Vera stood by the sink, counting the drops.
The faucet had been leaking for the third week, and every evening she promised herself she would call a plumber. She never did. There were more important things. Things that made her fingers go numb and made her want to lie down on the floor right there in the hallway.
Igor was sitting in the room. She could hear him typing something on his phone. Quickly, skillfully, almost cheerfully. He used to type to her like that. Eight years ago, when they had just moved in together and he would send her funny voice messages from work.
Now he was typing to someone else.
And Vera knew it.
She had known for two months.
It all began in February, when Igor suddenly started coming home in a good mood. Not the usual kind, when a person simply isn’t irritated, but a real good mood. He hummed in the bathroom. He bought oranges, even though he used to consider them a pointless waste of money. And he began shaving every day, even on weekends.
Vera noticed everything at once, one evening, as if someone had switched the light from warm to cold. She was standing at the stove, stirring stew, when he passed by, brushed her shoulder, and did not apologize.
Not because he was rude.
Because he did not notice.
He was no longer here.
Physically, he was standing in the hallway, taking off his shoes, hanging up his jacket. But inside, he was somewhere far away, in some place where she was no longer allowed to enter.
“Will you have some stew?” she asked.
“No, I already ate.”
“Where?”
“Got held up at work. We ordered pizza.”
He did not look at her. He went into the room and closed the door.
Vera turned off the stove. The stew had been made for two. She put it into a container and placed it in the refrigerator, even though she knew she would throw it away the next day.
That night, she lay on her side of the bed and stared at the ceiling. Igor was asleep with his back turned to her. He smelled of another woman’s perfume. Not sharply, not provocatively. Faintly. As if someone had hugged him goodbye and left a trace on his collar.
Vera did not start sniffing. She did not check his phone. She simply lay there and listened to the ticking of the wall clock they had bought together at the Izmailovo flea market.
The clock was seven minutes slow.
She had not corrected it in three years.
In the morning, she called her mother.
Galina Petrovna picked up after the first ring. She always picked up after the first ring, as if she had been sitting there waiting.
“Mom, are you busy?”
“I’m making compote. Talk.”
“I think Igor has someone.”
A pause.
Vera could hear the water bubbling on the stove, hear her mother moving a lid. Then came her voice, steady and without panic.
“Do you think so, or do you know?”
“I know. But I don’t have proof. Not yet.”
“You don’t need proof,” her mother said. “You’re not in court. You’re in your own home.”
Vera gripped the phone. Her fingers turned white at the joints.
“Mom, I don’t know what to do.”
“Then don’t do anything yet. Live. Watch. When it’s time to act, you’ll understand it yourself.”
Galina Petrovna spoke as if they were discussing burnt pancakes. No drama, no gasps. But Vera heard something else behind that calmness. Her mother had already understood everything. Maybe even before Vera had.
The compote bubbled.
Vera hung up and went to work.
She worked as an accountant at a construction company. The office was on the third floor, its windows facing the courtyard, with the smell of vending-machine coffee and the constant hum of the printer behind the wall.
The work was boring and saving at the same time. Numbers did not lie. They did not betray. They did not smell of another woman’s perfume.
Her colleague Zoya noticed first.
“You’re pale. Didn’t sleep again?”
“I slept.”
“You’re lying. Your eyes look like an owl’s after a night shift.”
Vera smiled.
Zoya was the kind of person who spoke directly and did not get offended if you answered the same way.
“Problems at home,” Vera said, and surprised herself.
“Igor?” Zoya asked.
Vera nodded.
“He’s home.”
It sounded as if “problems at home” meant a leaking faucet, not a husband who smelled of another woman.
Zoya looked at her, narrowing her eyes. The cap of the pen in her mouth cracked.
“Igor?”
Vera nodded again.
“He’s a fool,” Zoya said. “But you know that without me.”
Zoya had divorced four years earlier. Her husband had left her for a neighbor. Literally. He moved one floor above her. For another six months, Zoya heard their footsteps overhead and fell asleep to them as if to a lullaby from hell.
Then she sold the apartment, bought a one-room place on the outskirts, and got a cat named Boris.
“The main thing,” Zoya lowered her voice, “is don’t do anything stupid. Don’t shout, don’t cry in front of him, don’t make scenes. Let him think you know nothing. And meanwhile, you think about the apartment.”
“The apartment?”
“Vera. Darling. The apartment. That’s the first thing they grab at when they leave.”
Vera opened an Excel spreadsheet and stared at the numbers.
But she did not see them.
She saw the apartment.
The two-room place on Kastanayevskaya Street that they called “ours,” even though her mother had bought it. Bought it and registered it in her own name. Five years ago, when Vera and Igor had just gotten married.
Back then, it had seemed strange. Igor had even been offended.
“Why not in our names? We’re a family.”
“Because that’s what I decided,” Galina Petrovna had replied in a tone that did not invite further discussion.
Igor had looked at Vera.
Vera had shrugged.
A mother was a mother.
Now, sitting in the office, she thought for the first time: her mother had known. From the very beginning. Not about Igor specifically. About life. About the way things happen.
March passed in silence.
Vera did not check his phone. She did not ask questions. She cooked dinner, did laundry, went to work, called her mother on Saturdays. From the outside, life looked normal.
From the inside, it resembled an aquarium with a crack.
The water was still holding.
But the crack was growing.
Igor began staying late more often. Twice a week, then three times. His explanations became shorter and shorter.
“A meeting.”
“A company event.”
“With the guys after work.”
He did not even make a great effort to lie, and that was the worst part. As if he no longer cared whether she believed him or not. As if he had already left in his mind and simply had not collected his things yet.
Vera began noticing small details.
He stopped putting his socks in the shared laundry basket. He started washing them separately. He put a password on his phone. Before, he had never had one.
One evening, after he had left the bathroom, she went in after him. A new shower gel stood on the shelf. She picked it up, unscrewed the cap, and smelled it.
Cedar and something citrusy.
Before, he had washed himself with laundry soap and seen no problem with it.
Vera put the gel back.
Her hands were not trembling.
She noticed this and was surprised.
In April, he said it.
Not over dinner. Not in the bedroom. In the kitchen, in the morning, while she was making tea. Casually, as if he were telling her about a business trip.
“Ver, we need to talk.”
She did not turn around. She kept pouring boiling water into the mug. A white one with a chipped rim. Her mother had given it to her for the housewarming.
“Talk.”
“I’m leaving. You probably guessed anyway.”
The water overflowed from the mug.
Vera put down the kettle. Wiped the table. Only then did she turn around.
He was standing by the doorway, leaning one shoulder against the frame. Tall, six feet or so, broad-shouldered, with that habit of folding his arms across his chest whenever he said something unpleasant. He was wearing a new shirt. Light blue, fitted.
Before, he had only worn T-shirts.
“To whom?” Vera asked.
He blinked. He had not expected her to ask so directly.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. It matters to me.”
“Her name is Alina. We work together.”
Alina.
Vera tasted the name in her mind.
It was light, cheerful, young.
Like the oranges he had started buying in February.
“How long?”
“Since January.”
Since January.
Four months.
All that time she had cooked him stew, washed his shirts, lain beside him in the dark, and he had been with Alina. In his thoughts, in his soul, in whatever way mattered.
Vera sat down on the stool.
Not because her legs gave way.
Because standing was inconvenient for a conversation that was apparently going to be long.
“And what do you want?”
“A divorce,” he said. “And to split the apartment. Fairly.”
There it was.
The thing Zoya had warned her about.
The main thing they grabbed at.
“Fairly,” Vera repeated.
“Well, yes. We lived together for five years. I invested too. I did repairs. Bought furniture.”
She looked at him carefully, the way one looks at a person one is seeing for the first time.
The crease between his eyebrows that she had once found sweet. The mole behind his ear. The hands that could fix anything, from a stool to a faucet valve.
“The apartment isn’t mine, Igor.”
His eyebrows drew together slightly.
“What do you mean?”
“The apartment is registered in my mother’s name. You know that.”
“Come on. That’s a formality. We live here. We’re registered here.”
“You are not registered here,” Vera said.
She said it quietly. As a statement. Like the temperature outside.
Igor pushed away from the doorframe. His arms dropped.
“Wait. What do you mean, I’m not registered here?”
“You’re registered at your mother’s place. In Balashikha. We discussed it when we got married. You decided yourself not to change your registration.”
He was silent.
Vera could see him searching through his memory: documents, conversations, signatures. Looking for something to hold on to.
“But I invested. The repairs. This kitchen — I built it myself, assembled it.”
“You assembled the kitchen. My mother bought the materials.”
That was true.
Galina Petrovna had paid for both the renovation and the furniture. Igor had gone to the hardware store, chosen tiles, tightened screws. But the receipts were all in her mother’s name.
Every single one.
“This is a setup,” he said.
“It isn’t a setup. It’s just how things are.”
He paced through the kitchen. Two steps one way, two steps back. The kitchen was small, six and a half square meters, and he filled it completely.
“I’ll talk to a lawyer.”
“Talk.”
He did.
Vera learned this a week later, when Igor came home sober but with the face of a man to whom something obvious had just been explained.
He sat down in the kitchen without taking off his jacket. Put his hands on the table and stared at them as if seeing his own fingers for the first time.
“The lawyer said the apartment can’t be divided.”
Vera poured him tea. Put it in front of him in that same white mug with the chipped rim.
“I know.”
“You knew from the start? When your mother registered everything in her name, you knew this would happen?”
“No. Back then I thought we were forever.”
He raised his eyes.
Something flickered in them. Not remorse. More like anger.
“Your mother planned everything.”
“My mother bought the apartment with her own money and registered it in her own name. That’s not a plan. That’s common sense.”
“And what if I hadn’t left? What if we had lived together until old age? Would we have lived in someone else’s apartment all that time?”
“It would have been our apartment, Igor. While we were still ‘us.’”
He stood up.
The tea remained untouched. A ring of steam over the mug dissolved into the air.
“I’ll pick up my things on Saturday.”
“All right.”
He reached the door. Stopped.
“You could have at least cried.”
Vera did not answer.
On Saturday, he came with two bags and a cardboard box. He took his clothes, tools, laptop. He stood for a long time by the bookshelf, deciding which books were his.
“The Master and Margarita is mine,” he said.
“Take it.”
She sat on the sofa and watched him pack up pieces of their shared life. Every object he took from a shelf or pulled out of a cabinet left an emptiness behind. A square of dust. A mark from a frame. A dent in the wallpaper.
Igor zipped the last bag. Straightened. Looked at her as if he wanted to say something.
He said nothing.
“The keys are on the nightstand,” Vera said.
He put down the keys.
The keychain clinked against the wood. Two keys, one to the entrance and one to the apartment, on a small compass keyring.
She had brought it for him from Kaliningrad three years earlier.
Back then he had said, “Now I won’t get lost.”
The door closed.
Vera sat on the sofa and listened to his footsteps on the stairs. The elevator in their building had not worked for two weeks, and every step was clearly audible.
Fourth floor.
Third.
Second.
The entrance door slammed.
That was it.
She stood up and walked to the window.
He was heading toward the car.
Alina was sitting in the passenger seat.
Vera could not see her face, only dark hair and a hand adjusting the rearview mirror.
The car drove away.
Vera stood by the window for another minute. Then she drew the curtains, sat down on the floor, and wrapped her arms around herself.
She did not cry.
She simply sat there.
The floor was cold, and the cold rose from her feet to her knees, from her knees higher, until it filled her whole body.
The phone rang.
Her mother.
“Has he gone?”
“He’s gone.”
“Come over. I made borscht.”
“Mom, I don’t want to eat.”
“I didn’t ask whether you wanted to eat. I said come over.”
Vera smiled.
For the first time that day.
Galina Petrovna lived in Preobrazhenka, in a Khrushchev-era apartment building that still remembered Brezhnev. The apartment smelled of borscht, old books, and something floral. Her mother grew violets on the windowsills. Seventeen pots. She counted them every morning, as if someone might steal one.
When Vera came in, her mother was standing by the stove. She was only five foot two, but seemed taller. Broad-shouldered, with short gray hair cut “like a boy,” as she called it. She wore a blue apron with sunflowers over a house dress.
“Sit down,” Galina Petrovna said without turning around.
Vera sat.
The table was set: plate, spoon, bread on a wooden board, sliced thick. Her mother always cut bread thick. She said only people who were stingy sliced it thin.
“Mom.”
“Eat first.”
“Mom, he said you planned everything. That the apartment is in your name because you knew.”
Galina Petrovna turned around. In her hand was a wooden spoon, and borscht was dripping from it onto the linoleum.
She did not notice.
“Of course I knew.”
“What did you know?”
“That men leave. Not all of them. But enough of them not to take risks.”
She said it without bitterness.
Like the weather outside.
Vera lowered her eyes to the plate. The borscht was thick, dark red, with a white blot of sour cream in the center.
“Dad left too.”
Her mother was silent for a second. Then she sat beside her.
“Your father left when you were four. For a cashier from the supermarket. Do you remember the supermarket on Shchyolkovskaya?”
“No.”
“And you don’t need to. He left, and the apartment was his. His mother had given it to us for the wedding. I was left with you in my arms and one suitcase. I rented a room from old Shura on Elektrozavodskaya. Six square meters. A shared toilet with the neighbors. You slept on a folding cot.”
Vera had heard this story before.
But before, it had sounded like a tale from the past, from another life.
Now it sounded like an instruction manual.
“I saved for twelve years,” her mother continued. “Twelve years. Then I bought a one-room apartment. Then I sold that one-room apartment, added money, and bought this two-room place. Everything in my name. Because the only person who definitely won’t go anywhere is yourself.”
She stood up, went to the stove, and wiped the drop of borscht from the linoleum with a rag.
“When you married Igor, I bought you an apartment. With my own money. And registered it in my own name. Not because I didn’t trust him. Because I trusted life. And I don’t trust life.”
Vera picked up the spoon.
The borscht burned her tongue, and she squeezed her eyes shut at that small, simple, understandable pain.
“He says it isn’t fair.”
“And leaving for another woman is fair?”
Vera did not answer.
She ate the borscht.
It was delicious.
Everything her mother cooked was delicious. She cooked as if food could repair what had broken.
The divorce was finalized in May.
Quickly, routinely, like paying a utility bill. They came to the registry office, signed the papers, and went outside separately. Vera turned left. Igor turned right.
The sun was bright, May-like, mercilessly cheerful.
On the way home, she stopped by Pyaterochka. Bought milk, bread, and oranges. She stood with the oranges in her hands for a moment, then put them back on the shelf.
No.
No longer necessary.
At home, it was quiet.
Truly quiet.
Not the kind of silence where someone is sitting in the next room and not speaking. Real, complete silence, when you are alone and the air stands still.
Vera walked through the apartment.
Bedroom.
Kitchen.
Balcony.
Traces of Igor were still everywhere: the dent on his side of the pillow, the nail in the wall where his guitar had hung, the scratch on the floor from the stool he had once shoved in anger.
But he himself was gone.
And because of that, the apartment seemed both bigger and smaller.
She opened the wardrobe.
On the top shelf lay a folder with documents. Vera took it down and opened it.
Certificate of ownership in the name of Zagorodnikova Galina Petrovna.
Purchase agreement.
A copy of her mother’s passport.
Everything was in place.
Everything was correct.
Her mother had taken care of it.
Vera put the folder back.
Closed the wardrobe.
Then opened it again and moved the folder to the lower shelf, where Igor’s T-shirts used to be.
The lower shelf was more convenient.
A week later, Zoya called.
“How are you?”
“Living.”
“I can see that. Give me details.”
“Quiet. Empty. Strange. Like a tooth has been pulled. My tongue keeps going to the hole, and there’s nothing there.”
Zoya snorted.
“It will pass. The hole will heal. Remember I told you about mine?”
“The one upstairs?”
“He moved out after a year. His new woman turned out to be an alcoholic. And he wanted to divide my apartment too. Good thing I sold it earlier.”
Vera listened and thought that all these stories were alike. Different names, different addresses, but the essence was the same: someone leaves, and then the bargaining over walls begins.
“Listen,” Zoya said. “My cat is sick. Boris. Can you come sit with him on Saturday? I need to go to the dacha.”
“I can.”
Vera smiled.
Zoya never asked, “Are you lonely?” and never said, “Hang in there.”
She asked her to sit with the cat.
That was better than any sympathy.
June brought heat and a sense of emptiness Vera slowly began to get used to.
She bought new curtains. Repainted the bedroom wall pale green, by herself, with a roller, splattering her T-shirt and half the floor. She removed the nail where the guitar had hung and put a small mirror in a wooden frame in its place.
The mirror had come from her grandmother’s apartment. Her mother had brought it long ago, when Vera was still little, and it had lain on the mezzanine wrapped in newspaper. Vera unwrapped it and wiped it with a cloth. The glass was a little cloudy around the edges, but clear in the center.
She looked at her reflection and did not recognize herself.
No, the face was the same. The same gray eyes, the same light-brown hair, the same mole on her neck just below her ear.
But the expression was different.
As if someone had removed the tension from her cheekbones and forehead.
She looked neither younger nor older.
She looked freer.
Vera stepped away from the mirror and called her mother.
“Mom, I painted the wall.”
“What color?”
“Green. Pale, like mint.”
“A good color. Come over on Sunday. I’ll bake a pie.”
“With apples?”
“With cherries. There are no apples yet, it’s too early.”
Vera hung up.
Outside the window, children were shouting in the courtyard. Somewhere, a dog barked. An ordinary evening of an ordinary day, with nothing special in it.
Except that, for the first time in six months, she felt at home.
Igor called in July.
She had not expected it. She saw his name on the screen and looked at it for a second before answering.
“Yes.”
“Ver, hi. How are you?”
“Fine.”
A pause.
She could hear the noise of cars. He was calling from the street.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking. About the apartment.”
Vera moved the phone away from her ear. Looked at the screen.
His name.
His number.
Then she put it back to her ear.
“The apartment isn’t mine, Igor. And it isn’t yours. We already discussed this.”
“Yes, I understand. I just… I have nowhere to live.”
She closed her eyes.
Because there it was: that familiar, pulling, habitual feeling, when someone calls you for help and you are already reaching out your hand before you have even thought.
“And Alina?”
“We… broke up.”
Silence.
Vera stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at the mug. White, with the chipped rim. It stood in the same place as always.
Beside it, there was no second mug anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Vera said.
“Maybe I could stay with you? Temporarily. Until I find an apartment.”
“No.”
“Ver…”
“No, Igor.”
She said it calmly. Without anger. Without pleasure.
Just “no.”
A full stop.
“All right,” he said after a pause. “All right.”
The conversation ended.
Vera put the phone on the table.
Her fingers were not trembling.
She poured herself tea into the white mug and drank it standing by the window, watching the evening darken.
In August, her mother came over with a pie.
Cherry, as promised, only a month later.
She came in, took off her shoes, and went into the kitchen. Looked around. Noticed the new curtains, the repainted wall, the mirror where the nail had been.
“Good,” Galina Petrovna said. “It looks like you.”
They sat at the table.
The pie was hot, the cherries showing through the dough in burgundy spots. Her mother cut it with a large knife, and the juice ran onto the plate.
“Mom, he called.”
“Who?” her mother asked, although she knew.
“Igor. Asked if he could stay here.”
“And you?”
“I said no.”
Galina Petrovna stopped cutting. Looked at her daughter. For a long time — five seconds, which for her was an entire speech.
“Good girl.”
One word.
Vera felt it settle inside her, warm and heavy, like a stone heated by the sun.
They ate pie and said nothing.
Not because there was nothing to say.
Because sometimes silence itself is a conversation.
Her mother looked out the window.
Vera looked at her mother.
And thought: here is a woman who saved for an apartment for twelve years, raised a daughter alone, never once complained, and never once let her ex back in.
Her mother had not taught her how to live.
She had simply shown her how it was done.
“The pie is delicious,” Vera said.
“Of course it is. I kneaded the dough for three hours.”
Vera laughed.
Galina Petrovna looked at her in surprise, then laughed too.
And the laughter sounded strange in the apartment, where it had been so quiet for the last few months. As if the walls were not yet used to it.
That evening, after her mother had left, Vera washed the dishes.
The white mug with the chipped rim stood on the drying rack, alone. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. The chip was old, from before Igor. Her mother had bought that mug at a market when Vera was twenty.
Nothing special.
White faience, no pattern, no inscription.
But it had survived everything.
The wedding.
Their life together.
Silent dinners.
The morning when he said, “I’m leaving.”
And the Saturday when he took his things.
The mug had remained in its place.
Like her mother.
Like Vera herself.
She put the mug into the cupboard.
Not on the drying rack, but specifically into the cupboard, on the shelf with the dishes for guests.
She would take it out when she wanted tea.
Or when someone came whom she herself chose to open the door for.
The kitchen faucet was dripping.
Vera took out her phone and dialed the plumber’s number. She made an appointment for Tuesday.
Then she turned off the light and went to the bedroom.
The wall was green, mint-colored, calm.
The mirror in the wooden frame reflected an empty room.
And that was all right.
Vera lay down.
The sheet smelled of laundry detergent and faintly of lavender; she had tossed a sprig into the washing machine during the last wash.
Outside the window, the city murmured: cars, voices, someone’s distant laughter.
She closed her eyes.
Tomorrow was Tuesday.
The plumber would come.
The faucet would stop dripping.
And it would become completely quiet.
