Anna never trusted her husband. So she had to rely only on herself. That’s just how their family life had turned out. Her husband Viktor was as handsome as a poppy in bloom. He was always the life of any party. He drank in moderation, didn’t smoke, wasn’t obsessed with soccer, fishing, or hunting. In […]
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Olga gripped the steering wheel tightly when she heard those words. In the rearview mirror she could see the satisfied face of Valentina Petrovna, who had settled comfortably into the back seat with a bag stuffed full of medicines and cosmetics. “Sorry, what?” Olga asked, hoping she’d misheard. “What’s hard to understand?” her mother-in-law’s voice […]
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The rain drummed against the windows of the St. Petersburg apartment when the doorbell rang. Anna lifted her eyes from her laptop and glanced at the clock in surprise—half past eleven at night, on a Wednesday. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Through the peephole she saw a blurred figure with a suitcase. Her heart tightened unpleasantly—something […]
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The doorbell rang so unexpectedly that Anna flinched and almost dropped her cup of coffee. Sunday morning promised to be lazy and quiet—they and Maksim had planned to spend it at home with books and TV shows. No guests, no fuss. “Who could that be?” Max looked up from his laptop, frowning in surprise. “No […]
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She entered the opera on the arm of a stranger, and in that instant his perfect world crumbled to dust, exposing the ruins he himself had built. The two tickets to the performance—the coveted slips of paper for which he’d been playing the art connoisseur—nearly slipped from Arthur’s numb fingers when he saw the black […]
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It all began on a morning that seemed to promise anything but a storm. The sun was just lifting above the rooftops, tinting the sky a tender shade of peach. The air was fresh and clear, and from the fields came the sweet scent of blooming meadow grasses. Anna, as always, had risen before dawn […]
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Sergey sat on an old wooden bench in the very heart of the park, watching as autumn leaves—crimson and gold—whirled in the cool air like dancing couples at a forgotten ball. Gusts of wind would catch them, lift them up, and then let them drift gently down onto the damp ground, forming a soft, rustling […]
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I found out about the cheating by accident. No, there was no lipstick on the collar or someone else’s perfume—much more banal than that. His phone buzzed on the kitchen table while he was in the shower, and I glanced at the screen without thinking. “Miss you, kitty. When will we see each other?” wrote […]
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When I opened the door and saw Valentina Petrovna on the threshold with two enormous bags, my heart sank. My mother-in-law stood there in her unchanging beige trench coat, hair pulled into a tight bun, lips pressed into a thin line. Her gaze slid over me with that all-too-familiar expression—a mix of disapproval and righteous […]
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Marina stood by the window of her twelfth-floor office, looking out at a city bathed in spring sunlight. Five years ago, she couldn’t even imagine that she would ever end up here— in a spacious office with floor-to-ceiling windows and a plaque on the door that read “Deputy Director for Development.” She couldn’t imagine she […]
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