On the day of our divorce, my ex-husband shoved a card at me like a handout. Humiliated, I threw it in a drawer and didn’t touch it for seven years. When I went to the bank to close the account, the employee told me something that made my vision go dark.
But that would happen later. Back then, at the end of October, Yegor Konstantinovich Bogorodsky sat in the hallway of an oncology center, watching a fine Kyiv drizzle streak down the windowpane in crooked paths. The MRI results lay on his lap—three pages of dense text from which he understood the main point.
Spinal cancer—terminal stage, metastases already spreading through his body like cracks on spring ice. The oncologist, a middle-aged man with a goatee, was saying something about palliative care and the quality of his remaining time. But Yegor barely heard him, because a single thought pounded in his head—a strange, absurd one for a man who had just received a death sentence.
“Will my appearance change a lot?” he interrupted the doctor. “Will I look like a dying man?”. The oncologist fell silent, clearly puzzled by the question, then slowly nodded and began to list the effects: hair loss from chemotherapy, weight loss to the point of extreme emaciation, dependence on a morphine pump. Probable paralysis of the lower body towards the end.
“I understand,” Yegor said and stood up, tucking the papers into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Thank you, doctor. Do you need to talk to my family? I have a wife… Children… I have a wife, no children.” Yegor was already at the door, and his voice sounded distant, as if he were talking about trivial things, like the weather or exchange rates.
“Goodbye.” He walked out into the corridor with its sharp hospital air, took out his phone, and dialed Angelina’s number. When she answered with her warm, slightly worried, “Hello, Yegorushka?” he smiled. His lips stretched on their own, though inside, everything had turned to stone.
“Darling, the negotiations are dragging on, I’ll stay in Lviv until tomorrow. Investors from Kharkiv have arrived, I can’t just leave them.” Annoyance flickered in her voice again, but it quickly gave way to acceptance. “Alright, just don’t forget to eat properly, not just your usual business lunches on the run.”
“I promise. I love you.” “I love you too.” He ended the call and stood by the window for a long time, looking at November Kyiv, at the wet roofs of Podil, at the few passersby below. The decision came on its own, not as a revelation, but as something inevitable, born from a deep, almost animalistic understanding of his own wife.
Angelina Mikhailovna was a woman who fainted at the sight of blood. Three years ago at their country house, when he cut himself on a piece of a broken jar, she turned so pale that he had to bandage his wound with one hand while holding her by the shoulders with the other to keep her from falling. She couldn’t recover for a week after watching a movie about illness—some melodrama where the heroine died of leukemia; she walked around with red eyes and flinched at every mention of the word ‘cancer’.
If she found out, she would drop everything. The career she had just started building after university, her life, herself. She would change his diapers, watch him writhe in pain at night, hear him howl when the painkillers stopped working. And this image of her decaying husband would stay with her forever.
Yegor pressed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes. He would rather die alone, cursed, than let her live through this hell by his side. The next three weeks turned into a frantic preparation. Yegor sold his IT company, ‘Detishche,’ which he had built from scratch starting in a basement office on Vozdvyzhenka, to competitors for 80 million hryvnias, when it was really worth 140.
In the Kyiv business community, rumors began to spread:
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