“Oh, one more thing. Lilia. The pregnancy she was blackmailing you with all these months—it was a fake. There was no baby, there never was. She told me everything herself. Voluntarily and in detail. For a hundred thousand. She sold you out, lock, stock, and barrel: recordings, passwords, conversations. She’s probably somewhere in Lviv by now, starting a new life. Without you.”
He turned around, and his face contorted in pain. The woman for whom he had left his family, for whom he had gone into debt and ruined his entire life, had betrayed him for a wad of cash—just as he himself had betrayed his dying mother.
“Leave,” Viktoria said and closed the door in his face. She heard him slump heavily onto the steps in the stairwell, heard him muttering something, then—uneven steps down the stairs and the slam of the entrance door.
A month later, she received a call from a lawyer at a law firm in the center of Dnipro. Roman Borysovych Holubev—he introduced himself and requested a meeting regarding the Titova inheritance case. In his office, Viktoria learned something she had never expected. Five years ago, Anastasia Prokhorovna had made two wills with him, and the second one concerned a three-bedroom apartment on Yavornytskyi Avenue in the very center of the city, which she had inherited from her parents—engineers who had received it as company housing back in Soviet times. Its market value was about four million hryvnias. The will stipulated that the apartment would pass to Viktoria Yevhenivna in the event of Valeriy Saveliyovych’s death or his refusal of the inheritance. Anastasia Prokhorovna knew her son and foresaw that he would refuse the “burden” himself.
Viktoria sat in the lawyer’s chair and cried. Her mother-in-law had known everything, had foreseen everything, had left not only money and documents, but also a roof over her head—a bright apartment with high ceilings and a view of the central avenue.
Valery found out about the apartment, hired an acquaintance, a former police officer, to “look up” his ex-wife in the databases, and one night he broke down the door—drunk, with crazed eyes, and a knife in his hand.
“This apartment is mine! The money is mine! You stole my life!”
Viktoria managed to grab the pepper spray from her nightstand (she hadn’t been without it since receiving the warning from Lilia) and sprayed it in his face just as a police squad, called by neighbors who heard the crash and screams, burst into the apartment. They subdued him, put him in handcuffs, and he screamed something about his rights and “that witch” as they dragged him down the stairs.
Viktoria handed over all the collected evidence to the investigator, and the cases were combined into one proceeding. The court sentenced Valeriy Saveliyovych Titov to six years in a general-regime colony on a combination of charges: fraud on a particularly large scale, forgery of documents, and attempted assault.
On the ground floor of the apartment on the avenue, in a space that was once a shop, Viktoria opened a small coffee shop with books—a cozy place with wooden tables, soft armchairs, and shelves along the walls where you could take any book and read for as long as you liked, even all day.
On the wall hung a black-and-white photograph in a simple wooden frame: a young Anastasia Prokhorovna with her husband Savely, laughing, happy, against the backdrop of their village, in some distant, sunny spring. And under the photograph, a brass plaque: “Nastya’s House”—in memory of the woman who loved more than she received in return.
The coffee shop became popular. Students from the nearby university came to study for exams, pensioners from the surrounding houses came to read newspapers over a cup of tea, and young mothers with strollers came to take a break from their household chores. Viktoria herself stood behind the counter, making coffee, arranging fresh pastries, and sometimes, in the quiet evening hours, she would tell regular customers the story of the woman in the photograph.
One spring day, when the chestnut trees were blooming outside and the sun filled the room with golden light, a man slightly older than her, wearing glasses and with a book under his arm, came into the coffee shop. He ordered an Americano and sat by the window with a volume of Kobzar. Viktoria caught his eye over the pages and, for the first time in a long time, smiled back.
Outside “Nastya’s House,” the spring Dnipro bustled, people hurried about their business, trams clanged at the turn, and life went on. As it always does, no matter what.
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