“My husband will get my divorce terms from you—I already told him you’d take care of everything,” my sister-in-law announced. So I handed the negotiator role right back to her.
Larisa, my husband’s sister, appeared on the doorstep of my apartment on Saturday morning. She walked straight into the kitchen and tossed her handbag onto a stool with a thud. Without wasting time on greetings, she placed two handwritten notebook pages on my kitchen table.
“You’ll give my husband my divorce terms,” Larisa said in a tone that allowed no argument.
She pushed the pages closer to me.
“I already told Oleg that you’d handle everything and get him to agree to every single point. He knows that you completely approve of this list and think my demands are perfectly reasonable. Start negotiating today.”
I looked at the densely written pages.
“Larisa, I don’t represent either of you, and I’m not going to present these demands as if they came from me,” I replied immediately, pushing the papers back toward her.
My sister-in-law had come up with a very convenient little scheme. She planned to dump responsibility for the inevitable scandal onto me—the scandal that would certainly follow once Oleg saw her uncompromising list of demands. If I refused to clear things up immediately, my relationship with the family would be damaged. After all, Oleg now believed that I had personally helped Larisa prepare this harsh ultimatum.
The reason Larisa had decided, without my permission, to appoint me as her personal negotiator went back to an incident a year earlier.
Oleg had once had a serious argument with Sergey, my husband. They had been discussing renovation work at my mother-in-law’s country house, specifically the building materials. Tempers rose, and neither man wanted to back down.
I had stepped into the conversation, laid out their arguments one by one, suggested a compromise, and Oleg had listened to me. He generally respected me because I stayed calm during conflicts.
Larisa had drawn absurd conclusions from that single episode.
She had decided to turn one isolated incident into some imaginary permanent responsibility of mine. According to her logic, I was now supposed to become the family’s unpaid “demand delivery service.”
“Is it really so difficult for you to talk to someone?” my sister-in-law asked indignantly, genuinely surprised by my firm refusal. “You know how to calm him down! Tell him that you and I calculated everything and reviewed the budget. Tell him this is a fair solution.”
“You and I didn’t calculate anything,” I repeated. “Take your list and discuss it with Oleg yourself.”
That same evening, I realized I couldn’t simply let the matter drift. I called Oleg and suggested we meet at a quiet café near my home.
I couldn’t wait until Larisa’s lie had time to settle in and turn into an unquestioned fact.
Oleg arrived on time. He sat down across from me, greeted me curtly, and immediately began speaking in a harsh tone.
“Irina, I didn’t expect this from you,” he began, nervously crumpling a napkin in his hands. “So you and Larisa sat down together and worked out exactly how to strip me of everything? That’s what she told me. She said, ‘Ira checked everything. Ira said you have to agree to every condition, otherwise you’d be acting dishonorably.’”
The scale of Larisa’s invention was even greater than I had expected.
She hadn’t merely presented me as a courier who was supposed to hand over a piece of paper. Without my knowledge, she had appointed me the author of the property division plan, a financial analyst, and a stern moral judge all at once.
“Oleg, listen to me carefully,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and convincing. “I didn’t see that list until this morning. I didn’t help Larisa write it. I didn’t review her demands, evaluate whether they were reasonable, and I certainly never gave her permission to speak on my behalf. I am not your mediator, and I’m not your divorce adviser.”
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, trying to figure out which one of us was telling the truth.
“But she said you would personally supervise the transfer of the car and make sure I didn’t take my tools out of the garage.”
“Larisa presented her wishes as reality. She brought me the list and demanded that I negotiate on her behalf. I refused.”
Oleg exhaled loudly. The tension in his shoulders visibly eased.
“I see. Sorry. She referred to your authority so confidently that I honestly believed her.”
“My authority has nothing to do with your divorce. Sort it out yourselves without dragging third parties into it.”
I paid for my syrniki, said goodbye, and left, leaving Oleg to process what he had just learned.
Larisa’s first scheme, which had been built on my supposed approval, had collapsed.
The next day, Larisa decided to change tactics.
She came over in the evening, just as Sergey had returned home, and tried to portray my refusal as some enormous betrayal of the family.
“Sergey, your wife is sabotaging my divorce!” she announced loudly the moment she kicked off her shoes in the hallway. “I trusted her with such a delicate matter. Oleg listens to her—he would have signed everything if she had just spoken to him properly. But not only did she refuse, she also went and told Oleg that I’d made everything up. She’s taking away my most important leverage!”
Larisa paced around the entryway, gesturing wildly.
“I asked for the smallest thing possible: just speak on my behalf and confirm that my terms are the absolute minimum any decent man should accept. And Ira left me to deal with Oleg myself. How can you treat your own sister like this during such a difficult time?”
She genuinely believed she could simply assign roles to the people around her.
In her version of reality, I was a free family negotiator who could be appointed without consent.
Larisa kept going, producing more and more outrageous arguments for why she was right.
“I told Oleg that Ira and I had developed the perfect property division plan. He had almost accepted his fate. Then Ira went and ruined everything. Now he wants to discuss every point separately. Why should I have to deal with that? I wanted you to settle everything so I wouldn’t have to deal with the stress. I shouldn’t even have to participate in this—I’m the injured party!”
Sergey listened to his sister very carefully without interrupting.
Our family wasn’t used to making scenes, and Larisa openly took advantage of that, presenting her long monologues as unquestionable truth.
“Sergey, you need to influence your wife,” my sister-in-law demanded categorically. “Make her call Oleg right now and tell him she overreacted yesterday at the café. Tell her to say that she’s actually on my side and will strictly supervise the fulfillment of my conditions.”
The sheer audacity of it was astonishing.
Larisa wasn’t merely demanding that I take responsibility for someone else’s divorce. She wanted me to publicly confirm her lie as well.
Sergey looked at his sister, then calmly turned his gaze toward me.
“Larisa, Ira is not going to conduct your negotiations,” my husband said evenly. “It’s your divorce and your conditions.”
“But Oleg respects her! She knows how to convince him!”
“That’s exactly why she isn’t going to risk her good name over your lists.”
Sergey supported me, but he didn’t offer to take my place. He simply repeated that neither of us would be involved in her negotiations.
My sister-in-law snorted indignantly, spun around sharply, and left.
Several days passed.
I assumed the incident was over, but I had underestimated Larisa.
Since I had refused to negotiate for her, she decided she would simply continue speaking in my name herself.
Oleg called me on Thursday, right in the middle of my workday.
“Ira, I don’t understand anything. We already cleared all this up at the café. So why are you sending me new threats through Larisa again?” His voice sounded tense.
“What threats, Oleg?” I asked, trying to sound as detached as possible, although irritation was already beginning to boil inside me…
Continuation is just below in the first comment.