The heavy winter boot flew within an inch of my ear and slammed into the coat rack with a dull thud. The coat hanging on it collapsed heavily to the floor, as if someone had simply thrown it down.
“Are you deaf?” Oleg stood in the doorway of the living room, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt. His face was flushed, and a vein bulged on his neck. “I said get out! I don’t want to see a trace of you here in five minutes!”
I stood there, clutching a salad bowl to my chest, the one I hadn’t managed to put on the table yet. My hands were shaking, and the glass gave a thin, trembling ring. From the room where music was booming and drunken laughter echoed, Nadezhda Vasilyevna peeked out. She adjusted the massive brooch on her chest and pursed her lips with disgust.
“Ksyusha, have some decency,” she said in that sugary voice that always made me feel sick. “It’s a man’s anniversary, his thirtieth birthday! The guests are respectable people, and you’re walking around with a sour face. You’ve ruined everyone’s appetite. Let your husband rest. Go… take a walk.”
“Take a walk?” My voice broke into a whisper. “It’s minus twenty outside. At night. Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t give a damn!” Oleg roared, stepping closer. He reeked of alcohol and that heavy cologne his mother had given him. “Go to your daddy. To the train station. To a basement. You ruined my celebration! Did I ask for a proper table? I did! And what did you cook? Some grass, some lean fish… My friends are laughing, saying my wife put me on a diet!”
He ripped the salad bowl out of my hands. I jerked instinctively, but couldn’t hold on. The crystal hit the floor. Shards sprayed in every direction, mixing with arugula and shrimp salad.
“There!” Oleg kicked a shard with the toe of his shoe. “This is my home! I’m the man of the house here! And I decide who lives here and who gets the hell out. Keys on the nightstand!”
I looked at him. Three years. For three years, I had believed we were a family. That his outbursts of anger were just fatigue from work. That his mother’s visits “for a week,” which stretched into a month, were only a temporary test.
That morning, I had transferred the last of my money to his card—forty thousand rubles I had been saving for a doctor’s appointment. He had said, “We need to set a beautiful table. Larisa and her husband are coming. I can’t lose face in front of them.”
Larisa… His school crush. She was sitting there in the living room in a red dress, and she had probably heard every word.
Slowly, I pulled my down jacket off the hook. It was cold. A draft was blowing through the cracks around the front door, which Oleg had never sealed, even though he had promised to do it back in October.
“All right,” I said quietly. “I’ll leave.”
“And hurry up!” Nadezhda Vasilyevna shouted, kicking my bag lying near the threshold. “And don’t you dare take any food with you. It was bought with my son’s money!”
I pulled on my boots and threw on my jacket. My hat was somewhere in the closet, but searching for it under their stares was unbearable. I opened the door and stepped into the darkness of the stairwell.
Behind me, the lock clicked. Twice. Like a sentence being passed.
Outside, a real blizzard was raging. The February wind struck my face with sharp pellets of snow. I walked to the bench by the entrance, brushed off the snow with my hand, and sat down. I had nowhere to go. My parents lived in a village forty kilometers away. The buses had stopped running. A taxi would cost around fifteen hundred rubles, and I had two hundred left on my card.
I took out my phone. The screen glowed in the darkness, showing 9:15 p.m.
My fingers were frozen stiff, but I found the only number that mattered now.
“Dad.”
One ring. A second. A third.
“Yes, Ksyusha?” My father’s voice was calm, but I heard tension in it. He always knew when something was wrong with me.
“Dad…” I tried to hold back my sobs, but they broke out in hoarse gasps. “He threw me out.”
“Who?”
“Oleg. He and his mother… They kicked me out. Said the apartment was theirs and I was nobody. I’m outside, Dad.”
The silence on the line was terrifying. Not empty silence, as if the connection had dropped, but heavy, charged silence, like the moment before a storm.
“Are you by the entrance?” my father asked. His voice had become low and rumbling.
“Yes.”
“Go into the twenty-four-hour pharmacy around the corner. Sit there. I’m coming.”
“Dad, don’t. There’s a blizzard. The road is bad…”
“I said wait.”
I sat in the pharmacy on a plastic chair, staring at a display of vitamins. The pharmacist, an elderly woman in glasses, glanced at me from time to time but said nothing. Only once did she offer me water. I refused. I was shaking not from the cold, but from humiliation.
I remembered how, an hour earlier, Larisa had laughed loudly at my dress.
“Oh, Ksyusha, is that from last century’s collection? Nobody wears that anymore.”
And Oleg had laughed with her.
Forty minutes later, my father’s black SUV pulled up sharply outside the pharmacy. Stepan Ilyich had bought it six months earlier for fishing trips, but now the vehicle looked like a battle tank.
My father entered the pharmacy, shaking snow off his shoulders. He was wearing an old but sturdy sheepskin coat. When he saw me—with tear-swollen eyes and my down jacket half unzipped—his jaw tightened.
“Get up, daughter.”
“Dad, please, let’s go to your place…” I whispered.
“No. We’re going home. To your home.”
We went upstairs. From behind the door of our apartment—now “their” apartment, as they thought—music was blaring. My mother-in-law’s dance playlist.
My father didn’t ring the bell. He took his own set of keys from his pocket. I had forgotten he had a copy—just in case, “to water the flowers if you ever go away.”
The click of the lock disappeared beneath the music. We entered the hallway.
The scene looked like a painting.
Oleg was dancing with Larisa, holding her far too tightly. Nadezhda Vasilyevna sat at the head of the table like a noblewoman, helping herself to cake—the very cake I had baked until two in the morning the night before. The other guests, Oleg’s colleagues, were already quite drunk and loudly arguing about politics.
“Oh!” Oleg noticed us first. He let go of Larisa and swayed. “You showed up? I told you I wouldn’t let you back in! And you dragged your daddy along? Stepan Ilyich, you should take your daughter away. She’s not well at all today. Started a hysterical scene out of nowhere.”
The music stopped. Someone had the sense to turn off the speaker.
My father silently walked into the center of the room without taking off his shoes. Dirty, wet tracks from his boots marked the light laminate flooring I had polished with a special cleaner the day before.
“I threw her out!” Oleg suddenly repeated loudly, with drunken bravado, addressing the guests. “So what? I have the right! My home, my rules! She has no business ruining my celebration with that sour face!”
Nadezhda Vasilyevna hurriedly swallowed a piece of cake and stood up, wiping her lips with a napkin.
“Dear in-law, why are you barging in like this? Young people quarrel and make up. Ksyusha is just showing character. She doesn’t respect her husband. We’re teaching her.”
“Teaching her?” my father repeated.
He spoke quietly, but the room became so silent that the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen could be heard.
Stepan Ilyich unbuttoned his sheepskin coat and took a thick folder from the inside pocket.
“Oleg, you seem to have forgotten our conversation before the wedding. Three years ago.”
“What conversation?” Oleg frowned, trying to focus his eyes. “You gave us the keys. You said, ‘Live there.’ A gift.”
“I said, ‘Live there as long as you are a family.’ I let you live in my apartment.”
My father pulled a document with a blue stamp from the folder.
“Can you read? Certificate of ownership. Voronov Stepan Ilyich. Date of purchase: November 10, 2021. No deed of gift. No shares.”
Larisa, who had been standing by the wall, suddenly began gathering herself in a rush. She grabbed her purse.
“Oh, I have to go. My taxi is waiting…”
“Stay where you are!” my father barked so sharply that Larisa flinched. “The show isn’t over yet.”
He turned to Oleg, who was beginning to turn pale. His face had gone gray.
“You shouted that you were the provider? That you were the master of the house? That Ksyusha was living off you?”
My father pulled out the next sheet—a bank statement.
“I wasn’t too lazy to get a printout of Ksyusha’s transfers. Every month, forty to fifty thousand to the ‘joint’ account. And here is your credit history, son-in-law. Three loans? A fancy phone, a car, and… what’s this? A trip for your mother? And all of that was paid off with joint money while my daughter walked around in an old down jacket?”
Nadezhda Vasilyevna clutched her heart and theatrically rolled her eyes.
“Oh, I feel faint… My medicine… You’ll drive me to the edge!”
“Don’t bother,” my father cut her off. “If we call doctors now, they’ll figure out very quickly that you’re pretending. But I have already called the police. The district officer will be here in five minutes.”
“What police?” Oleg shrieked. “We’re registered here!”
“Your temporary registration expired a week ago,” my father reminded him calmly. “You asked me to extend it, and I said, ‘Later.’ Well, later has arrived. Right now, you are strangers illegally occupying someone else’s property. Plus damage to property—there’s the salad on the floor. Plus,” he looked at the red mark on his daughter’s face, “the fact that you laid a hand on Ksyusha.”
The guests began to disappear. Silently, sideways, they slipped into the hallway, grabbed their coats, and fled into the stairwell. Nobody said goodbye to the “master of the house.” Larisa left last, throwing Oleg a look full of contempt.
“Stepan Ilyich…” Oleg suddenly dropped to his knees. Right into the salad on the floor. “Forgive me! The devil got into me! I love her! Ksyushka, tell him! Come on! We’re family! Mom just lost her temper!”
I looked down at him. At his expensive trousers smeared with mayonnaise. At his sweaty face. And I felt nothing. Not pain. Not anger. Only disgust, as if I had stepped into filth.
“You threw me out into a blizzard, Oleg. You said I was nobody. You were right about only one thing: I am nobody to you.”
I turned to my father.
“Dad, make them leave. Now.”
“You have ten minutes,” my father said, glancing at his watch. “Take only your personal belongings. Don’t touch the appliances. I have all the receipts. I know what I bought and what Ksyusha bought. Put the dishes back.”
It was a pathetic sight.
Nadezhda Vasilyevna rushed around the apartment, trying to stuff jars of pickles she had brought with her into bags.
“Leave the jars!” my father commanded. “Glass is heavy. You’ll strain yourself.”
Oleg gathered his personal things into a gift bag with the words “To the Best Man” printed on it. His hands were shaking.
When they stood at the threshold, loaded with bundles, my mother-in-law turned around. Her face was twisted.
“May you be cursed! Choke on your apartment! Everything comes back like a boomerang! You’ll regret this, Ksyushka, when you realize nobody needs you!”
“Get out,” my father said calmly and took a step forward.
They bolted down the stairs as if they had been scalded.
My father slammed the door shut and immediately locked the night latch.
“Tomorrow I’ll change the lock cylinder,” he said matter-of-factly.
Then he looked at me, and his stern face trembled.
“Come here, little one.”
I buried my face in his scratchy sweater, which smelled of tobacco and frost, and finally cried. Really cried. Leaving behind those three years of lies.
Six months passed.
I sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. The windows were wide open, letting in the warm August wind. There were no heavy kitchen smells here anymore. It smelled of fresh baking—I was learning to make croissants.
During those months, I had done a lot. I threw out the old sofa Oleg had loved to lie on. I repainted the walls a light beige. And I filed for divorce.
In court, Oleg looked pitiful. He tried to divide the property and demanded compensation for the renovations he had done “with his own hands,” even though we had hired a crew with my father’s money. The judge quickly put him in his place after seeing the documents.
A few days ago, I ran into a mutual acquaintance. She told me that Oleg and his mother were renting an old apartment on the outskirts of town. Larisa had left him two weeks after that birthday party. As it turned out, she didn’t need a helper with debts and a mother included in the package. Oleg had been fired from work too—the rumors about the scandal had reached his bosses, and who needed an employee like that?
The doorbell interrupted my thoughts.
I went to the door and looked through the peephole. A tall man in glasses stood on the landing, holding a toolbox. It was Savely, the new neighbor from downstairs. We had met a week earlier when I had accidentally watered his flowers on the balcony.
“Hi,” he said with a smile when I opened the door. “You said your faucet was leaking? I was passing by and thought, since it’s my day off… Am I disturbing you?”
“Hi,” I smiled back. “You’re not disturbing me. Come in. My pies aren’t ready yet, though.”
“I’ll wait. I’m patient.”
He came in, carefully took off his shoes, and placed them neatly by the mat. He went into the kitchen and immediately got to work, without demanding a table set for him or praise.
I watched his calm back, the confident movements of his hands, and understood: life goes on. And now there was no room in it for people capable of throwing someone close to them out into the cold.
That evening, a message came from an unknown number:
“Ksyush, maybe we can start over? I sent Mom to the village. I’ve changed. I feel bad without you.”
I read it, smirked, and pressed “Block.”
Then I put the phone aside and went to the kitchen, where Savely was already finishing his tea and telling some funny story about his cat.
“Sava, would you like some more?” I asked.
“Yes, please. It’s very tasty. You did well, Ksyusha.”
I poured him more tea. For the first time in a long while, this home was filled not with fear, but with simple human warmth.
And that was worth more than any picture put on for guests.