I Let My Son and His Wife Stay for Six Months—Then They Put a Lock on My Room and Flew to Bali
I entered the apartment at seven in the evening. My bag was heavy, with a can of stewed meat and a carton of kefir inside. The light in the hallway was off, which was strange—Kristina was almost always home. I felt around for the switch.
My slippers were not beside the coat rack, where I always left them, but tucked into a corner behind the cabinet. My coat was hanging inside the wardrobe on a hanger, as though a guest had arrived and someone had put it away out of sight. On the hook hung a set of keys with a heart-shaped keychain. Kristina’s.
I walked over to the door of the large bedroom. It was locked.
“Kristina!”
“Mom, I’m in the kitchen.”
Her voice was sweet. She spoke to me formally, but called me “Mom.” After three years, I still had not gotten used to it.
Kristina was sitting at the table wearing headphones and looking at her phone. She raised her head and smiled broadly, like a Hollywood actress—the way she had trained herself to smile in her social media stories.
“Mom! Back from work? Oh, we’ve… Well, we’ve made a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?”
“Denis will be back soon. He went to get some wine. Come on, I’ll show you!”
She took me gently by the elbow, like a nurse guiding a patient.
The small room—the one that had belonged to Denis until he was fifteen, before I turned it into a study with a sofa—was open. Inside stood my bed. My chest of drawers, which my father had given me as a wedding present twenty-eight years earlier, with its dark veneer and chipped corner. My dressing table with its round mirror—the only thing I had left from my grandmother. There was no room for my bookcase, so some of my books had been stacked on the floor. My winter clothes were in one bag and my summer clothes in another, both shoved beneath the bed.
“See how cozy it is? Mom, you get up early, and now you’re closer to the kitchen and the bathroom. You won’t have to walk across the whole apartment. And it’s quieter here—the window faces the courtyard.”
I said nothing. I stared at my chest of drawers.
“And the large room?”
“Well, Denis and I will have the large room. We’re planning to have a baby, Mom. We need more space for a crib. I even made a designer layout. Would you like to see it?”
The front-door lock clicked. Denis came in wearing his jacket and carrying a bag from the wine shop.
“Hi, Mom! Did you see it? We worked hard. It’ll be more convenient for you now. Aunt Sveta told us that her mother has the small room too, and she’s perfectly fine. You don’t mind, do you?”
I looked at my son. His face was exactly like his father’s. Andryusha had had the same dimple in his chin and the same gray-blue eyes. But Andryusha would never have said anything like that.
“I don’t mind, Denis.”
Then I went into the small room and closed the door behind me.
Two days later, they installed a new lock on the door of the large bedroom.
“Mom, you understand, don’t you? We need our personal space. We’re an adult family now. I’ll give you a key in case you need something.”
They never gave me a key.
I lived in the small room. I cooked dinner for three. I washed their clothes—Kristina once loaded her laundry into the washing machine and forgot about it, and for the next three years I simply washed everything.
I paid the utility bills—more than twelve thousand rubles for a three-bedroom apartment in winter. I paid for the internet. I bought groceries—more than thirty thousand a month for all of us.
My salary was eighty-five thousand rubles, seventy-four thousand after taxes. Five thousand went on medication because I had a thyroid condition and could not go without my pills. Twelve thousand went on utilities. Thirty-five thousand went on food. What remained had to cover clothes, a visit to the hairdresser once every three months, and anything I could manage to save.
Denis earned, as he put it, “a hundred and twenty thousand net.” He was a manager at some IT company; I never really understood the details.
Kristina did not work.
“I’m trying to find myself, Mom.”
She spent three years looking.
She filmed social media stories in which she did yoga in front of my kitchen tiles and captioned them, “Morning in our little nest.”
Denis was “saving for a mortgage.” I never asked how much he had saved. Once, when I did ask, he said, “Soon, Mom. Just a little longer. We have plans.”
A year after moving in, he bought himself a brand-new Kia Rio on credit. When I asked what had happened to the mortgage, he said, “Mom, we need a car. I have to drive Kristina around. Come on.”
A year and a half later, Kristina went to Bali alone, “on a retreat with friends.” Out of curiosity, I searched the cost online afterward. It was around one hundred and fifty thousand rubles.
After two years, Denis bought a gaming computer for two hundred thousand.
But they still did not get a mortgage.
Andryusha died in March 2021. He had a heart attack at work. He was forty-nine.
At the time, Denis was studying for his master’s degree and living in a dormitory. He came to the funeral for one night. Kristina was already his girlfriend, but she did not come.
“I couldn’t get away from work.”
She was working part-time as a salesperson in a cosmetics shop.
I lived alone for two years. Not badly, not well—just alone.
Denis called once a month and asked, “Mom, how are you?”
I said, “Fine,” and he quickly changed the subject to his own affairs.
I stopped cooking large meals. I made a pot of soup that lasted three days and ate it with bread. I went to work. On Saturdays, I cleaned the apartment. On Sundays, I went to the cemetery.
In April 2023, Denis came over with Kristina.
“Mom, we want to introduce you properly. We’re registering our marriage in June.”
Before then, I had only seen Kristina twice, and only briefly. They sat in my kitchen, Kristina holding a cake from Sladkoyezhka and Denis carrying tulips.
After tea, Denis spoke without looking me in the eye.
“Mom, listen. Kristina and I have been thinking. We’ll have a modest wedding because money is tight. We’re renting a one-bedroom apartment in Zatulinka for twenty-eight thousand, plus food, and we’re trying to save for a mortgage. Maybe we could move in with you? Just for six months, until I’m placed in the management talent pool at my new job and they raise my salary. We’ll help you out. And it’s been difficult for you living alone for two years. I can see that.”
At the time, all I heard was “we’ll help” and “I can see.”
“Move in. You can have the large room.”
“Thank you, Mom. We’ll be grateful to you forever.”
Kristina reached across the table and held out her hand.
“Mom, may I start calling you Mom right away? My own mother lives far away in Berdsk, and we don’t communicate much. You’ll be like a real mother to me.”
I allowed her to call me that.
Two months after moving in, Kristina began rearranging my photographs in the hallway.
“Mom, I want to hang an ikebana arrangement here. We’ll put the photograph of you and Uncle Andrei in your room. It’ll be more visible there. That’s better, isn’t it?”
I allowed it.
A year later, Denis had me sign a power of attorney.
“Mom, I was arranging an apartment for my boss through work, and something needed to be signed urgently. Did you sign it?”
I signed it. I did not read it carefully.
And so it continued.
Our wedding portrait had once hung above the bed in the large bedroom. Andryusha was wearing a light-colored suit, and I was holding a bouquet of gladioli.
Kristina moved it into the hallway. Later, she took it down “temporarily, while cleaning.”
I found it in the storage closet behind the vacuum cleaner in December of last year. It was simply standing there, facing the wall.
I found Kristina’s tablet by accident. She had left it faceup on the kitchen table and rushed into the large room to change. Denis was away on a business trip.
I was washing the dishes. My eyes passed over the screen, and I would have ignored it if I had not noticed one word in a conversation with someone named “Lerka.”
“Mother-in-law.”
I stopped. Without drying my hands, I sat on a stool and turned the tablet toward me. The conversation could be scrolled in both directions. I scrolled upward.
“Lera, can you believe it? She’s come home carrying her little bags of groceries again.”
“Listen, Kristina, you’re lucky. My mother-in-law fought with me like a dog during the first month.”
“Yeah, mine’s a quiet little sheep. I’ve been carving her up for three years already.”
I read for ten minutes without looking away.
“Denis says the old woman will retire soon. Her pension will only be eighteen thousand, and then we’ll have to support her too. What a nightmare.”
“Don’t rush. In reality, she’ll leave the apartment to you and Denis. She’s not going anywhere. Where would she go?”
“I’m not rushing. I keep a serious expression and handle her properly. We took the large room—did she make a sound? No. I just gently said, ‘Mom, it’ll be more convenient for you,’ and that was it. You have to be gentle with people like her.”
Then came an emoji laughing so hard that it was crying.
“Kristina, what happens if she, you know… gets sick?”
“Then we’ll hire a caregiver. Denis and I will manage. The important thing is that she doesn’t transfer the apartment to someone else before then. I keep reminding Denis to feel her out. Her will definitely names him. I checked.”
I sat with the tablet for forty minutes.
I did not cry. I did not tremble.
I simply sat there very calmly and understood one thing: no one needed me.
No one needed me as a person.
They needed me as a function—an apartment, a stove, a washing machine, and an eighteen-thousand-ruble pension seven years from now.
I wiped my hands on my apron, closed the tablet, and placed it back exactly as it had been.
Kristina came out of the room wearing a robe, her hair loose.
“Mom, are you washing the dishes? Let me help you!”
“No, Kristina. I’ve already finished.”
“Oh, thank you, Mom. I’m so tired today…”
“You’re welcome.”
I went to my small room and closed the door. I opened my phone and found Lidia in my contacts. She was the lawyer Andryusha and I had used years earlier when dealing with the inheritance after his mother’s death.
I wrote, “Lida, I need a consultation. Urgently. I’ll pay.”
She answered ten minutes later.
“Come tomorrow at six.”
Lida was sitting in her office on Krasny Prospekt, wearing glasses, with a printed contract in front of her. I told her everything.
She listened silently.
Then she said, “Marina, we’ll revoke the power of attorney. Write the application, and I’ll certify it. Do you have a will?”
“I made one naming Denis in 2021. Kristina apparently knew about it even then.”
“Change it. Leave everything to anyone you like—a distant relative, the state, a church.”
“I have a niece. My sister’s daughter. She lives in Barnaul.”
“Leave it to your niece.”
“Lida, they’re registered in the apartment. Can I deregister them?”
Lida removed her glasses.
“Marina, are you the sole owner?”
“The sole owner. The apartment was privatized in my name alone. Andryusha was away on a business trip during the privatization and did not participate.”
“Then remove them through the courts under Article 31 of the Housing Code. They’re former members of the owner’s family. Denis is already a former member—he has his own family unit and a wife. I’ll have them deregistered by May.”
“And before the court hearing?”
“Before the hearing, change the locks. Put their belongings outside. You have every right to do that. You are the owner. They’ll be outside, and you’ll be inside. The police will arrive, look at your ownership documents, shrug, and leave.”
“Lida, what about doing things humanely?”
Lida looked at me. She has two daughters, both nearly thirty. I know them.
“Marina, humanely speaking, you spent three years supporting a grown man and his wife while they discussed your death in a chat as though it were a staffing matter. Humanely speaking, you’re already late.”
I paid fifteen thousand rubles for the consultation and the document package.
When I stepped outside, it was the end of February and twenty degrees below zero. My cheeks stuck to my scarf. I walked to the metro for twenty minutes without stopping once.
I spent two weeks preparing everything. I did not hurry.
I revoked Denis’s power of attorney.
I changed my will and left everything to Anya, my niece in Barnaul.
I opened a separate account at another bank and transferred my savings into it—nine hundred thousand rubles that I had accumulated during five years of widowhood.
I changed every password.
I ordered two new locks for the front door and arranged for a locksmith to come at ten in the morning on Friday, March sixth.
That Friday, Denis and Kristina were going to a dacha belonging to Kristina’s friend Lera—the same Lera from the chat. It was Lera’s thirtieth birthday, and they were staying there for two nights.
I had known about the trip for two weeks. Kristina had openly discussed it in front of me during dinner.
At eight on Friday morning, Denis loaded their bags into the trunk of the Kia, and they left.
Kristina kissed me on the cheek.
Denis said, “Mom, there’s dinner in the refrigerator.”
Inside the refrigerator was a container of frozen dumplings from Pyaterochka that I had bought with my own money the previous day.
At nine, I began packing their belongings.
I put Denis’s things into his backpack, two sports bags, and the large suitcase we had bought for his student trip to St. Petersburg.
Kristina’s belongings went into her two suitcases, along with shopping bags from L’Etoile, into which I tossed her cosmetics from the bedside table and the bathroom.
Their tablet, laptop, and Denis’s gaming computer all went into boxes. The gaming chair went into the hallway.
Everything in the large bedroom that did not belong to me was removed.
I worked for four hours without a break. By one in the afternoon, everything was arranged in neat piles on the landing.
I did not throw anything into the trash or break anything. I took care of their possessions so that they would not later claim I had destroyed them.
The locksmith finished installing the new locks by two. He removed the old ones and took them away.
I taped a note to the door. I had printed it the previous day on the printer in the accounting department at work.
“Denis and Kristina,
“You planned a life without me. You may begin it right now.
“The apartment belongs to me. All the documents are with my lawyer. The will has been changed. The power of attorney has been revoked.
“I did not leave keys with the concierge. I am no longer ‘Mom with her little grocery bags.’
“Denis, there is a photograph on the dressing table in the small room. You are three years old in it, sitting in your father’s arms. You may take it.
“Everything else—you removed yourself.
“Marina Viktorovna.”
Viktorovna.
For the first time in twenty-eight years, I had addressed myself by my first name and patronymic in that note.
I liked it.
I locked the door with the new lock and put my phone on Do Not Disturb until Monday.
They returned at midnight on Saturday.
Denis pounded on the door. Kristina knocked on the window from outside after climbing onto the hood of the car.
Denis shouted, “Mom, open the door! Mom, our things are on the landing! Mom, what are you doing? Have you lost your mind?!”
Kristina sobbed, then pleaded with the neighbors, and finally called the police.
The police arrived at one in the morning.
I opened the door for them and showed them my documents.
The senior lieutenant looked at them, nodded, and said to Denis, “Sir, step away from the door. The woman is the owner. You are registered here, but that does not give you a right of residence. Take any dispute to court.”
Then they left.
Denis and Kristina gathered their belongings from the landing until three in the morning. Everything would not fit into the Kia, so Denis drove one load away and then returned for the second.
I lay in my small room in the darkness, and for the first time in five years, I did not cry.
In the morning, the door to the large bedroom stood open.
I went inside.
It was empty. Only their bed remained, along with an IKEA wardrobe that had been bought back in 2018, before Andryusha died, and a large, furry layer of dust behind the bedside table.
For three years, Kristina had claimed that she did the cleaning.
I moved my chest of drawers back into the room.
I took my wedding portrait with Andryusha out of the storage closet and hung it in its old place.
On Monday, I went to work.
At lunchtime, I went downstairs to the café on the first floor of the business center. Tatiana Mikhailovna, a colleague from the sales department, was ahead of me in line. In the forty years we had worked there, we had never had coffee together, although we always nodded when we saw each other.
“Marina, is what people are saying true?”
“What are they saying?”
“That you threw your son and his wife out. That you dumped their things outside. Denis is your own flesh and blood, your only son. How could you?”
The café was full of people. The cashier slowed down as she counted out my change.
“Who’s saying that, Tanya?”
“Sveta from the fifth floor. Her mother apparently has a mutual acquaintance with Kristina’s mother. Marina, you have no one except Denis. He lost his father too. Where will they go now? Will they have to rent a place?”
“They’ll rent.”
“Marina, I’m speaking to you as a mother. So what if they wrote a few things in a chat? Perhaps they were joking. They’re young. Make peace with them before it’s too late. You’ll regret it afterward.”
I looked at Tatiana. She had two sons, both living in Krasnodar. She visited them twice a year.
“Tanya, when you visit Vitya and Sergei, do you stay with them?”
“I stay with Vitya. He has a four-bedroom apartment.”
“And does he move you into the smallest room?”
“Of course not! What are you talking about? Vitya always gives me the best. We always stay in the living room.”
“Well, Tanya, now I’m in the large room too. In my own home. In my own apartment. Always.”
Tatiana fell silent.
The cashier handed me my change. I picked up my tray of syrniki and walked to a table.
A year passed.
It was December. Snow had fallen, and outside my window stood a streetlamp and a snowdrift on the windowsill.
My niece Anya had flown in from Barnaul for the weekend on Saturday. She had two children, her husband worked for the railway, and they were good people.
Anya was sitting in my kitchen eating syrniki while I told her how I had painted the ceiling in the large bedroom by myself, standing on a stepladder, in November.
The intercom rang.
It was Lena from the sixth floor, my friend.
“Marina, are you home? I need to stop by for a minute.”
She came in and kissed me on the cheek.
“Marina, listen. Yesterday I met Tanechka at Zaeltsovskaya—you remember her, don’t you? We went to school together. She knows Kristina through some mutual fitness friends. She told me something. I wasn’t sure whether I should tell you, but you ought to know.”
“Lena, tell me.”
“Kristina had a baby girl in September. They named her Alisa.”
I nodded.
I already knew that Kristina was pregnant. I had learned about it from a mutual acquaintance back in February.
Denis had not sent me a single message during the entire year. Not one.
Neither had I.
“They’re living on Demakova now,” Lena continued. “They’re renting a one-bedroom apartment for thirty-five thousand. Kristina isn’t coping. She has postpartum depression. Denis is always away on business because his new job involves a lot of travel.
“So Kristina called her mother. She lives in Berdsk. She’s been staying with them for two months now.”
“And?”
“Marina, she does all the laundry. She cooks. She stays up with Alisa at night. She sleeps on a folding bed in the kitchen because Denis and Kristina sleep in the bedroom with the crib.
“She’s sixty-two. She worked as an accountant at Berdskkhleb her entire life and retired two years ago. Tanya says she looks completely gray and exhausted. She never sleeps properly. She does all the washing, cooking, and walks with the baby.
“Kristina says to her, ‘Mom, you can see I can’t manage. You do it.’
“And Denis tells his mother-in-law, ‘Tatiana Andreyevna, just push yourself a little harder. We’ll let you rest later, once Alisa is older.’”
Anya listened silently, stirring her tea.
I was silent too.
For a long time.
“Marina, what is it?” Lena asked.
“Nothing. Lena, would you like some tea?”
“Yes, pour me some. Oh, I thought you’d be pleased, or angry, or something. But you’re just sitting there silently.”
I poured her tea.
“Lena, I’m neither pleased nor angry. I simply recognize it.”
“Recognize what?”
“I recognize how they live when there’s no one available to serve them for free.
“They haven’t forgotten how to live that way, Lena. Quite the opposite—they’re living very well. They simply found the next person.
“A folding bed in the mother-in-law’s small room or a folding bed in the mother’s kitchen—what difference does it make?
“The important thing is that there is always someone there to do the laundry.”
Lena could not think of anything to say. She finished her tea and left.
Anya came over and hugged me from behind.
“Aunt Marina, I’m here with you.”
“I know, Anya.”
So what do you think?
Was I right to put their belongings outside, change the locks, and rewrite my will?
Or should I have tried to talk to them, reconcile, and forgive them?
Or should I at least meet my granddaughter Alisa once? She is not guilty of anything.
I think about that every evening when I go to bed.
I think about Alisa more often than I think about Denis and Kristina.
Perhaps I am a vindictive bitch who took revenge for being moved into the small room and for the laughing emoji in the chat—and, by doing so, deprived herself of her only granddaughter.
Perhaps I am a grown woman who finally understood, at the age of fifty-two, that she had been exploited for three years under the guise of being a family.
Or perhaps I am both at once.
What do you think?
I genuinely want to know.
The snow on the windowsill lies smooth and untouched.
The folding bed in Tatiana Andreyevna’s kitchen is probably creaking.
