In the evening, when Denis went to a friend’s to celebrate the wheels of his precious car, I sat in the kitchen staring blankly at a cup of cold tea. The humiliation in the store still burned on my cheeks. I dialed Katya, my best friend.
— Hi, Katya, can you talk?
— Alinka, hi, of course. What’s with the voice? Did something happen?
And I burst. I told her everything. About the BMW on credit, about the payment schedule, about the separate budget, about the parmesan, and about today’s trip to Auchan with the calculator. I spoke incoherently, choking on tears and anger. Katya was silent, and I could only hear her heavy breathing in the receiver.
When I finished, she was silent for a couple more seconds, and then said in such an icy voice as I had never heard from her:
— He is sick, Alina, simply a mentally sick person. Greed has eaten his brain. You understand that this is not normal?
— I… I don’t know what to do, Katya. I’m so ashamed.
— Ashamed? — she flared up. — He should be ashamed. He is destroying you, trampling you underfoot in front of everyone. You must leave him right now. Pack your things and come to me. You can live with me as long as needed. Then we’ll come up with something.
Her words were like a tub of cold water. Leave? Just like that? Drop everything? Run away? I imagined the scene. Me standing on her doorstep with a bag in my hands, tear-stained, pathetic, crushed.
— No.
— No, Katya, — I replied firmly, wiping tears with the back of my hand.
— What do you mean no? You’re going to tolerate this? It will only get worse. Today he makes you pay for chicken legs, and tomorrow what, he’ll calculate how much toilet paper you used?
— I won’t tolerate it, but I won’t run away like a beaten dog either. I’ll do it differently.
— How? — there was bewilderment in her voice.
— He wants a separate budget? He’ll get it. He wants financial independence? Fine. I will become financially independent. So much so that he couldn’t even dream of it.
I surprised myself with how confident and cold my voice sounded. The tears dried up, replaced by a ringing, clear rage. It didn’t burn, but concentrated, made thoughts sharp as a blade.
— Alina, what are you planning?
— I don’t know exactly yet, but I won’t be lost.
We talked a little more, and I promised to keep her posted.
Hanging up, I opened my old laptop. My fingers started running across the keyboard on their own. I worked as an editor in a small publishing house; the salary was modest but stable. But I knew I could do more. I always could, there just hadn’t been a need for it before. I went to freelance sites I hadn’t visited for about six years. I updated my portfolio, found several exchanges for copywriters and editors. Everywhere they needed people ready to work evenings, nights, weekends. People who really needed money.
I sent out a dozen applications for different projects: editing a thesis, writing articles for a commercial blog, proofreading a voluminous novel. When the first email with a test assignment arrived an hour later, my heart beat faster. It was a chance. A chance not just to survive, but to win this humiliating war that my own husband had declared on me. This was my secret escape plan. Escape not from the apartment, but from dependence.
My double life began. By day, I was the editor Alina Tikhonova, receiving a modest salary. But at night, when Denis fell asleep in front of the TV or went to play on his console, I turned into an invisible person earning money on the Internet. I took on everything. Proofread student papers, wrote faceless texts about plastic windows, edited menus for restaurants. I slept 4–5 hours. Coffee became my best friend. But I felt almost no fatigue. I was fueled by adrenaline and the growing figure on my personal bank card, which Denis, of course, knew nothing about. Every earned hryvnia was a small brick in the wall I was building between myself and him.
One evening I almost got caught. I was so engrossed in proofreading an urgent article that I didn’t hear him return from a corporate party earlier than usual. The door to the room opened, and he looked inside. I barely managed to minimize the working document.
— Not sleeping? — his tongue was slightly slurring….
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