“Kiryusha, my dear son, you can’t even imagine how awful I feel!” The voice coming through the phone was so loud it seemed as if it could be heard through two walls and a closed door. “I’m all alone, completely alone, and those neighbors upstairs flooded me again! The wallpaper is already peeling off! My heart hurts, my blood pressure is all over the place, and there isn’t even anyone here to bring me a glass of water!”
Natalia lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling. August was suffocating even at night. The window was slightly open, but the air remained warm and heavy, like the stillness before a storm. The clock on her phone showed 3:14 a.m.
Kirill thought she was asleep.
He had picked up his phone so carefully, gotten out of bed so slowly that the mattress springs had barely creaked, and quietly closed the bedroom door behind him before stepping into the hallway. Almost like a professional.
If only the vibration of his phone hadn’t woken Natalia before he even managed to answer it.
She got out of bed, walked to the door, leaned against the frame, and listened.
She had known Anna Ivanovna for four years—exactly as long as she and Kirill had been married. During those four years, her mother-in-law had never visited without finding something to complain about, never called without eventually asking for something, and never given them a gift without reminding them of it later whenever the opportunity arose.
Anna Ivanovna knew how to suffer convincingly. Someone unfamiliar with her could easily end up in tears after listening to her for five minutes.
Natalia was no longer unfamiliar with her.
“Mom, please, calm down,” Kirill whispered in the hallway.
He was thirty-three years old, yet his voice sounded like that of a schoolboy being scolded for bringing home a bad grade.
“I’m here, okay? Do you hear me? Everything will be fine.”
“How can everything be fine?!” Anna Ivanovna sounded as though she were crying—or at least her voice had taken on exactly the right tone. “I’m dying here while you’re living your own life over there! I don’t bother you, I keep quiet, but a mother is a mother! You only have one mother, Kiryusha. Only one!”
Natalia closed her eyes.
Alone.
Of course.
Apparently, “alone” meant calling her son three times a week and spending an hour telling him how terrible everything was.
“Alone” meant arriving at their apartment unannounced on their wedding anniversary and staying for ten days, rearranging all of Natalia’s things in the bathroom because, according to her, “this way is more convenient.”
Alone and miserable.
“Listen, do you want me to come this weekend?” Kirill offered.
“This weekend?” His mother sounded offended. “You don’t understand! I need to solve this now, Kiryusha. Now! I can’t live in this dump anymore. I need an apartment near you. Somewhere close, so I can see my son, so I won’t be alone…”
“Mom, apartments cost money…”
“What do you mean, money? Are you putting a price on your own mother?”
Natalia slowly returned to the bedroom.
She lay down again and stared at the ceiling, where the shadow of leaves swayed under the light from the streetlamp outside.
She listened for another twenty minutes.
Anna Ivanovna was in top form. She talked about her heart, her blood pressure, the neighbors, her loneliness, and how life was passing her by while her own son never seemed to think about her.
Then, after a long pause, her voice became quieter and much more specific.
“Kiryusha, you have money in your account. I know you’ve been saving. What’s so terrible about withdrawing it tomorrow and helping your mother buy a small studio apartment? I don’t need much. And I won’t sell my apartment here yet. You never know what might happen. I’ll keep it for now.”
Silence.
“Kiryusha?”
“Mom, but that’s…”
“That’s what? Your mother is asking you for help. Is your mother asking for something really such a problem?”
“No, of course not, Mommy…”
Natalia squeezed her eyes shut.
Mommy.
The moment he said it, she knew what would come next.
Agreement.
Kirill had never been able to say no to his mother. Natalia had understood that during their four years of marriage. He could argue, hesitate, sigh dramatically, even protest for a while—but in the end he always did what Anna Ivanovna wanted.
Because otherwise his mother would cry.
And a crying mother was the end of the world for Kirill.
“All right, Mom. Fine. I’ll sort it out tomorrow.”
“Just don’t tell Natasha yet. She won’t understand. You know what she’s like.”
“I know. I know.”
“That’s my good boy. Go back to sleep, sweetheart.”
Natalia heard him remain in the hallway for another minute or two.
Then he slowly returned to the bedroom.
He lay down on his back and stayed still for a long time.
Natalia did the same.
Outside, everything was quiet except for a cricket somewhere in the darkness, chirping endlessly.
August was heavy, hot, windless.
Kirill fell asleep about half an hour later. Natalia could tell from his breathing.
She did not sleep.
She thought.
Thinking was something Natalia was good at. It was part of her job. She worked as an analyst—data, numbers, patterns. She knew how to find logic where none seemed obvious at first, how to reconstruct the whole picture from small clues, how to calculate what would happen if you chose one path instead of another.
Now she was calculating.
There were almost nine hundred thousand rubles in their joint savings account.
Three years of strict budgeting.
Three years without proper vacations, choosing cheaper groceries, wearing clothes longer than they should have, repairing things instead of replacing them.
They were saving for a three-bedroom apartment.
They had talked about having a child. About needing more space. About building a future.
Kirill himself had said that one more year of saving would give them enough for a down payment.
He had looked her directly in the eyes when he said it.
And now, at three in the morning, he was whispering in the hallway:
“I’ll sort it out tomorrow.”
Natalia stared at the ceiling and felt something strange.
It wasn’t anger. Anger would have been easier.
This was colder.
It felt like the silence that comes right before you make an important decision.
She didn’t march into the hallway and start a fight.
There was no point.
Late-night arguments weren’t her style.
She got up, drank some water from the glass beside the bed, looked at her sleeping husband, and lay down again.
She had until morning to think.
By seven, she was already sitting with her phone in her hand.
Kirill was still asleep. If he didn’t have to work, he usually slept until nine.
Natalia quietly went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and while the water heated, opened the banking app.
The transfer took forty seconds.
She wasn’t even in a hurry.
She poured herself tea, added a slice of lemon, and sat by the window.
Outside, the courtyard was slowly waking up. Someone was walking a dog. The elderly man from the first floor carried out his trash. Pigeons strutted along the curb as though they had important business to attend to.
August.
It was already hot.
Kirill appeared around eight-thirty, his hair messy, wearing the expression he always had when something was wrong—the expression of a man who suddenly found the floor much more interesting than his wife’s eyes.
“Morning,” he muttered.
He rummaged through the refrigerator and poured himself some juice.
“Going somewhere?” Natalia asked.
“Yeah. Just some errands. I need to do something at the bank.”
She nodded and looked out the window.
He left twenty minutes later.
She heard the entrance door downstairs slam shut.
Her phone rang forty minutes after that.
She answered on the third ring.
“Natasha.” His voice sounded strange. Quiet. “Natasha, what happened to the account?”
“Nothing happened,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “I transferred the money into my personal account.”
Silence.
“Why?”
“Kirill,” she said calmly, “you went into the hallway at three in the morning. You whispered for half an hour. Did you really think I was asleep?”
The silence on the other end was so complete she could almost hear everything inside him sinking.
“I heard everything,” Natalia continued. “The studio apartment. Your mother. The part where you decided it would be better not to tell me. Everything.”
“Natash…”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
She put down her cup.
“You have two choices now. First: you come home, we sit down, and we talk like adults. About your mother, about the money, about all of it. Second: you go to a notary, and we start dividing our property. Choose.”
She never raised her voice.
That was probably what frightened him most.
Kirill came home twenty minutes later.
Natalia heard him climbing the stairs slowly, as if every step required effort.
The key turned uncertainly in the lock.
He entered, took off his sneakers, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
He looked at her the way people look at something that had always seemed familiar until suddenly, overnight, it became completely unknown.
“Sit down,” Natalia said.
He sat.
He placed his phone on his knees, then slipped it into his pocket. A moment later he pulled it back out again.
His hands didn’t seem to know what to do.
“Listen, I can explain…”
“I’m listening.”
He began talking.
At first his words were hesitant, then faster and louder.
His mother was alone. His mother was unwell. His mother couldn’t continue living like this. His mother was still his mother, after all, and couldn’t Natalia understand that he couldn’t simply ignore her suffering?
The words poured out quickly, as though he had rehearsed the speech on the way home.
Natalia listened.
She didn’t interrupt.
She watched him and remembered how, four years earlier, he had spoken just as quickly and convincingly about something entirely different.
He had said they were a team.
That they were in this together.
That important decisions would always be made together.
“Kirill,” she said when he finally stopped for breath, “you’re explaining why you think this needs to be done. But I want to understand something else. Why did it have to be done secretly? At three in the morning. While I was supposedly asleep?”
He fell silent.
“If you had come to me and said, ‘My mother is in a difficult situation, let’s think about what we can do,’ I would have listened. We would have discussed it. But you chose something else.”
“I knew you’d be against it,” he muttered.
There was so much packed into that sentence—resentment, exhaustion, and something else Natalia privately called cowardice.
“You’re always against things when it comes to Mom.”
“I’m against our joint savings being spent without my knowledge. Those are two different things.”
Kirill stood and walked across the kitchen.
He stopped by the window.
Outside, the August heat shimmered over the courtyard. The asphalt almost seemed to glow.
“She’s alone there, Natash. You don’t understand what that’s like.”
“She isn’t alone. She has an apartment. She has neighbors. She has friends. And she owns something she can sell if she wants to buy a place here. But she doesn’t want to sell it. She wants you to buy another apartment for her with our money while she keeps hers ‘just in case.’ You heard that just as clearly as I did.”
He turned toward her.
His face was tense, almost angry.
“What, did you record everything?”
“I was simply awake.”
Anna Ivanovna called at ten-thirty.
Natalia was in the other room sorting through work papers and pretending to be busy.
Kirill answered in the kitchen.
This time he didn’t close the door.
Maybe he didn’t have time.
Maybe he had realized there was no point anymore.
“So, sweetheart? Did you do it?”
“Mom, there’s a problem…”
“What problem? Kiryusha, I didn’t sleep all night. My blood pressure was one-sixty. I took a pill and I still feel terrible. You promised me.”
“I know, Mom, but…”
“But what? Your mother is speaking to you. Your mother! Or is your wife more important than your mother now? Just say it. I’ll understand. I’m used to coming last.”
Natalia came out of the room.
She stopped in the kitchen doorway and leaned against the frame.
Kirill saw her.
Something shifted in his expression—not quite fear, not quite relief. More like the look of someone finally putting down something heavy after carrying it for too long.
“Mom, wait.”
He held the phone out to Natalia.
She was surprised.
She hadn’t expected that.
She took it.
“Good morning, Anna Ivanovna.”
There was a brief silence on the other end.
Then her mother-in-law’s voice changed instantly. It softened, becoming almost affectionate.
“Natashenka! Oh, I didn’t realize you were there. Forgive us for bothering you so early. I just have this terrible situation…”
“I heard,” Natalia said evenly. “I was awake last night too.”
The pause became longer.
“Anna Ivanovna, I understand that you want to live closer to your son. That’s perfectly reasonable. But Kirill and I cannot afford to buy you an apartment. Our savings are the down payment for our future home. We spent three years building that savings.”
“Oh, Natashenka, I’m not asking forever! I’ll pay everything back once I settle in…”
“You told Kirill you weren’t planning to sell your apartment. You said you wanted to keep it.”
Another pause.
This one was different.
It was the kind of silence that happens when someone gets caught.
“Well, I don’t know how everything will work out yet…”
“Neither do we,” Natalia replied calmly, almost pleasantly. “So here’s what I suggest. You sell your apartment there, and we’ll help you find something suitable here within your budget. We’ll look at listings together. We’ll go to viewings with you. We’ll help with the move. That would be fair.”
“That is not fair!” Anna Ivanovna’s sweet tone disappeared instantly. “You expect me to sell the last thing I have? Kiryusha, do you hear how she’s talking to me?”
Kirill stood by the window, staring outside.
“I hear you, Mom.”
“And? You’re letting your wife talk to your mother like that?”
“Mom,” he paused, “she’s right.”
The silence on the line was absolute.
Natalia could almost physically feel something rearranging itself on the other end as Anna Ivanovna prepared for a new attack.
“So that’s how it is. Your wife is more important than your mother. I devoted my whole life to you. Everything I ever did was for you, and now you…”
“Mom, please don’t.”
“Don’t? I can’t sleep at night, my heart is killing me, and you tell me not to?”
Kirill took the phone from Natalia.
“Mom, I’ll call you tonight.”
He ended the call.
They stood silently in the kitchen.
Outside, the city hummed. Children were laughing somewhere in the courtyard. A pigeon kept bumping against the outside of the window, apparently unable to understand why it couldn’t fly straight through the glass.
“She won’t let this go,” Kirill said quietly.
“I know.”
“She’ll call every day. She’ll say I abandoned her.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at Natalia properly for the first time that morning.
Not at the floor.
Not toward the window.
At her.
“You’re not putting the money back into the joint account?”
Natalia thought for a second.
August blazed outside. The fan in the corner lazily pushed hot air around the room. Somewhere, the kitchen faucet dripped. She still hadn’t gotten around to calling a plumber.
“I will,” she said. “When I know there won’t be any more secret conversations in the middle of the night.”
For the next three days, Anna Ivanovna said nothing.
That alone was remarkable.
Normally she could never stay silent longer than a day. After every argument she would call again the next morning as if nothing had happened, usually with a fresh story about her blood pressure, her neighbors, or some new misfortune.
But this time there was silence.
Kirill became restless.
He kept picking up his phone, checking the screen, then putting it down again.
Natalia watched him and thought: So this is how it works.
Anna Ivanovna didn’t pressure him only by shouting.
She pressured him through silence.
Because for Kirill, his mother’s silence was worse than any argument.
It meant: You have hurt me so badly that I don’t even want to speak to you.
He knew it.
And she knew that he knew it.
On the fourth day, he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He called her himself.
Natalia was working in the next room. Her monitor was filled with spreadsheets, numbers, and graphs.
She lowered the volume on her speakers and listened.
She didn’t walk to the door this time.
She simply caught fragments through the wall.
“Mom, how are you?… I’m worried… Mom, please don’t be like this…”
Then a long silence while Anna Ivanovna spoke.
Then Kirill again, much quieter.
“I understand… I understand, Mom… But I can’t…”
Natalia went back to her spreadsheets.
That evening they drove to the supermarket.
It was an ordinary August evening. The store was ten minutes away, but traffic clogged the exit from their courtyard.
Kirill drove in silence.
Natalia looked out at the city—hot, dusty, glowing in that particular late-summer light when the sun no longer burns as fiercely but still makes you squint.
“She said I chose my wife over my mother,” Kirill said at last, keeping his eyes on the road.
“I know.”
“She said I’m a stranger to her now.”
“It’ll pass,” Natalia replied. “It always does.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Kirill, I’ve known her for four years.”
Natalia turned toward him.
“She said you were a stranger when you didn’t go to her birthday because we were in St. Petersburg. Remember? She said it when you refused to give her money to renovate her hallway. She said it when we didn’t invite her to live with us immediately after the wedding. Every time it’s the same: stranger, betrayal, abandonment. And every time she calls again the next week.”
He pulled into the parking lot and switched off the engine.
For a while he simply sat there looking at the steering wheel.
“That doesn’t change the fact that she’s lonely.”
“No,” Natalia agreed. “It doesn’t. Which is exactly why I suggested a reasonable solution. She sells her apartment, moves here, and we help. We help find a place. We help with the move. We visit. That’s fair.”
“She doesn’t want to sell.”
“I know what she doesn’t want. She wants to keep what she has there and get something here too. At our expense.”
Natalia opened the car door.
“Come on. We still need to make dinner.”
The supermarket was cool and crowded.
Evening rush hour.
Shopping carts overflowing with groceries. Children hovering near shelves of candy. Tired cashiers scanning items without looking up.
Natalia and Kirill walked through the aisles quietly.
She picked tomatoes.
He took bread.
She checked the expiration date on a package of cheese.
He chose bottled water.
Ordinary life.
Strangely ordinary, considering everything.
Near the dairy section, Kirill stopped.
“Natash.”
She turned.
“I should have talked to you. Right when she first brought it up. A week ago. She’s been pushing this idea for a while. I just… hoped it would go away on its own.”
Natalia picked up a bottle of kefir and looked at him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew how the conversation would end.”
He shrugged slightly.
“You’d say no. She’d pressure me. I’d be stuck between the two of you. So I kept putting it off.”
“And did that work out better?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
They reached the checkout and placed their groceries on the conveyor belt.
Kirill reached for his bank card.
Watching that simple, familiar movement—something she had seen hundreds of times—Natalia suddenly felt exhausted.
Not angry.
Not hurt.
Just tired.
Four years.
For four years she had watched him balance between her and his mother.
Every time, she had hoped that eventually he would choose the family they had created—not because someone forced him into a corner, but because he understood, on his own, that this was his responsibility now.
Maybe he would.
Maybe something had finally shifted this time.
Or maybe not.
Anna Ivanovna called again on Friday.
This time she called Natalia directly.
Kirill was in the shower and his phone lay on the table.
Natalia saw the screen and answered.
“Natasha,” her mother-in-law said.
Her voice was dry now, stripped of its former sweetness.
“I need to talk to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve been thinking. About the apartment. I… might see what I can do with mine. Maybe rent it out for now. At least that would give me some income. But I want to know that you’ll help me find a place here. Kirill promised.”
Natalia paused.
Outside, the evening city hummed. Somewhere a gate slammed. Music played in the neighboring apartment.
“If you rent or sell your apartment there and start looking for something here, we’ll help you,” Natalia said. “You have my word.”
“You.”
Anna Ivanovna pronounced the word as though it tasted unpleasant.
“So now you’re the one who makes decisions in this family.”
“Kirill and I make decisions together,” Natalia replied calmly. “That’s exactly why I’m giving you the same answer he is.”
Silence.
“Fine,” her mother-in-law muttered. “I’ll think about it some more.”
Then she hung up.
Kirill came out of the shower five minutes later with a towel over his shoulder.
He took one look at Natalia’s face.
“Mom called?”
“She did.”
“And?”
“She’s thinking.”
Natalia gave a small shrug.
“That’s something.”
That same night, while Kirill slept, Natalia went to the kitchen.
She poured herself a glass of water and opened the window.
August air came through the gap a little more easily than it had a week earlier.
The nights were beginning to cool.
Only slightly.
But still.
The end of the month was approaching.
September would come soon.
Natalia opened the banking app and stood there looking at the screen.
Then she transferred the money back into their joint savings account.
Not because everything was suddenly fine.
Natalia was an intelligent woman. She knew Anna Ivanovna wasn’t going to change overnight. She knew Kirill would find himself caught between his mother and his wife again. She knew there would be more uncomfortable conversations in the future.
She understood all of that perfectly.
But she understood something else too.
Something in Kirill had shifted.
A tiny change, almost invisible.
At the supermarket he had said:
“I should have talked to you.”
He hadn’t defended himself.
He hadn’t accused Natalia of always being against his mother.
He had simply admitted it.
Maybe this was how change actually began.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Without dramatic gestures or beautiful promises.
Just a person gradually beginning to understand that family is not only the mother who has loved you since childhood.
It is also the person you chose to build your life with.
Natalia closed the window.
She rinsed the glass and returned to the bedroom.
Kirill was asleep on his side of the bed, peaceful, without his phone in his hand.
The phone was lying face down on the nightstand.
Natalia got into bed and closed her eyes.
Outside, the city continued to murmur.
It never became completely silent.
But the sound was familiar now.
Almost like silence.
Almost.
Four Months Later
Anna Ivanovna eventually rented out her apartment.
She found tenants through acquaintances—a young couple who paid on time and caused no trouble.
With the rent money, plus some modest savings that apparently existed after all, she rented a one-bedroom apartment about ten minutes away from Kirill and Natalia.
She didn’t buy anything.
She rented.
The decision had been hers, which surprised everyone, including her son.
Natalia suspected that her mother-in-law simply didn’t want to rush.
She wanted to look around.
See how she liked the area.
And perhaps understand what else she might be able to get.
They saw each other roughly once every two weeks.
Kirill visited his mother on Sundays, sometimes alone and sometimes with Natalia.
Anna Ivanovna would set the table and complain about the new neighborhood, the noisy neighbors downstairs, and the price of cottage cheese at the local supermarket.
Natalia drank tea, answered politely, and refused to argue over small things.
It became an unspoken truce.
No handshakes.
No warm smiles.
But no war either.
One afternoon in October, without looking Natalia in the eye, Anna Ivanovna mentioned that she had bought a different kind of cottage cheese this time.
Natalia’s favorite kind.
Natalia thanked her.
Nothing else was said.
But Natalia remembered the gesture.
She and Kirill eventually had a real conversation.
Just once, but it lasted a long time.
It happened late one evening while rain tapped against the windows.
Kirill talked about his childhood.
About how afraid he had always been of disappointing his mother.
About how he had never learned to refuse her because she always looked at him as though he were the only thing she had in the world.
Natalia listened.
She didn’t interrupt.
Then she said one thing.
“I’m not asking you to choose between me and her. I’m asking you to remember that you have your own family now. Your own life. And your decisions affect both of us.”
Kirill nodded.
Natalia didn’t know whether he understood it completely, deep down where it really mattered.
But he nodded.
In December, they submitted their mortgage application.
The savings were still there.
