Galina Petrovna was washing the dishes and heard everything.
Not on purpose — it was just that the kitchen in their apartment was arranged in such a way that the extractor hood had not worked for the third year already, the window had to be kept open, and Sergey was talking on the phone out on the balcony, which adjoined the kitchen on one side. The balcony door was slightly ajar. It was October, but he was not cold — he was pacing in a sweater and slippers, pressing the phone to his ear.
She was finishing washing the frying pan. That very frying pan she had bought three years ago with her own money — heavy, cast iron, a good one. Back then Sergey had said there was no need to spend that much on a frying pan, that they already had a perfectly normal one, an old Soviet one, his grandmother’s. She bought it anyway. Now he fried eggs on it every morning and said the taste was completely different.
“My wife is as dumb as a block of wood, a real oak stump. I’ve already found a buyer for her apartment,” her husband laughed quietly into the phone.
Galina Petrovna placed the frying pan on the drying rack. Carefully. Then she picked up the next plate.
“No, she has no idea. And I’m not planning to tell her ahead of time. Why would I? Let her sit quietly and not make a fuss. I’ve already pulled up the documents and looked them over — she’s the sole owner there, but we’re married, which means it’s jointly acquired property…”
The plate had a small crack along the edge. Galina Petrovna remembered when it had cracked — a year ago, Sergey had dropped it while drying it. She had not thrown it away because it seemed a shame; it was a good plate, deep. She put it with the others.
“No, the realtor is someone I know, everything’s clean. He says we can pull it off quickly. The main thing is her signature. She’ll sign, where else will she go? I’ll say we’re filing for a tax deduction or something like that. She doesn’t understand these things.”
Galina Petrovna turned off the water.
She dried her hands on the towel hanging from the oven handle — linen, embroidered with roosters, brought back from Suzdal six years ago, when they still used to go places together.
She stepped into the hallway. Put on her coat. Her boots. Took her bag from the coat rack.
Inside the bag was everything she needed right now: her wallet, her phone, the keys to her mother’s apartment.
That very apartment. Her mother’s. A two-room apartment in Cheryomushki, which her mother had left to her three years ago. Not to them — to her. Her mother, who had never particularly liked Sergey — or perhaps had simply seen better than she had — had made the will in her daughter’s name alone, without any shared rights. At the time, Galina Petrovna had been upset about it: it had seemed as though her mother was deliberately doing something against the family, against her husband. Sergey had also taken offense — he had sulked for a week, saying it was disrespectful.
Now she thought of her mother with such sharp, belated tenderness that she had to stop in the hallway and stand for several seconds, looking at her reflection in the mirror.
Fifty-two years old. Dark hair with gray strands she had long ago stopped dyeing. Gray eyes. A dark chocolate-colored coat bought on sale last year.
A normal woman.
Not wooden.
She opened the front door and left.
The notary received her forty minutes later.
His name was Anton Valeryevich, and he was a businesslike man of few words — exactly the kind of person she needed right now. Galina Petrovna had called him from the elevator while going downstairs: they knew each other through her friend Rita, he had helped her several times with matters after her mother’s death, and she knew he worked on Saturdays until three.
It was twelve forty-five.
“Galina Petrovna, I’m listening,” he said when she entered his office.
A small office, shelves full of folders, the smell of coffee and a little old paper. Outside the window, the street was noisy.
“I need a consultation,” she said. “Quickly. I have an apartment — an inheritance from my mother. I am the sole owner. We have been married for seventeen years. My husband wants to sell it and has already found a buyer. He didn’t warn me. I found out by accident.”
Anton Valeryevich looked at her. Took off his glasses. Rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“The apartment was received by inheritance?” he clarified.
“Yes. Under a will. Three years ago.”
“Then it is your personal property,” he said. “Not jointly acquired. Article 36 of the Family Code: property received as a gift or by inheritance is not common marital property. Your husband has no rights to it.”
“He thinks otherwise.”
“He is mistaken,” Anton Valeryevich said without emotion, as a fact. “He cannot sell it without your consent. No conscientious notary will certify such a transaction without your personal presence. And if he somehow obtains your signature by deception — that is already a criminal matter. Fraud.”
Galina Petrovna nodded.
“What do I need to do right now?”
“First, make sure the original documents for the apartment are in your possession. The certificate of inheritance, the extract from the Unified State Register in your name. Where are they?”
“At home,” she said, then stopped short. “In the desk drawer in the bedroom.”
“Take them today. Put them somewhere your husband has no access. With a friend, in a bank safe-deposit box — anywhere.”
“All right.”
“Second,” he paused, “you understand this is not only a legal issue?”
“I understand,” said Galina Petrovna.
“What are you going to do?”
She did not answer immediately. She looked out the window — there, on the street, a man was walking with a red dog. The dog was pulling the leash sideways toward the lawn, while the man walked and looked at his phone, and somehow their directions did not quite match.
“I don’t know yet,” she said at last. “But first I’ll take the documents.”
She returned home two hours later.
Sergey was sitting in front of the television with a mug of tea, watching some fishing program he liked on weekends. He turned around when she came in.
“Where did you go?”
“On business,” she said. She walked past him into the bedroom.
“What kind of business on a Saturday?”
“My own.”
She opened the desk drawer. The folder with the documents was where it had always been — under a stack of old magazines. Galina Petrovna took the folder, without hurrying, and checked its contents: the certificate of inheritance, the extract from the Unified State Register, the will, the technical passport. Everything was there.
She put the folder into her bag.
Then she went into the living room.
Sergey was watching television again. On the screen, a man in an orange vest was explaining something about fishing tackle.
“Sergey,” she said.
“Mm?” He did not turn around.
“Look at me.”
Something in her voice made him turn. He looked. He saw her face, the bag on her shoulder, her coat — she had not even taken off her coat.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she said. “I just want you to know: I heard your conversation. Today. On the balcony.”
He was silent. Something changed in his face — she watched attentively and saw it: a flicker of fear, then something like calculation, then came the expression of offended innocence she knew so well.
“What conversation? What are you talking about?”
“About the apartment,” she said calmly. “About the buyer you’ve already found. About the fact that I’m an oak stump and don’t suspect anything.”
“Galya, you misunderstood…”
“Sergey,” she interrupted, and there was no irritation in her voice, no tears, none of that high note he knew how to drive into hysteria within fifteen minutes. “Don’t. I was at the notary’s. The apartment is my personal property. Inheritance is not divided. I think you know that yourself.”
He looked at her.
“I took the documents,” she lifted her bag slightly. “They’ll be in a safe place.”
“Galya, wait, are you serious?” He stood up. “I just… it was a conversation, just a conversation, I didn’t…”
“I don’t want to talk right now,” she said. “I need to think. I’ll go stay with Rita for a few days.”
“With Rita? Have you lost your mind? Over some phone conversation?”
“Over seventeen years,” said Galina Petrovna. Quietly, without anger. “Goodbye, Sergey.”
She left.
Rita lived three trolleybus stops away, in an old building with high ceilings and a cat named Broshka, who immediately hid under the bed at the sight of guests and stayed there until the guest brought her something tasty.
On the way, Galina Petrovna bought a packet of cat treats.
“My God,” Rita said, opening the door and seeing her friend on the threshold — with a bag, in her coat, with a completely calm face. “Come in immediately.”
Broshka came out from under the bed twenty minutes later, ate the treat from Galina Petrovna’s palm, and allowed herself to be scratched behind the ear. Animals can sense when a person needs exactly that — a warm living creature nearby, one that demands nothing and asks no questions.
Rita put the kettle on. Took out cookies. Sat opposite her and listened.
Galina Petrovna told her everything — briefly, without anything unnecessary. The frying pan, the balcony, the words “oak stump,” the notary, the documents in her bag, his face when she said, “I heard.”
“And how are you?” Rita asked when she finished.
“I’m fine,” said Galina Petrovna. And it was true. A strange truth, but still the truth. “You know, I’m not crying. I expected I would cry. But I’m not.”
“Because you already knew for a long time.”
Galina Petrovna thought about that. She took the mug in both hands.
“Probably. I didn’t know it like this — concretely. But I had felt something like it. For a long time.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think. Can I stay with you for a few days?”
“As long as you need,” Rita said without hesitation.
Broshka moved from the windowsill to the sofa, settled next to Galina Petrovna, and began to purr. It was unexpected — usually the cat did not go onto the sofa with guests. Rita raised her eyebrows, and Galina Petrovna lowered her hand and scratched Broshka behind the ear.
“Tell me something,” she asked. “About your life. About Antoshka, about work. Anything ordinary.”
And Rita told her. About her son, who had enrolled in correspondence studies and was now working at an auto repair shop and seemed to have found himself. About the vegetable garden at the dacha and how this year a pumpkin of unbelievable size had grown, and now nobody knew what to do with it. About their neighbor Zinaida Mikhailovna, who had got a dog at eighty, and the dog had turned out to be a completely happy event for the whole building entrance.
Galina Petrovna listened and drank tea, and outside the window it was getting dark, and the floor lamp glowed in the corner, and Broshka purred beside her, and it was quiet, and — strangely — it was good.
For the first three days, the phone rang nonstop.
Sergey called seven or eight times a day. At first his voice was offended — he did not understand how she could do this, it had only been idle chatter, he had never intended anything of the sort, she had misunderstood everything. Then his voice became conciliatory — come home, let’s talk normally, there’s no need to sulk. Then irritated — you’re an adult woman, you need to know how to talk, not run away.
Galina Petrovna did not answer every time. When she did answer, she spoke briefly: she was thinking, she needed time, she would call him herself.
On the fourth day, his sister Lyudmila called.
“Galya, come on, what are you doing? He’s worried, come home already.”
“Lyuda,” said Galina Petrovna. “Did you know?”
A pause.
“Know what?”
“About the apartment. About the buyer.”
The pause was longer than an honest person needed.
“Galya, he just told me you were thinking of selling the apartment, that you needed money…”
“I see,” said Galina Petrovna.
“Well, he’s not a bad person, he just…”
“Lyuda, I’m asking you: don’t call me about this anymore. I’ll sort it out myself.”
And she did sort it out.
Not in four days, of course. Not in a week. Life rarely sorts itself out quickly, especially when it is seventeen years long and so much is tangled inside it — a shared apartment, mutual acquaintances, a shared history, shared habits like the fact that he always added extra salt to the soup, and she always opened the small window at night, and it annoyed him, but he tolerated it.
Galina Petrovna called a lawyer — not the notary, but specifically a family lawyer, whom she found through acquaintances. A woman of about forty, businesslike, without unnecessary words. They met in a small office. Galina Petrovna brought the folder with the documents and explained the situation.
“The apartment is clean,” the lawyer said after reviewing the papers. “Inherited, not joint property. That’s a plus. Now — what do you want in the end?”
“A divorce,” said Galina Petrovna. She said the word aloud for the first time, and it turned out not to be as heavy as she had expected. “And our shared apartment. We bought it together, during the marriage. I want to understand what I’m entitled to.”
“Jointly acquired property is divided equally, unless there is a prenuptial agreement.”
“There is no agreement.”
“Then half. Either you sell it and divide the money, or one of you buys out the other’s share.”
Galina Petrovna nodded. Thinking.
“I don’t need that apartment,” she said slowly. “I’d rather live in my mother’s. It’s smaller, but it is mine. Completely mine.”
“Then you can give up your share in exchange for compensation,” said the lawyer. “He pays you half the market value. Or you reach an agreement about property — furniture, the car, whatever else you have.”
“The car is registered in his name, but we bought it together.”
“Then it is also joint property.”
They spoke for another hour. Galina Petrovna wrote things down in a notebook — neatly, the way she had been used to writing down important things all her life. The lawyer answered to the point, without pity and without judgment — just facts, figures, options.
When Galina Petrovna stepped outside, it was already evening. The streetlights were on. A fine rain was falling.
She stopped on the steps and lifted her face. The rain was cold, October rain, almost blind.
She stood like that for a minute, perhaps longer.
Then she took out her phone and wrote to Sergey: “We need to meet and talk. Not at home. The café on Sadovaya, tomorrow at eleven.”
He replied a minute later: “All right.”
The café on Sadovaya was the kind of place people went to not for the food. Wooden tables, floor-to-ceiling windows, the smell of coffee and cinnamon. Galina Petrovna arrived ten minutes early, chose a table by the window, ordered a latte. She looked out at the street — people were walking with umbrellas, and there was something calming in that ordinary morning movement.
Sergey arrived on time. She had not seen him for eight days. He looked tired — bags under his eyes, unshaven. He sat down opposite her without taking off his jacket.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
The waiter brought her coffee. Sergey ordered an Americano.
They sat in silence for a while.
“Galya,” he began. “I want to explain…”
“Sergey,” she interrupted. Not sharply, just to steer the conversation where it needed to go. “I didn’t come here for you to explain. I came here so we could reach an agreement. Like human beings, without court, if possible.”
He looked at her.
“Reach an agreement about what?”
“About divorce,” said Galina Petrovna. “And the division of property.”
Something passed across his face — several expressions at once, quickly. She watched and did not look away.
“You’re serious.”
“Completely serious.”
“Galya, this is… over one conversation? Which, besides, you misunderstood…”
“I understood correctly,” she said calmly. “And it isn’t about one conversation. You know that too.”
He fell silent.
Outside the window, a woman walked by with a large checkered bag and a small dog on a leash. The dog stopped at every post.
“What do you want?” he asked at last.
“Our apartment — half and half. I give up my share in exchange for compensation. Half the market value. We’ll call an appraiser together. The car too — either we sell it and divide the money, or you pay me half. I don’t need anything else.”
“That’s a lot of money,” he said.
“I know.”
“Where am I supposed to get that kind of money?”
“That is not my question, Sergey. You could take out a loan. Or sell the apartment and buy something smaller. Or divide the proceeds fairly.”
“Fairly,” he repeated with a kind of bitterness.
“Exactly.”
She drank her coffee. He looked at the table.
“We could try,” he said quietly. “Talk normally, fix something. Seventeen years is not…”
“Sergey,” she said. “I heard you calling me wooden. I heard you laughing into the phone. I heard you saying I wouldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t a quarrel — it was… ordinary. As if you had thought that way for a long time.”
He did not answer.
“Maybe you do think that,” she said without resentment. “That’s your right. But I don’t want to live with a person who thinks that of me. And I don’t want to sign documents without reading them, and I don’t want decisions made about me without me. Not by you, not by anyone else.”
He sat very quietly.
“You’ve changed a lot,” he said at last.
“No,” said Galina Petrovna. “You just weren’t looking.”
They reached an agreement.
Not immediately — it took three more meetings, an appraiser, several calls to lawyers on both sides, and one raised-voice conversation after which she left the café, walked to the nearest bench, sat there for ten minutes looking at pigeons, and returned.
They agreed: he would pay her compensation for her share in the apartment — not all at once, but in installments, through the bank, officially. The car would remain with him, and he would pay her the difference. As for the furniture — whatever she wanted, she would take; the rest would stay with him.
She took little furniture: the armchair she had brought from her mother’s apartment. The floor lamp she had chosen herself eight years ago. A few books. And the cast-iron frying pan.
The movers finished in two hours.
Her mother’s apartment smelled slightly uninhabited — the way all apartments smell when nobody has lived in them for a long time. Galina Petrovna opened the windows despite the fact that it was November. She walked through the rooms. Touched her mother’s curtains in the kitchen — white, with a small blue pattern, slightly faded. They ought to be changed. Or perhaps not — let them stay for now.
She placed the armchair by the window. Switched on the floor lamp.
Broshka, whom Rita had allowed her to take “temporarily, until you settle in” — and they both knew it was forever — came out of the carrier, walked around the entire apartment along the perimeter, sniffed everything that could be sniffed, and settled into the armchair.
“Get down,” said Galina Petrovna.
Broshka looked at her and did not get down.
“All right,” she agreed.
She put the kettle on. While it boiled, she stood by the window, watching the lights on the other side of the street, the cars passing, someone walking a dog below. Everything ordinary, everything as always.
Her phone pinged. Her friend Rita had written: “How are you there?”
Galina Petrovna wrote back: “Drinking tea. The cat has taken the armchair. I’m fine.”
Rita sent a laughing emoji and a heart.
The kettle boiled.
She took out a mug — an ordinary white one without any inscription, taken from her mother’s cupboard. She brewed tea — her mother’s tea, which still remained in a tin box with an elephant drawn on it. Her mother had liked it strong; Galina Petrovna did too.
She sat by the window, next to Broshka — the cat glanced sideways at her, but did not move. Galina Petrovna placed her hand nearby, and the cat nudged it with her nose.
Outside the window, evening was falling. An ordinary November evening.
And everything that was needed right now was there: hot tea, a warm cat, a window with lights, silence — a silence that was her own, not someone else’s.
An oak stump.
So be it.
December came early and all at once — with frost, with short days, with that special smell that exists only at the beginning of winter: a little snow, a little smoke, a little something else nameless, something that always tightens the heart slightly and reminds one of childhood.
Galina Petrovna loved December. It was one of those small facts about herself that a person discovers only when they begin living alone: that she loved December, that she slept better with the small window slightly open, that in the morning she did not need to talk — she could drink coffee in silence, and it would be the best start to the day.
Her colleagues at her new job turned out to be tactful people. Nobody pried with questions. On the first day, the chief accountant, Svetlana Nikolaevna — a woman of about fifty-five, with thick dyed hair and a very straight back — simply said, “You’ll understand everything quickly; it’s not scary here.” And she turned out to be right — it was not scary. Galina Petrovna figured out the software in a week, and everything else in two. By the end of January, she already felt the way she should there: not like a guest, but not like furniture either — like a person in her proper place.
Sometimes after work she stopped by a nearby shop — the very one that sold good coffee by weight. She bought a little, chose slowly, smelled different varieties. The young salesman with an earring in his ear began to recognize her and sometimes suggested something new: “Try this Ethiopian one, it just came in, interesting.”
A small life. But her own.
On Saturdays she cleaned. Her mother’s apartment was small, and cleaning took two hours at most — but she did it without hurrying, without rushing: wiped her mother’s shelves, rearranged her mother’s cups in the cupboard, and sometimes found something she had not noticed before. In November, she found an old photograph in the vanity drawer — her mother young, about thirty, in a light dress, laughing, looking somewhere past the camera. Galina Petrovna held the photograph in her hands for a long time.
She placed it on the windowsill, leaning it against a flowerpot with a geranium — the geranium was also her mother’s, had survived two years without its owner, and now seemed pleased with regular watering.
“Mama,” she said aloud. Just like that. Broshka lifted her head from the armchair and looked at her.
Galina Petrovna smiled — at the cat, at her mother in the photograph, at the December window.
In January, Lyudmila, Sergey’s sister, called. Galina Petrovna had already decided not to answer, but then she thought — Lyudmila personally had done nothing bad to her; it was simply that she had such a brother. So she answered.
“Galya, hello,” Lyudmila said cautiously. “How are you?”
“I’m well,” said Galina Petrovna.
“I heard you found a new job?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Truly, that’s good,” there was something sincere in Lyudmila’s voice, and Galina Petrovna heard it. “The reason I’m calling… Were you offended with me then? When I talked about Seryozha?”
“I wasn’t offended,” said Galina Petrovna. “I understood you. He’s your brother.”
“Yes,” Lyudmila was silent for a moment. “You know, I told him then. Afterward. That he was a fool. That you can’t do things like that. He didn’t really listen, but I said it.”
“Thank you, Lyuda.”
“You… if you want, let’s meet sometimes. Just like that, for coffee. We’ve known each other for eighteen years, after all.”
Galina Petrovna thought for a second.
“Let’s,” she said. “Just not now. Maybe in spring.”
“Spring is good,” Lyudmila agreed. “Call me.”
“I will.”
She put the phone away and thought that this, too, was part of adult life — the ability to distinguish people who had been near a situation from people who had themselves been the situation. Lyudmila had simply been nearby. That was different.
In March, when the snow had almost melted and the yard was covered with wet leaves from the previous year, she ran into Sergey at the shop near his building — she had been passing by and stopped in for bread.
He was coming out of the shop; she was going in. They stopped for a second.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said.
“How are you?”
“Well. And you?”
“Also,” he paused. “You look good.”
“Thank you.”
She entered the shop. Took bread. Stood at the checkout and thought that she needed to stop by Rita’s on Sunday — Rita was gathering a group to watch a film, something new and French, about a woman who leaves her husband and opens a bakery. Rita had said, “It’s all shown so clearly that you laugh and cry at the same time.”
At the checkout stood a young girl of about twenty, with pink headphones around her neck. She scanned the items and hummed something under her breath.
Galina Petrovna paid. Went outside.
Sergey was already gone.
She walked toward her car — her own car, a small Korean one bought in January with part of the compensation — and thought that on Sunday she should arrive at Rita’s early to help set the table. And that Broshka had been acting strangely that morning — sitting by the front door and singing something to herself in cat language; she should take her to the vet for a routine checkup. And that tomorrow was the first working day at the new place — she had found the job at the end of January, as an accountant in a small company, and the people there had turned out to be good, and the office was small but had a window overlooking the park.
Wooden, then.
She smiled. To herself, just because.
She remembered how her mother used to say sometimes: “Galechka, wood is good. Wood bends and doesn’t break. It’s stone that breaks.” Her mother had said many things like that, things that back then had seemed like mere words, but now were gradually becoming clear — not to the mind, but to some other place located somewhere between the heart and the collarbone.
She came out of the shop with bread. Stopped for a second. Then bought oranges too — three of them, bright orange, smelling good even through the peel. Broshka would not touch the oranges — cats do not eat citrus — but the smell they gave the apartment was so alive, so springlike, that she bought them every week now. Just because. Because she liked them.
Small pleasures. It turns out that this is life — these oranges, this coffee beans from the young man with the earring, Broshka in the armchair, a movie with Rita on Sunday. A French movie about a woman with a bakery. And the first snowdrops in the yard, which she had noticed that morning on her way to the parking lot — three of them, pale, impossible, right through the last dirty snow.
She got into the car. Started the engine.
The apartment was warm. Broshka met her at the door — something new, acquired over the winter: before, the cat had only got up for food; now she sometimes came to greet her. Galina Petrovna set the bag down, picked up the cat — the cat did not struggle, only looked at her with dignity — and stood like that for a second in the middle of the hallway.
Outside the window, the day was growing lighter. In a March way, cautiously, but still — lighter.
She put the kettle on. Turned on the radio softly in the background. Some old song was playing, one she remembered from childhood, though she did not remember where from. She simply remembered it — and that was all.
And that was enough.