How she avoided conversations about business, finance, investments, even though she could talk about them for hours, so he wouldn’t feel insignificant next to her. She had dimmed her own light, hidden her connections with officials and directors, turned herself into a bland, boring, gray woman because she thought he wanted a simple, honest, real love. Kefir. He called her kefir. She became kefir for a man who had been planning all along to throw her out of her own house and move his pregnant mistress in.
Her fingers found the phone in her dress pocket; she had put it there automatically when she went up to the room. Now, trying not to move, not to breathe, Snezhana silently activated the voice recorder, covering the screen with her palm so the light wouldn’t give her away. A red bar crawled across the screen, counting the seconds, and every word spoken above her head was recorded into the device’s memory, turning from air into evidence, from gossip into a verdict.
“Speak louder,” she thought with an icy rage that surprised even herself. “Give me everything!” Larisa Arkadyevna suddenly fell silent, and Snezhana heard the creak of springs. Her mother-in-law leaned toward the edge of the bed, and Snezhana’s heart stopped for a moment.
Something glinted on the carpet, in the strip of light from the window, and a hand with long, manicured nails painted in dark burgundy polish reached down, inches from Snezhana’s face, fumbled on the floor, nearly brushing her cheek, and picked up a pearl earring—the very one that had fallen out when Snezhana was climbing under the bed.
— Just some trinket, — Larisa Arkadyevna muttered, and Snezhana heard the clink of the earring on the nightstand. — Probably costume jewelry from a previous guest. The maids don’t clean at all.
The earring was worth 35,000 hryvnias, a gift from her father for her 30th birthday, but Snezhana didn’t even allow herself a mental smirk, because she was too busy trying not to faint from the wave of relief that washed over her.
— Vadik, first thing tomorrow, transfer half the wedding money to my account. — The mother-in-law’s voice became business-like again, with the tone of someone used to giving orders. — About 120,000. Pull out the rest gradually, in small amounts, so that when you divorce, the joint account is empty and there’s nothing to divide.
— Okay, Mom.
— And tonight… — a pause, during which Snezhana heard her mother-in-law rummaging through someone’s bag—her bag, she realized with horror. — You have to sleep with her.
— Mom, I don’t want to.
— You have to, Vadim. — Her voice became harsh, tolerating no objections. — Intimacy will make it harder to have the marriage annulled if that fool tries to go that route. We need a divorce with a division of assets, not an annulment. Do you understand the difference? With an annulment, she keeps everything.
Snezhana heard the man to whom she had sworn her love less than three hours ago agree to perform his marital duty as an unpleasant but necessary chore. Take out the trash, pay the bill, sleep with his wife for a 10-million-hryvnia apartment.
— I took the spare key to the room from her purse, — Larisa Arkadyevna added.
This act of invasion, this brazen digging through her personal belongings, sent shivers down Snezhana’s spine.
— Just in case. One year, Vadik, and you’re free.
Vadim mumbled something in response and collapsed onto the bed right above Snezhana’s head, so the springs sagged almost to her nose, and she felt his weight with her whole body. A minute later, he was snoring—the champagne had taken its toll, and Snezhana lay in the darkness and dust, counting his breaths, waiting until enough time had passed to slip out unnoticed.
She crawled out from under the bed 10 minutes later, moving more cautiously than ever before in her life, freezing after every movement and listening to her husband’s snores. Her dress was gray with dust, her makeup smeared in black streaks across her cheeks, but her eyes in the mirror were clear and cold. It was the way her father looked before a hostile takeover of a rival company. And for the first time in her life, Snezhana recognized his features in her reflection.
She took off her wedding dress—the symbol of her blindness, her foolish belief in a fairy tale—and threw it in a heap in the corner, not caring about the 120,000-hryvnia lace. She pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt from her suitcase, went down the stairs, avoiding the elevator so as not to run into any guests, got into her inconspicuous car with the supercharged engine, and called her father.
— Dad, — she said, her voice not trembling, though everything inside was on fire. — You were right about everything. Wake up Ulyana. I’m coming to Sovinyon. We’re going to war.
She covered the forty-minute drive along the night highway by the sea in 20 minutes, pushing the engine to its limits, and the motor sang at high revs the song she had hidden from everyone for so long.
On the mansion’s porch, bathed in the light of lanterns, her father was waiting for her in a robe, an unlit cigar in his fingers and anxiety in his eyes, along with Ulyana Makienko. The lawyer, a partner at one of Odesa’s largest law firms, capable of tearing opponents apart in court with her bare hands, stood in pajamas with kittens on them, but with an open laptop on her knees and ready to work through the night.
Fedor Grigoryevich looked at the dust on his daughter’s sweatshirt, her tightly pressed lips and red eyes, and didn’t say what he had every right to say, didn’t utter a single reproach. He just hugged her tightly, as he had when she was a child after a nightmare, and Snezhana allowed herself exactly 10 seconds to be a little girl whose world had collapsed, then pulled away and straightened her shoulders.
— They planned it. Vadim, his mother, and Angelina. From the very beginning. They want the apartment. Angelina is pregnant by him.
She played the recording. Larisa Arkadyevna’s voice filled the living room, echoing off the high ceilings. “The fool suspects nothing. A country bumpkin. An arrogant empty shell.”
When the recording ended on the words “bland as kefir,” her father’s face turned into a mask of such fury that Snezhana had only seen once before, when he found out about the betrayal of Aunt Zina and Valechka, who had robbed his dying wife. He broke the cigar in half, tobacco scattering onto the parquet floor.
— I’ll drown him. I’ll call the director of the car dealership, he’ll be thrown out on the street by lunch. I’ll evict his mother from her apartment by noon, I have connections…
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