Sofia still remembered the sticky, unpleasant smell of primer. She'd worked until she was exhausted, peeling off the old Soviet wallpaper, which was peeling off in small pieces. She dragged bags of the mixture while her husband, with a mischievous expression, pointed a level at the wall and clicked his tongue: "There's a two-millimeter gap here, do it again."
But the straw that broke the camel's back was last winter.
Oleg suddenly announced that his colleagues were inviting him on an ice fishing trip with an overnight stay at a tourist camp. Sofia, who had been working seven days a week for two weeks to complete her annual report, asked him to stay home.
"Sonya, I've already contributed to the gas," my husband said with a wave of his hand. "You go home and get some sleep."
But I couldn't get enough sleep. At seven o'clock on Saturday morning, Raisa Pavlovna called. Her voice was weak and halting.
"Sonya... I fell on the porch. My back hurt so much I couldn't breathe. I called Oleg, but he wasn't available."
Sofia jumped to her feet, pulled her jeans up over her pajama bottoms, got behind the wheel, and sped down the icy highway toward the village. She was shaking the entire way. She imagined serious injuries, broken bones, blood in the snow... and at the same time, deep in her chest, beneath her ribs, a strange, almost forbidden thought stirred: what if it hadn't just been a fall? What if her mother-in-law, with her constant complaints and piercing gaze, was simply testing her limits?
When Sofia burst into the house, Raisa Pavlovna was sitting in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea with raspberries. An apple pie was already on the table: warm, smelling of cinnamon and deception.
"Oh, Sonya, it's so kind of you to come," her mother-in-law sang, without getting up. "And Oleg... well, they're men, fishing is more important to them. You sit here and rest. I've made up a bed for you in the guest room."
Sofia's hands, which had gripped the steering wheel the entire journey, suddenly went numb. She stood still in the middle of the kitchen, feeling the snow melt from her boots and soak into the linoleum, leaving dark stains like traces of nonexistent blood. In that instant, something inside her cracked silently, almost soundlessly, like ice on a river under the first spring sunshine. Not a snap, not a roar, but just a barely audible creak, after which the water began to slowly but surely disappear beneath the crust.
For six years, she lived as if in a transparent cocoon made of other people's expectations. Oleg's every gesture—thrifty, measured—was not just a habit, but an entire philosophy: the world was divided into "mine" and "theirs," and the "others" were always more valuable. He learned to listen to the silence after her words, the same silence when, without looking at her, he moved the bills from one pile to another. And in that silence, everything was hidden: his tiredness, his unexpressed desires, and his body, which was gradually becoming just another resource in his rational system.
The plane was already ready for landing. The announcer's voice rang out in the room softly, almost tenderly, as if inviting her into an embrace she couldn't refuse. Sofia pulled away from the window. The cold lingered on her skin, a thin sheen, reminding her of when she'd once pressed her cheek against the wall of their still-unfinished apartment, trying to absorb some of the heat from the radiators, which Oleg only turned on after ten o'clock "to avoid paying too much."
My phone vibrated again in my bag. This time it was a message. Not a voicemail. Just a text message, as brief as a BB gun shot:
