“I saw the messages with Lyubov,” she interrupted calmly, and this calmness came surprisingly easily. “I saw the transfers. I saw everything.”
He fell silent, and in that silence, there was more truth than in all his words over the past five years. Yulia took the suitcase, walked past him into the hallway, and put on her coat.
“Yulia, wait, let’s talk. It’s not what you think, I can explain…”
“Don’t,” she said, opening the door. “I’ve already understood everything.”
A taxi was waiting at the entrance. She got into the back seat, gave her mother’s address on the other side of Zhytomyr, and spent the entire ride looking at the passing streets, feeling neither relief nor pain—only a strange emptiness, which, however, was better than the heaviness that had been pressing down on her for the past few weeks.
Natalia Mikhailovna opened the door, saw her daughter with a suitcase, and didn’t ask a single question. She just hugged her tightly, like a mother, and said quietly, “Come in, your room is waiting.”
That night, Yulia lay in her old room, listening to the ticking of the wall clock that had hung there since her school days, and looked at the familiar cracks on the ceiling, the faded wallpaper, the shelf with the books she had read in her youth. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.
“I’ll only be upset if you continue to endure and suffer,” her mother said at breakfast the next morning, pouring her tea into a cup she’d had since childhood. “But if you’ve decided to live like a human being, I’m glad. It was about time.”
The court summons arrived two weeks later. Gleb had beaten her to filing for divorce, apparently deciding that offense was the best defense. Yulia took the envelope, opened it, read it, and told her mother without a tremor in her voice:
“I’m ready for this.”
At the first hearing, her representative, the same female lawyer she had consulted, presented the facts clearly and concisely: jointly acquired property, loan payments from joint funds, regular transfers to a third party without the spouse’s knowledge. Gleb sat opposite her, his expression changing with each new document pulled from the folder. First bewilderment, then irritation, then something akin to fear. Lidia Vasilyevna waited in the corridor and tried to comfort her son after the hearing, muttering something about audacity and ingratitude.
“What is your position?” the judge asked, addressing Yulia.
“I want everything to be according to the law,” she replied, looking straight ahead. “I don’t want to win or lose. I want justice.”
The hearing ended without a final decision; another date was set. Leaving the courthouse, Gleb caught up with her on the steps.
“Do you have anything else to say to me?” he asked, his voice a mixture of anger and confusion.
“I’ve said enough today.”
A week later, Lidia Vasilyevna appeared at Natalia Mikhailovna’s house. Without warning, without a call—she just materialized on the doorstep in her expensive coat, which looked out of place against the backdrop of the old Khrushchev-era building’s entrance. Her tone was no longer as sharp as before, but rather tired, broken.
“May I come in? I want to talk.”
The three of them sat in the kitchen: Yulia, her mother, and her mother-in-law. Natalia Mikhailovna put the kettle on, but no one touched their cups.
“Yulia, do you really want to see this through to the end?” Lidia Vasilyevna asked. “Think carefully. You’re putting pressure on Gleb, you’re only making it worse for yourself. Who will want you—a penniless divorcée?”
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