The message came on a Thursday evening while I was chopping salad for dinner. My husband’s phone was lying on the table, screen up—he’d forgotten it in the kitchen again, as usual, when he went to take a shower. I wasn’t even planning to look. But the notification practically pulled my eyes to it. “Igoryok, […]
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— “Vitya, are you serious right now? So in your opinion I spend all day at the office shuffling papers, then come home and here I also… rest?” Natalya froze with the iron in her hand. Hot steam hissed out of the soleplate, but she didn’t even notice. She was staring at her husband, sprawled […]
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“Earrings!” her mother-in-law snapped. “The ones I gave you for the wedding. Take them off right now.” “Lyudmila Borisovna, I… I don’t understand,” Kristina began. “Why are you—” “Just take them off,” the woman cut her short. “They’re my earrings. I changed my mind about giving them to you. And I want them back.” Kristina […]
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— Yesterday I saw it myself: your “poor” mom was striding cheerfully down the alley with her friend, laughing her head off. And today—on my birthday—she’s suddenly at death’s door? How convenient! Larisa was a Scorpio. Not just by horoscope, but by her very nature—prickly, closed-off, unable to tolerate hypocrisy and lies. She was already […]
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Elena Sergeyevna scrubbed at a stain on the kitchen oilcloth for a long time. The stain was old, ground in—an orange ring left by a hot mug of tea her husband had set down three years ago, back when he was considered a healthy man. Now that stain had become her point of support. When […]
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The one-and-a-half-carat diamond ring on my left ring finger shimmered, catching the light from the crystal chandelier in the Metropol restaurant. Igor had reserved a table by the window. He said he wanted everything to be perfect for meeting his parents. I adjusted my modest black mass-market dress, which I’d bought специально for this evening […]
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Olga stood at the living-room window, watching Lena get out of her car. Lena waved, smiling broadly, and headed for the porch. The third time in two weeks already. “Ol-ya!” Lena burst into the entryway with a bouquet of roses and a bag with wine. “How could I say no? Sergey insisted so much that […]
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Katya, let’s talk.” The voice she’d hoped never to hear this close again yanked her out of pleasant thoughts of a hot bath and a new series. It surfaced from behind a massive concrete column of the office complex like a predator from ambush. The evening air—cool, smelling of exhaust and wet asphalt—suddenly felt stale […]
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Nina never liked that blazer. It hung at the very back of the wardrobe—a bulky, polished monster that took up a third of the room and smelled of mothballs mixed with old paper. Vitya called the blazer his “concert one,” even though the last time they’d been to the conservatory was in 1989. Now the […]
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Victoria held the key in her hand—small, metal, yet heavy with an entire lifetime. As if it wasn’t a key at all, but a medal for surviving a strange discipline called “five years without joy.” The cold, prickly metal burned her fingers, and not because of the February frost—because of what it meant: every morning […]
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