could have been mine.’ I don’t want to live with someone looking at my home that way.”
Ilya left. The door closed quietly behind him. He didn’t even slam it.
Dasha remained standing there for a minute, staring at the closed door. Then she took out her phone and dialed a number.
“Hi, Lera. You were right. He tried it.”
Three days later, Ilya returned.
Not with an apology, but with new arguments.
“My mother says you’re obligated to…”
Dasha didn’t let him finish.
“Your mother says a lot of interesting things. For example, she tells the neighbors that I ‘bewitched her boy.’ And she tells the relatives that I keep you ‘on a short leash.’ Want me to continue?”
Ilya went pale.
“How do you know about…”
“It’s a small world, Ilyusha. Especially when your mother likes having loud phone conversations on the balcony at one in the morning. The neighbors aren’t deaf.”
“She’s just worried about me!”
“She’s manipulating everyone around her. And you are her favorite tool. Do you know what the worst part is? She wins either way. If we divorce, you go back to her and crawl under her wing. If I give you a share of the apartment, she gets to brag about how clever her son is. The only people who lose are you and me.”
Ilya sat down.
Not on the sofa. On the floor, right against the wall, like a child who had just been told that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Start by not listening to her. Then ask yourself what matters more to you, without anyone else’s voice in your head: square meters or the person beside you?”
“You, obviously.”
“Words are cheap, Ilya. Prove it.”
She opened the door.
“One more week. Then we’ll talk. And if I hear even one more sentence about a ‘fair division,’ don’t bother coming back at all.”
He walked out.
This time slowly, like a man carrying an invisible weight on his shoulders.
Dasha closed the door and finally allowed herself to take a deep breath.
There was one thing she knew for certain: the apartment would remain hers.
As for her husband, that question was still open.
That evening, Lera called.
“So? How is he?”
“Crushed. But that’s probably a good thing. It means he’s thinking.”
“And what have you decided?”
Dasha was silent for a moment.
“I’ve decided I’m not paying for other people’s mistakes. His mother failed him—she can answer for that herself. His sister got more than he did—he can sort it out with her. But what I have is mine. My family earned it, protected it, and passed it down to me. I’ll only share my life with someone who understands the value of that.”
“That sounds wise.”
“No, Lera. Just fair.”
She ended the call and looked out the window.
Somewhere across the city, in his mother’s apartment, sat the man who only yesterday had still felt like her husband.
Whether he would still be her husband tomorrow depended entirely on him.
But Dasha had already made one decision for herself.
She would never sacrifice what generations of her family had built simply to soothe someone else’s wounded pride.
