“If you want to hold a memorial dinner, go ahead. But no one is canceling my anniversary. I’m turning forty, and that day belongs to me.”
Viktor stopped in the hallway without even taking off his coat. Fine autumn drizzle still clung to his shoulders. It had been raining all day while they buried his father. In one hand he carried a bag of food containers the neighbors had packed up after the funeral meal. In the other was a folded umbrella, its cover still wet.
Svetlana was leaning against the kitchen doorway.
The glow of her laptop lit the table behind her. Judging by the open pages on the screen, she had been ordering something before Viktor came home. She was wearing a new burgundy robe she had bought the previous week, and the sharp smell of nail polish drifted from the bedroom.
“We buried my father today,” Viktor said quietly. “The fortieth day after his death falls on your birthday. November twenty-second.”
“So what?” Svetlana shrugged. “The restaurant is booked. Everyone has already been invited. I paid the deposit.”
Viktor went into the kitchen, put the food into the refrigerator, and sat down at the table.
 
He still didn’t take off his coat.
Outside the window, a streetlamp swayed in the wind. Strangely, Viktor wasn’t thinking about his father anymore.
He was thinking about the beginning.
Twenty years earlier, he had been twenty-three, working as an assistant engineer at a factory while finishing his degree through evening classes. He met Svetlana at a friend’s birthday party.
She was loud, confident, and knew how to become the center of attention in any room.
She told him she was twenty-five and worked in advertising.
A month later Viktor discovered that she was actually twenty-one, and her “advertising job” meant occasionally putting up flyers for a small local company.
When he confronted her, she laughed.
“What difference does it make?”
But four months later, something much more serious happened.
Svetlana called and told Viktor she was pregnant.
He immediately offered to marry her.
 
She refused.
Instead, she asked him for money.
Viktor borrowed money from two coworkers and gave it to her.
Ten days later, someone knocked on his door.
It was Svetlana’s father—a broad, heavyset man in a leather jacket with an unpleasantly direct stare.
“So you abandoned my daughter?” he demanded. “While she’s pregnant?”
That was how Viktor learned the truth.
Svetlana had never used the money for what she claimed. She had given it to her mother to cover an old debt. Then she told her parents Viktor had refused to take responsibility for the pregnancy.
Three weeks later, Viktor and Svetlana got married.
There was no celebration. They simply went to the registry office with their parents.
After the ceremony, Viktor’s mother quietly asked him one question.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
Their son Ilya was born first.
 
Two years later came their daughter, Katya.
Viktor loved both children immediately and without reservation.
His relationship with Svetlana, however, became harder with every passing year.
Arguments started over anything.
He came home late.
He bought the wrong cheese.
He answered a question with the wrong tone.
After particularly bad evenings, Viktor would say, “I’m leaving.”
“Then leave,” Svetlana would reply coldly. “You’ll never see the children again. Not even through court. I know how to explain things.”
So Viktor stayed.
He stayed for Ilya and Katya.
He stayed because on weekends they would run into his room carrying a tablet and ask him to help with homework.
Three days before his father died, Svetlana had shown him a restaurant estimate on her phone.
“Look,” she said. “The menu is ready. Guests can choose fish or meat for the main course, plus appetizers. Forty people.”
Viktor looked at the final number.
Two hundred and ten thousand rubles.
 
“Are you serious?”
He handed the phone back.
“Ilya has entrance exams in February. He’s been taking math lessons for three months. Katya needs a new laptop for school because hers barely works.”
“You always do this,” Svetlana snapped, taking the phone away. “Children, children, children. Am I not a person? You only turn forty once.”
“We can celebrate at home. Properly. Without spending a fortune on a restaurant.”
“At home?”
She repeated the words as though he had suggested something humiliating.
“Do you understand what people will say? Nadezhda rented a hall for fifty guests last year. Her husband made sure she had a proper party. And what am I supposed to do? Sit in the kitchen with a bowl of Olivier salad?”
“Then take out the loan yourself.”
“You know I don’t have official income. They’ll only approve it in your name.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
Her voice rose immediately.
“I’ve spent twenty years running around like a hamster in a wheel. Cooking, cleaning, dealing with school…”
Viktor said nothing.
The last time she had cooked a real dinner had probably been sometime in May.
 
Most evenings they ate ready-made food or ordered delivery.
“I said no,” Viktor repeated. “If you want the party, find a way to pay for it yourself.”
“What way?” Svetlana demanded, jumping to her feet. The chair scraped loudly across the tile. “You were the one who always said the children were small and their mother needed to stay home!”
“Katya is sixteen. Ilya is eighteen.”
Katya appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Dad, are you going to eat? I fried some potatoes.”
The following night, Viktor’s phone rang at half past three in the morning.
He had become a light sleeper lately.
The caller was Nina Pavlovna, his father’s neighbor. She lived across the landing and sometimes checked on the old man.
“Vitya, I called an ambulance, but you need to come too. Something’s wrong with him.”
His father died before the ambulance arrived.
A stroke.
Viktor didn’t make it in time.
The next three days disappeared into paperwork and grief.
The morgue.
 
Medical certificates.
The death certificate.
The funeral office on Rechnaya Street, where Viktor sat for two hours because someone else’s documents were being corrected.
Then the bus.
The cemetery plot.
The funeral dinner at his aunt’s apartment.
During those three days, Svetlana barely left the bedroom.
When Viktor returned after arranging the funeral documents, she was sitting with her phone, scrolling through something.
“Yes, darling, write down the address,” she was saying cheerfully into the phone. “The Almaz restaurant, second hall. We start at eight. Dress nicely, but nothing too formal.”
On the dining table, sheets of paper listing birthday menu options lay between black ribbons meant for funeral wreaths.
Beside the photograph of Viktor’s father, which he had brought home to place in a mourning frame, there was a printed page showing hairstyle ideas for Svetlana’s birthday photo shoot.
Ilya stood in the doorway holding his formal jacket.
“Mom, do you even understand what’s happening?”
“I understand perfectly well. Grandpa died. It’s sad. But that has nothing to do with my celebration.”
On the third day, while sorting through his father’s papers, Viktor opened the calendar on his phone.
The fortieth day after his father’s death would be November twenty-second.
Svetlana’s birthday.
 
The same day.
“We have to move the celebration,” Viktor told her that evening. “At least by a week. We’ll be holding the memorial for Dad that day.”
Svetlana didn’t even look up from her phone.
“The deposit is non-refundable. Guests have already bought tickets. Masha is flying in from Yekaterinburg.”
“Mom!”
Katya rarely raised her voice, but she did now.
“This is Grandpa. Dad’s father.”
“Katya, I understand. But I’m not canceling something I’ve been planning for six months because of a date on the calendar. Nothing we do can help the dead.”
Ilya walked over and stood next to his father.
“Dad, Katya and I aren’t going to the party. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Then don’t come!” Svetlana threw her phone onto the sofa, only to pick it up again immediately and check the screen. “I’ll manage without you.”
On the morning of November twenty-second, Viktor woke before everyone else.
He put the kettle on, sliced bread and cheese, and made breakfast.
For the first time in a long while, there was no confusion in his mind.
No hesitation.
No “what if.”
Only a calm understanding that something had already been decided.
Svetlana came into the kitchen around ten.
Her hair was styled.
 
Her nails were freshly done.
A shopping bag containing her evening shoes stood by the coat rack.
“I booked a taxi for seven,” she said, pouring herself coffee. “Don’t wait for me.”
“You’re sure you haven’t changed your mind?” Viktor asked.
“Oh, for God’s sake. You sound like a broken record. No, I haven’t.”
The children were in the living room.
Katya was holding a framed photograph of her grandfather.
Ilya was packing a bag with ritual food—kutya, pancakes, and the bottle of vodka their aunt had asked them to bring.
“We’re going,” Viktor said.
At seven-thirty that evening, the three of them were sitting around Aunt Valentina’s table.
A few relatives had also come.
Viktor’s father’s cousin.
Nina Pavlovna and her husband.
His father’s old friend, Uncle Gena.
Everyone spoke quietly.
 
They remembered how Viktor’s father had always helped people repair their cars.
How he had taught Ilya to hammer nails properly.
How every New Year he brought the children mesh bags full of mandarins.
Viktor’s phone vibrated several times.
He turned it face down.
“Dad,” Ilya said, nodding toward the phone.
“Later.”
Uncle Gena raised his glass.
“He was a good man. A real one.”
After midnight, when most of the guests had left, Viktor finally checked his phone.
There were four messages from Svetlana.
“Only twelve people came out of forty.”
“Masha didn’t make it. Her flight was delayed.”
“Where are all of you?”
“You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”
Viktor put the phone back into his pocket.
Katya was helping her aunt wash dishes.
Ilya was folding chairs.
The next morning Viktor would file for divorce.
 
He already knew which government service office to go to.
Svetlana called the following morning while Viktor was frying eggs for himself and the children.
He switched the phone to speaker.
“You deliberately told people not to come!” she shouted. Her voice was hoarse, and she clearly hadn’t slept. “Half the guests didn’t show up!”
“Svetlana, I’m filing for divorce. I’ve already made the appointment.”
There was silence for about five seconds.
“Have you lost your mind? I’m taking the children. And we’re dividing the apartment. Half of it is mine.”
“The apartment passed to me through my father’s will,” Viktor replied, taking the frying pan off the heat. “It’s inherited property. It isn’t divided in a divorce. You can ask any lawyer.”
“Mom, I’m staying with Dad,” Katya said. “I’m sixteen. I can choose where I want to live.”
“And I’m staying with him too,” Ilya added. “I’m nineteen, just so you remember.”
“He turned you against me!” Svetlana shouted.
“You have a month to pack your things,” Viktor said calmly. “I’m not rushing you, but I don’t want any scenes.”
She kept talking.
About the twenty years she had given him.
About injustice.
 
About how he supposedly owed her everything.
Viktor ended the call.
Then he divided the eggs between three plates.
His eyes moved to the photograph of his father that Katya had placed on the shelf.
“Everything’s fine, Dad,” he said quietly.
The divorce took seven months.
Svetlana hired a lawyer and demanded a share of the apartment, the car, and monthly financial support for herself.
In her lawsuit, the request was described as compensation for “maintaining the household.”
During one hearing, she cried quite convincingly.
“I gave everything to this family. Twenty years of my life. And now they’ve thrown me away like I’m nothing.”
The judge quietly reviewed the documents.
The apartment had been inherited by Viktor.
There was a notarized will.
A certificate confirming his inheritance rights.
An official property registry record.
There was nothing to dispute.
Katya submitted a formal statement saying she wanted to live with her father.
By then, Ilya had already rented a room near the college he had entered in September.
“You turned the children against their mother,” Svetlana told Viktor in the courthouse corridor.
Ilya zipped up his jacket.
“Mom, we saw everything ourselves. Nobody had to turn us against anyone.”
The court rejected Svetlana’s claims to the apartment and the car.
Instead, she was ordered to pay child support for Katya.
It wasn’t much, but it was still child support.
Svetlana moved in with her mother in the Moscow region.
At first she called friends constantly and complained about how unfairly she had been treated.
Then the calls became less frequent.
Eventually, they almost stopped.
 
Viktor remained in his father’s apartment.
Legally, it was his home now.
In the evenings, he and Katya cooked dinner together.
Sometimes Ilya visited and brought groceries.
One Sunday, the three of them went to the cemetery to clean the grave and replace the flowers.
“Dad,” Katya asked on the metro ride home, “do you regret that everything turned out this way?”
Viktor looked at his daughter.
Then he glanced at Ilya, who was scrolling through his phone while eating a pastry he had bought at the station.
“I regret that Grandpa didn’t live longer,” Viktor answered. “But everything else? No.”
Sometimes the hardest decision is also the only right one.
The problem is that people often need a final push before they are ready to make it.
And sometimes that push comes from something that can never be undone.
