Here’s how it’s going to be, dear,” Raisa Petrovna’s voice rang like cracked crystal. “Sit here in the kitchen since you came. But don’t you dare come out to the table. There’s no need for you to embarrass me in front of people!”
Varya froze by the refrigerator, a bottle of champagne in her hands. Her fingers tightened so hard that the label crumpled beneath them. Her mother-in-law stood in the doorway, dressed entirely in a beige suit, with a hairstyle that had probably cost as much as Varya’s monthly salary. Her face was taut, her lips pressed tight.
“Excuse me, I don’t understand,” Varya said slowly. Everything inside her was clenching, but she kept her voice steady. “It’s Artyom’s birthday. Your son’s. My husband’s.”
“Exactly,” Raisa Petrovna took a step forward, and the scent of her perfume struck Varya’s nose. “That’s exactly why I don’t want you ruining the celebration with your appearance. Look at yourself! What did you come wearing? That cheap turtleneck from some mass-market shop?”
Varya lowered her gaze to her red turtleneck. It was new, bought on sale. Nothing special, but clean and neat.
“Where is Artyom?” she asked.
“Artyom is busy with the guests. Real guests who came to congratulate him. Aunt Vera brought him a Swiss watch, Uncle Lyosha promised to help him with a contract in Moscow. And you? What can you offer my son besides your poverty?”
Laughter and music came from the living room. Someone clinked glasses. Varya heard Artyom’s voice — loud, pleased. He was telling some story about work.
“Go to hell!” Raisa Petrovna raised her voice, and Varya flinched. “I don’t want to see you at my celebration, you gray little mouse!”
“Mom, what’s going on?” Artyom looked into the kitchen. His tie was loosened, his cheeks pink from drinking. He was smiling until he saw Varya’s face.
“Artyom, I’m simply explaining to your… spouse,” his mother stretched out the last word like elastic, “that today people of a certain level have gathered here. And she will feel uncomfortable among them.”
“Varya,” Artyom scratched the back of his head. “Maybe you really are tired? Go home and rest. I’ll come later.”
There it was. That very feeling when the ground disappears beneath your feet. Varya set the bottle down on the table — too sharply, and the champagne hissed inside.
“Are you serious right now?” she breathed. “Artyom, it’s your birthday. I am your wife.”
“Well, yes, but…” he shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “Mom is right. There are important people here today. Dad’s partners, relatives. You don’t like these kinds of gatherings anyway.”
“I don’t like being humiliated,” Varya stepped toward him. “Do you understand the difference?”
Raisa Petrovna snorted.
“You see, Artyom? A scandal right away. I told you — she doesn’t know how to behave in society.”
“Mom, please,” Artyom muttered, but he wasn’t looking at his mother. He was looking somewhere to the side. At the refrigerator, at the tiles, at anything but Varya.
A woman’s voice sounded from the living room.
“Artyomushka! Where did you disappear to? Aunt Vera wants to take a picture with you!”
“I’m coming!” he shouted, then slid a guilty glance toward Varya. “I’m sorry. Really, go home. I’ll be there soon.”
And he left.
Varya was left alone with her mother-in-law. Raisa Petrovna smiled triumphantly.
“You see? Even he understands that you don’t belong here. You never did, from the very beginning.”
“Why do you hate me so much?” Varya heard her own voice as if from somewhere outside herself. Calm. Too calm. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You?” her mother-in-law narrowed her eyes. “You stole my son. Dragged him into your beggarly life. He could have married the Sokolovs’ daughter — beautiful, educated, wealthy. But he chose you. A salesgirl from a bookstore.”
“A librarian,” Varya corrected automatically.
“What difference does it make!” Raisa Petrovna waved her hand, and her gold bracelets jingled. “It’s all the same. You are not worthy of Artyom. And I will prove it. Sooner or later, he will see it himself.”
Varya picked up her bag. Her hands were not shaking. That was strange — her hands should have been shaking, but they were completely calm.
“You know what?” she turned in the doorway. “You’re right. I really don’t belong here.”
She left the apartment and went down the stairs — she didn’t wait for the elevator. Outside, it was getting dark, and the streetlights had already come on. The January wind lashed her face, and Varya finally drew a full breath.
Her phone vibrated. A text message from Artyom: “Don’t be offended, okay? Mom worries about me.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she opened the map and looked for the nearest café. Go home to their rented one-room apartment on the outskirts and wait for Artyom to return from his mother’s celebration? Sit there thinking about how he hadn’t even defended her?
No. Not today.
Varya entered a small coffee shop on the corner. It was warm inside and smelled of cinnamon and vanilla. Behind the counter stood a man of about thirty, with a tattoo on his wrist.
“What would you like?” he asked.
“An Americano,” Varya said. “And a slice of cheesecake.”
“Bad day?” the guy smiled.
“You could say that.”
She sat by the window. Outside, people were passing by — hurrying somewhere, laughing, talking on the phone. An ordinary Friday evening. Everyone had their own life, their own joys and problems.
The phone vibrated again. This time it was a call. Artyom.
Varya declined it.
A minute later — another call. Then another text: “Varya, please answer. Where are you?”
She turned off the sound and placed the phone face down.
The coffee arrived. Hot, strong, exactly what she needed now.
“Sorry for sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong,” the barista said, placing the cheesecake in front of her, “but this isn’t your first time here, is it? I think I saw you about two weeks ago.”
Varya looked up. True, she had come here after work. Bought coffee to go.
“Yes,” she nodded. “I work nearby. At the library on Sadovaya.”
“Ah, exactly!” he snapped his fingers. “I came in there once looking for a book. You helped me find it.”
Varya didn’t remember, but she nodded.
“My name is Gleb,” he said. “For the record, I’m not hitting on you. It’s just… well, you look like you need a friend right now. Or at least someone to talk to.”
“Thank you,” Varya exhaled. “But I really need to be alone.”
“Of course,” Gleb nodded and returned behind the counter.
Varya drank her coffee and looked out the window. The phone kept lighting up — Artyom clearly wasn’t going to leave her alone. Six calls. Eight. Ten.
“Mom is asking how long you’re going to keep being offended.”
Varya read that message and laughed. Quietly, almost soundlessly. Of course. Mom was asking. Not he was worried, not he wanted to apologize. Mom was asking.
Three years ago, Varya had fallen in love with Artyom at first sight. He had been different then — funny, sincere, dreaming of becoming an architect. He showed her his projects, said he would build her a house with large windows and a view of the river. They went to the movies, ate shawarma on nighttime streets, kissed under streetlights.
And then Artyom went to work for his father’s company. “Temporarily,” he said. “Just to save some money.” His father promised to help him open his own architectural bureau. But temporary stretched into a year, then two. His drawings gathered dust in the closet. Artyom started wearing expensive suits, having lunch with partners, and smiling less and less.
And his mother… Raisa Petrovna was always there. Giving advice, criticizing, comparing Varya to the daughters of her friends. Artyom listened, nodded, promised Varya that his mother would get used to her soon.
But she never did.
Varya finished her coffee. There were already seventeen missed calls on her phone. It was time to make a decision.
She dialed her friend’s number. Long beeps, then a sleepy voice:
“Varka? Why are you calling at this hour?”
“Tanya, can I come over?” Varya gripped the phone tighter. “Not for long. Just a couple of days.”
“What happened?” Tanya woke up immediately. “Are you crying?”
“No,” Varya lied. The tears only appeared now, when she heard a familiar voice. “I just… I need to think. I’ll explain everything when I get there.”
“Do you remember the address? I’m waiting for you.”
Varya left the coffee shop. The metro was a ten-minute walk away. Tanya lived on the other side of the city, in Cheryomushki, in an old Khrushchev-era apartment building she rented with two roommates.
The metro car was stuffy and crowded. Varya sat down in an empty seat by the window and stared at her reflection. A tired face, loose hair, mascara smudged beneath her eyes. When had she become so exhausted?
The phone came alive again. Now her mother-in-law was calling.
Varya wasn’t even surprised. Raisa Petrovna liked to finish people off completely.
She answered.
“Do you seriously think you can just run away?” her mother-in-law’s voice was icy. “Artyom is beside himself, looking for you. The guests are asking where his wife is. Do you even understand how awkward this is?”
“I understand,” Varya looked at the elderly woman sitting across from her, knitting something with bright yarn. “It’s awkward for you. It’s awkward for Artyom. And what about me?”
“You?” Raisa Petrovna snorted. “You should be ashamed. Making scenes, ruining the celebration. Artyom is so good, so patient. And you? All you know how to do is act spoiled.”
“You know, Raisa Petrovna,” Varya closed her eyes, “I endured your attacks for three years. For three years I tried to please you. I cooked, cleaned, kept silent when you criticized my clothes, my job, my education. But today you crossed the line.”
“What line?” her mother-in-law raised her voice. “I simply told the truth! You are not right for my son! He deserves better!”
“Perhaps,” Varya agreed. “But that should be his decision, not yours.”
She ended the call and blocked the number.
Next was Artyom. Varya stared at the screen for a long time, then finally answered.
“Varya! Thank God!” he spoke quickly, anxiously. “Where are you? I’ll come now and pick you up. We’ll talk everything through.”
“Artyom, answer honestly,” Varya looked into the darkness of the tunnel outside the window. “Did you really want me to leave? Or were you just afraid of upsetting your mother?”
A pause. Too long a pause.
“Varya, well… the situation was complicated. Mom tried hard, she cooked, invited important people. You know what she’s like.”
“I know,” Varya nodded. “And what are you like?”
“What?” he didn’t understand.
“What are you like, Artyom?” she exhaled. “Because three years ago, I fell in love with a guy who dreamed of building houses and read poems to me on the roof of the dormitory. And now I’m talking to a person who didn’t even defend his wife.”
“Varya, don’t dramatize,” irritation appeared in his voice. “Mom is just worried. She wants the best for me.”
“And I’m not the best?”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“Then what?” Varya stood up as her station was announced. “Artyom, I’m tired. Tired of justifying myself, of proving that I deserve to be your wife. I need time to think.”
“Think about what?” Now he was alarmed. “Varya, what nonsense are you talking about? We’re family!”
“Family,” she repeated and stepped out of the train. “Yes. Except for some reason, there are three people in our family, not two.”
She hung up and rode the escalator upstairs.
Tanya met her in a robe, holding a cup of tea.
“Come in,” she hugged Varya tightly, genuinely. “Tell me everything.”
They sat in the kitchen until three in the morning. Varya talked — about her mother-in-law, about Artyom, about how she had gradually lost herself trying to meet someone else’s expectations.
“You know what’s the scariest thing?” Varya wrapped her hands around the warm mug. “Today I realized that I don’t even miss him. Artyom. He called, and I just… felt nothing.”
“That isn’t scary,” Tanya patted her shoulder. “That’s normal. Love doesn’t live where there is no respect.”
“I really thought I could change the situation,” Varya wiped her eyes. “That if I was good enough, Raisa Petrovna would accept me. Stupid, right?”
“Not stupid. Human,” Tanya poured more tea. “But now the question is — what next?”
Varya looked out the window. The city was asleep, the streetlights flickered, and somewhere in the distance a car drove by.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I know one thing for sure — I’m not going back to that apartment. Not to him. Not until he understands that I’m not the problem.”
The phone was silent. Artyom no longer called. And that was the loudest answer of all.
In the morning, Varya woke to the smell of pancakes. Tanya was standing by the stove, flipping them with a skillful movement of the frying pan.
“Good morning, runaway,” she smiled. “How did you sleep?”
“Better than I have in the last six months,” Varya admitted.
After breakfast, she went home — to their rented one-room apartment. Artyom wasn’t there; he had spent the night at his parents’. Varya methodically packed her things: clothes, books, documents. Everything that was hers. Nothing shared.
In a desk drawer, she came across an old envelope. Documents for an apartment in Sochi. An inheritance from Grandma Lydia, who had died two years earlier. A small one-room apartment in a quiet neighborhood, not far from the sea. Varya had wanted to sell it back then, but Artyom had talked her out of it: “Let it stay. Rent it out to tourists in the summer.” She had listened to him and almost forgotten about the place.
Now she held the documents in her hands and thought: what if…
Three days later, Varya was sitting on a plane to Sochi. A one-way ticket, two bags of belongings, an empty head, and a strange calm inside.
Artyom called several times. He asked her to come back, promised to talk to his mother. But when Varya asked whether he was ready to move out from his parents’ place and live separately, he hesitated.
“Well… it’s not financially reasonable. Why pay rent when they have a big apartment?”
“I see,” Varya said and hung up.
And then something happened that she hadn’t expected at all.
Raisa Petrovna declared war. A real, dirty war.
First she called all their mutual acquaintances and relatives, telling them how ungrateful Varya was. Then she wrote an angry message in the family chat, accusing her daughter-in-law of abandoning her husband and wanting to sue for his parents’ apartment. It was so absurd that Varya even laughed.
“What apartment?” she wrote back. “Raisa Petrovna, I have my own place. And I have never claimed yours.”
But her mother-in-law would not let up. She hired a lawyer, who sent Varya a letter demanding that she return the “family gifts”: the gold earrings from the wedding, the fur coat Raisa Petrovna had supposedly bought last New Year.
Varya photographed the receipts — she had bought all those things herself, with her own money — and sent them to the lawyer. No more letters came.
The last straw was the attempt to make Varya look like a thief. Raisa Petrovna claimed that an antique diamond ring had disappeared from her apartment. And she suspected her daughter-in-law.
“Can you imagine?” Varya said on the phone to Tanya, standing on the balcony of her Sochi apartment. “A ring I’d never even seen in my life! She even wanted to go to the police.”
“And what happened?” Tanya gasped.
“What happened is that Artyom found the ring in his mother’s own jewelry box,” Varya smirked. “She had simply forgotten where she put it. But of course, she didn’t think to apologize.”
After that, Varya blocked everyone. Raisa Petrovna, Artyom, even Aunt Vera, who had been sending her angry messages about destroyed families.
Four months passed.
Varya got a job at the local library. The salary was small, but it was enough. The apartment was hers, the bills were low. On weekends she went to the sea, read, and met new acquaintances.
Gleb, the barista from that Moscow coffee shop, somehow found her on social media. He wrote sometimes, asked how she was doing. It turned out he had moved too — to St. Petersburg, where he had opened his own small coffee shop.
“Look how life turns,” he wrote.
“Yeah,” Varya replied. “The main thing is to understand in time where to turn.”
And Artyom… Tanya told her everything herself when she called one evening.
“Varya, you won’t believe this. Your mother-in-law found him a new wife.”
“What?” Varya almost dropped the phone.
“Seriously. A woman about forty-five, divorced, no children. Her name is Elizaveta. She works as an accountant in their company. Raisa Petrovna introduced them a month after your breakup.”
“She moved fast,” was all Varya could say.
“Oh, very. They’ve already had the wedding. Quiet, no guests. I saw the photos — Artyom is standing there in a suit, smiling stiffly. Elizaveta is beside him, and Raisa Petrovna is between them, like a director.”
Varya was silent. It was strange. Not painful, not insulting. Just… strange.
“They say they all live together,” Tanya continued. “In the same apartment with his parents. Elizaveta cooks and cleans. Raisa is satisfied — she finally found an obedient daughter-in-law. Artyom doesn’t decide anything at all. Silent as a mouse.”
“He became what his mother wanted him to be,” Varya said quietly. “Convenient. Controllable.”
“And you know the funniest part?” Tanya snorted. “Uncle Lyosha recently asked mutual acquaintances where you were. He says Artyom has completely faded. Works on autopilot, comes home silently. He even stopped going fishing.”
“I feel sorry for him,” Varya looked at the sea. The sun was setting, painting the water orange. “I really do. He could have been different.”
“But he didn’t want to be,” Tanya summed up. “He had a choice, Varya. He made it.”
When they said goodbye, Varya stepped out onto the balcony. A warm evening, a light breeze from the sea, the cries of seagulls. Somewhere below, children were playing and laughing.
She thought about Artyom. About how he was probably sitting now in that huge apartment between his mother and his new wife. Silent. Nodding. Following instructions.
And she thought about herself. About how she had learned to breathe deeply again. How she had stopped adjusting herself, stopped apologizing for who she was.
Raisa Petrovna had wanted to break her. To portray her as poor, stupid, unworthy. To start a scandal and take away the last things she had. But instead, she had only shown Varya the exit.
“Thank you, Raisa Petrovna,” Varya thought with a smirk. “You set me free. Without even meaning to.”
Her phone vibrated. A message from Gleb: “By the way, are there any good coffee shops in Sochi? I’m thinking of heading south for a vacation.”
Varya smiled and began typing her reply.
A new life was only beginning.
