I Overheard My Husband’s Secret Conversation with His Mother—and Immediately Emptied Our Joint Account
“Where did you put our money? Have you completely lost your mind?!”
Vadik burst into the kitchen, nearly slamming his shoulder into the doorframe. He gripped his phone as though he were about to hurl it against the wall.
Rita flinched violently. The knife slipped from her hand and clattered against the cutting board. She slowly placed it beside the half-sliced loaf of bread and brushed the crumbs from her palm into the sink. Her back ached with the familiar pain of standing over the stove for too long.
“Where is it all?” her husband roared, looming over the dining table.
“Where is what?” Rita did not turn around. She stared at the trails of water running down the stainless-steel sink.
“The savings! There’s nothing there! The balance is zero!”
He waved the phone close to the back of her head. The banking app was open on the glowing screen.
Rita rinsed her fingers under the running water, dried them on a dish towel, and only then turned to face her husband. Her face was gray with exhaustion, and an unpleasant trembling ran through her legs. She did not feel calm or composed. All she felt was a dull, heavy disappointment that had been accumulating for the past eighteen months.
“The money is somewhere safe,” she replied quietly. “In my personal account.”
“Put it back!” Vadik planted his fists on the countertop. “That money belongs to both of us!”
“It did. Until you decided to buy Tamara Ilyinichna a country house.”
Her husband fell silent.
It was as though someone had suddenly let all the air out of him. His shoulders dropped instantly, and all his aggressive confidence was replaced by the confusion of a schoolboy caught doing something wrong.
Two hours earlier, Rita had come home from work ahead of schedule. Management had let the entire department leave early before the weekend, and she had practically flown home.
By Friday, the amount they needed would finally be sitting in their joint account. They could order tiles for the bathroom and proper laminate flooring for the bedroom.
For a year and a half, they had been living in the bare concrete shell of their newly built apartment. They slept on a mattress thrown directly onto the dusty unfinished floor. They bathed in a bathroom where cold air blew through the unsealed cracks so fiercely that they had to turn on a portable heater.
Rita had taken off her shoes in the hallway and was already opening her mouth to call out to her husband when she heard his voice.
Vadik was standing on the balcony.
“Mom, I told you, I’ll transfer everything tomorrow morning,” he said confidently, with the self-important tone of a wealthy gentleman. “Don’t worry. The seller isn’t going anywhere. We’ll pay the deposit.”
Rita froze without even taking off her coat. Her legs suddenly felt numb.
“Rita can manage without her precious tiles,” her husband added into the phone with mild irritation. “That plot of land is more important for you while the price is still good. We’re family. We have to help each other. So what if we live with bare concrete for another six months? She’s not some noble lady.”
Rita did not storm in and start a scandal.
She quietly crouched down in the hallway, took out her phone, and opened the banking app.
Two and a half taps were all it took to create a hidden account and transfer the money.
The joint savings account, into which they had deposited every spare coin they could scrape together over the previous year and a half, was emptied.
“You… you were eavesdropping?” Vadik finally managed to say, pulling Rita back into the reality of the kitchen argument.
“I live in this apartment, Vadim. I also have the right to walk through the hallway without wearing earplugs.”
“Rita, you don’t understand!” her husband exclaimed, waving his hands.
He quickly recovered from the shock of being caught and immediately changed tactics, switching to aggressive self-defense.
“They’re selling an incredible piece of land for almost nothing! Right beside the river! Mom has dreamed of something like that her entire life. It would be a crime to let the opportunity go. We can wait.”
“In bare concrete?” she asked, leaning her lower back against the edge of the sink.
“It’s not a big deal!” he snorted. “So the walls are gray. We have a roof over our heads. It’s warm, and we have electricity. Helping your mother in her old age is practically sacred. Her blood pressure keeps rising!”
“And will she repay the deposit from her pension?”
Vadik’s face twisted.
Any mention of his mother’s finances was always dangerous territory.
Tamara Ilyinichna was not poor, but she preferred spending her money exclusively on herself: massages, expensive vitamins from the pharmacy, and trips to visit friends in another city.
“It’s none of your business to count someone else’s money!” her husband snapped. “Transfer it back. I already promised her.”
“Then the person who made the promise can transfer the money.”
Vadik sank heavily onto an ordinary kitchen chair.
He had failed to solve the problem through intimidation. His wife was neither crying nor shouting. She simply stood there, looking at him from beneath her brows with exhausted eyes.
His voice immediately became pleading and drawn-out.
“Rita, why are you making such a big deal out of this? Seriously. Mom’s joints hurt. She needs fresh air, don’t you understand? The doctor said nature heals people. Working with the soil gives you strength.”
“She can go to the city park.” Rita crossed her arms. “There’s soil there too. And trees. Completely free of charge.”
“You’re cruel.” He shook his head as though he were standing before pure evil. “She needs a vegetable garden. Her own garden beds. She can work in the soil and take her mind off her illnesses.”
“And I need a bathroom,” Rita said, and her voice finally trembled, revealing the anger that had been building inside her. “I want to be able to wash without standing inside a gray concrete box with wires sticking out of the walls. I want to walk around my own home barefoot instead of wearing three pairs of socks because the floor is covered in concrete dust!”
Her husband slapped his palm against the table. A cup containing the remains of his morning coffee jumped.
“Why are you so obsessed with that bathroom? We’ve been living like this for a year and a half, and nothing has happened. Nobody died. We’ll put up with it for another six months and save the money again. Why are you acting like a child? All you ever think about is yourself!”
“A year and a half, Vadim.” Rita stepped toward the table, clenching her fingers. “I haven’t bought myself a new pair of shoes in a year and a half. This is the second winter I’ve worn a down jacket whose zipper comes apart whenever I bend over the wrong way. We eat discounted pasta and chicken backs. The last time we went on vacation was three years ago, at a cheap holiday camp with the toilet outside.”
“I deprived myself of plenty of things too!” her husband interrupted, bristling. “I didn’t buy a new fishing rod!”
“Yes, you deprived yourself so that you could eventually spend everything on a country house for your mother? Without telling me? Using our joint budget?”
“It’s temporary!” Vadik jumped up again, waving his arms. “We’ll buy the land and register it in Mom’s name so the taxes are lower. Then one day, it will belong to us anyway. It’s an investment in our family’s future.”
“Yes, of course.” Rita gave him a crooked smile. “We both know what ‘one day’ means. You also have a younger brother, dear little Pasha, who probably dreams every night about grabbing a piece of Tamara Ilyinichna’s property. So what you’re really investing in is your mother’s cucumbers and Pasha’s inheritance. Meanwhile, I’ll keep bathing in a concrete tomb.”
The persuasion was over.
His attempts to appeal to her sympathy had failed, so he brought out the heavy artillery—his favorite method of attack.
“You’re acting like a rat,” her husband hissed, leaning toward her across the table. “Secretly taking our joint money and putting it into your personal account is theft. You behaved like a vile, dishonest market trader.”
“I’m saving my home renovation from someone who sponsors other people’s country houses.”
“I could divorce you for this! Remember that!” he shouted.
Rita closed her eyes for a second.
For some reason, his words caused neither fear nor panic. There was only a ringing emptiness inside her.
“Go ahead.” She shrugged and looked directly into his face. “We can divide the concrete walls in half while we’re at it. At least we’ll save money on lawyers, because there’s nothing to divide. The only property we own is construction dust.”
Vadik followed her closely as she took plates out of the cabinet. He needed to have the final word.
“You have no right!” he continued pressuring her. “Exactly half of that money came from my salary! I worked for it! I took night shifts!”
“Exactly. Half.”
Rita took her phone out of the pocket of her house pants again.
“Tomorrow morning, I’ll transfer your exact share to your salary account. Every last penny. You can use it to buy a plot of land, an airplane, or a seaside vacation for Tamara Ilyinichna.”
Her husband froze.
All his aggression vanished, leaving behind undisguised panic.
“Half won’t be enough for the deposit!” he blurted out. “We’ll lose the land!”
“What a shame.”
“Rita, please!” He tried to grab her hand, but she stepped back. “Mom has already made an agreement with the seller! She has to pay tomorrow. She gave them her word!”
“That has nothing to do with me,” Rita said firmly. “Tomorrow, I’m spending my money on building materials. The delivery workers will arrive by evening. You can deal with the problems you created yourself.”
“You’re humiliating me in front of my mother! What am I supposed to tell her? I promised her I would handle everything! How am I supposed to look her in the eye?”
“Tell her I can manage without my tiles,” Rita reminded him, repeating the words he had spoken on the balcony. “And you can manage without my salary. This conversation is over. Sit down and eat. The pasta is getting cold.”
Vadik lost his temper.
He shoved the chair away so violently that it crashed against the wall. Then he stormed into the bedroom and spent a long time muttering into the phone.
Rita could hear him making confused excuses and placing all the blame on “that crazy woman.”
A few minutes later, the front door slammed in the hallway.
Her husband had gone to Tamara Ilyinichna’s house to drown his sorrows in tea and complain about his monstrous wife.
There was nothing else he could do, and Rita understood that perfectly.
She did not want to see his face either.
A week and a half later, the hallway was filled with heavy cardboard boxes.
The apartment smelled strongly of primer and construction dust, but to Rita, it was the finest fragrance in the world.
Vadik walked around the apartment looking darker than a storm cloud.
Whenever he spoke to his mother on the phone, he used only short sentences and tried to retreat to the balcony.
The magnificent plot of land beside the river had been successfully purchased by other, faster buyers.
Now, whenever she had the chance, Tamara Ilyinichna sighed into the phone and complained that her ungrateful children had driven her into an early grave and deprived her of the final joy in her life.
Rita crouched calmly in the bathroom, mixing grout in a small bucket.
Her husband had not rushed to file for divorce, of course. Nor had he packed his belongings.
He simply spent his evenings silently eating pasta with chicken and staring at his phone.
Rita scooped up some of the white mixture with a rubber grout float.
The television murmured behind the wall, while beneath her hand, a smooth, clean line appeared between the brand-new white tiles.
And that was far more important than his mother’s cucumbers.