“But they’ll be paying me in dollars there!”
“But how will I manage alone?”
“You’ll manage.” He was already putting on his jacket, zipping it up with feverish speed. “Here’s a card, the PIN is our wedding date. I’ll transfer money every month.”
His farewell hug was hurried, and Viktoria caught a whiff of a strange scent—a sharp, floral perfume, nothing like her own.
“He’s already gone, daughter…” her mother-in-law rasped from the sofa as the door closed behind Valery. “Gone for a long time.”
Three months turned into three centuries. Viktoria would get up at five in the morning to wash her mother-in-law, change her diaper (a week’s supply cost six hundred hryvnias), and feed her puréed porridge with a spoon, coaxing her to swallow at least a little. Only then could she rush to work, with dark circles under her eyes that no amount of concealer could hide. Her boss called her in twice, hinting that lateness and errors in reports could lead to dismissal. But what could she say? That her mother-in-law was dying in the next room?
At night, Viktoria would wake up every two hours to give painkillers, turn the sick woman to another side to prevent bedsores, and help her through a coughing fit.
The money on her husband’s card appeared in the paltry amount of fifteen thousand—allegedly, the rest was eaten up by non-resident taxes and insurance.
“Vika, how are you?” he would ask on Sundays, appearing on the screen tanned and clearly well-rested. “Are you managing?”
“Yes,” she would reply, looking at her reflection in the dark window: a gaunt face, a messy ponytail instead of a hairstyle, a dead look in her eyes. “I’m managing.”
She had eighty thousand in savings—five were left. Then a twenty-thousand debt to a friend, then a credit card with a fifty-thousand limit.
That December night, after another terrible attack her mother-in-law had, when Viktoria barely managed to help her and then spent half an hour cleaning the room, she couldn’t sleep. She picked up her phone to check the balance: would there be enough for medicine until the next transfer? She opened the banking app—they had never separated their accounts after the wedding—and her world collapsed.
Transaction geolocation: Bukovel, the Carpathians. A restaurant bill for five thousand hryvnias. A hotel at twelve thousand per night. An equipment store—forty thousand. The last transaction was an hour ago, while she was on her knees scrubbing the floor.
Her fingers moved on their own, opening the cloud storage he had once given her the password for, for their wedding photos. A folder named “Vacation 2024″. Snowy mountains, a pool with a view of the peaks, a luxurious room with snow-white robes on the bed. And a woman with bleached blonde hair, in an expensive ski suit, holding a glass of sparkling wine. Lilia Sukhanova—”just an old friend, a classmate,” whom he sometimes met at reunions.
In the next picture, Valery was hugging her against a backdrop of snow-covered fir trees. Both were laughing so carefreely. For him, there was no dying mother, no exhausted wife, no debts.
Viktoria looked at her hands—chapped from endless washing, with broken nails, ingrained with the smell of disinfectant. The very hands that cared for his mother every day while he bought his mistress handbags for forty thousand.
The phone slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. A hoarse cough came from the other room, and Viktoria slowly got up, feeling tears stream down her cheeks. Not from grief, but from rage—thick and hot, rising from somewhere deep inside her. The woman who had stood in the hallway three months ago, submissive and believing her husband’s every word, was dead. In her place, in the dark kitchen of a panel building, stood a completely different woman. With a face wet from tears, but with dry, clear eyes. And what tied her to this house was only her duty to the dying woman behind the wall, but no longer her love for a traitor.
Anastasia Prokhorovna was fading with each passing day. Viktoria, carrying the truth of her husband’s betrayal, kept silent, not letting it escape. She didn’t want to darken the last days of the dying woman, who was already suffering enough.
The blizzard outside had been howling for three days, piling up huge snowdrifts. The radiators were barely warm due to a heating main failure somewhere in the district, and Viktoria wrapped her mother-in-law in two blankets, tucking the edges in on all sides, while she sat beside her in a down jacket, not letting go of her icy hand with its protruding veins.
“Daughter…”
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