“Tell me, Yulenka, you’ve been caring for me, a stranger, for five days. But was it easy for you to care for your own husband?”
Yulia opened her mouth to answer and realized she didn’t know what to say.
“He’s… he’s sick, it’s hard for him…”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking: did this care bring you joy or was it just a burden?”
The silence answered for her.
“Now think about the last few months,” Vasilisa Nikitichna continued. “Did he look at you the way he used to? Did you have dinner together, talk heart-to-heart? Or did he mostly turn his back to you?”
Yulia remembered. The late returns, the phone he never left unattended, the monosyllabic answers to her questions, his back in bed when she wanted to hug him. She remembered the dinner she had cooked with love, and how he pushed the plate away saying, “it’s not tasty,” though he used to ask for seconds.
“He’s just working a lot,” she said, but the words sounded pathetic even to her own ears.
Vasilisa Nikitichna got up on her crutches and slowly moved towards Gleb’s ward. Yulia wanted to stop her, but the old woman waved her away. Stopping in the doorway, she asked loudly, for the whole corridor to hear:
“Tell me, young man, have you said a single kind word to your wife these past few days? She comes to you every day, cooks, takes care of you. Have you thanked her even once?”
Gleb looked up from his phone and stared at the old woman with an expression of disdainful bewilderment.
“It’s a wife’s duty to take care of her husband, what is there to thank her for?”
Vasilisa Nikitichna nodded as if she had heard exactly what she expected, and returned to Yulia. She was sitting on the bench, unable to move, while images of the past few months flashed before her eyes, forming a pattern she had so diligently ignored.
The old woman sat down beside her, took her hand, and said slowly, deliberately:
“Remember this, my child! A grateful person is a happy person! And whoever considers another’s care a duty will live their whole life with bitterness. And they will poison those around them with that bitterness!”
Yulia sat there, looking at the old banknote in her palm. A piece of paper that once meant something but was now an empty shell, a memory of a non-existent value. And suddenly she understood with a piercing, almost physically painful clarity: her marriage wasn’t a crisis that could be overcome. It was a diagnosis.
The conversation was interrupted by a sharp, insistent phone call. It tore through the silence of the hospital corridor so suddenly that Yulia flinched. Through the slightly ajar door of the ward, she saw Gleb grab the phone from the bedside table and stare at the screen with the expression of someone caught in the middle of something shameful. A single letter glowed on the display: “L”.
He hastily rejected the call, glanced at the door, and shoved the phone under his pillow—with such a quick, furtive movement that Yulia felt a pang somewhere in her chest.
“Who was that?” she asked, entering the ward, trying to make her voice sound normal, casual.
“Work,” he answered too quickly, not looking her in the eye, instead examining his own hands on the blanket. “Calling about the project, they’re driving me crazy. I’m lying here, and they’re bugging me about every little thing.”
She nodded, but something inside her clenched and wouldn’t let go. The feeling was like that moment when you realize you’ve forgotten to turn off the iron, but you’re already far from home. She remembered an incident from three weeks ago. Gleb’s phone had slipped into the sink while he was shaving, and he had panicked not over a piece of plastic and glass, but over something vital, something he couldn’t exist without. He rushed to the repair shop that same evening, though he usually postponed any errands, finding a hundred excuses. And when she asked questions, he snapped irritably: “Stay out of it, I’ll figure it out myself, what do you know about technology.”
Vasilisa Nikitichna waited for Yulia to come out into the corridor and beckoned her over with a dry, light hand.
“Don’t ask anything right now,” she whispered, leaning so close to her ear that Yulia could feel the warmth of her breath. “If you ask, he’ll just lie again, only he’ll be more careful, he’ll learn to cover his tracks. If you want to know the truth—open your eyes. And to open your eyes, you need proof. Without it, you’re just a jealous wife, but with it—you’re a person who knows what she’s fighting for.”
“What kind of proof?” Yulia felt goosebumps, cold and prickly, run down her back.
“You know what kind. His phone, his messages, his money. Haven’t you noticed that he hides the screen when you’re around? That he turns away, waits for you to leave the room?”
Yulia had noticed. Many times. But each time she found an explanation, each time she reassured herself: it was work correspondence that couldn’t be shown to outsiders; a surprise for their anniversary he was secretly preparing; just a modern habit—keeping your phone with you.
“And how does your mother-in-law treat you?” the old woman asked, changing the subject so abruptly that Yulia was taken aback.
“Lidia Vasilyevna? Well, she…” Yulia hesitated, searching for words that wouldn’t sound like complaints. “She thinks I’m not good enough for her son. That he could have done better.”
“Does she say that? Straight to your face?”
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