Alena was spreading out envelopes with invitations on the table when the front door slammed and Sergey’s sports bag hit the floor with a dull thud. He walked straight into the kitchen, still in his jacket, already telling his mother something about the evening, and stuffed his phone into his pocket as he passed by the fridge.
“So, here’s some news,” he said, breaking off a chunk of sausage straight from the stick. “My mom’s moving in with us after the wedding. It takes her an hour and a half—and a transfer—to get to the clinic from her place. With all these medical appointments, she’s worn out.”
Alena was holding an envelope she had just addressed to his cousin, waiting for Sergey to crack a smile. But he didn’t joke; instead, he kept chewing sausage and continued matter-of-factly:
“I’ll clear out the small room. Your desk is in there, but you don’t work from home every day, and she’ll need a quiet space to rest after her treatments. We’ll get a sofa bed, hang a TV on the wall—she can’t be without her TV.”
Alena had bought the apartment herself, scraping together every cent for the down payment, and paid off the mortgage three years before Sergey ever came into her life. He moved in eight months ago with two bags and a laptop. He paid for groceries and utilities, sometimes ordered pizza on Fridays. Now he stood in her kitchen, hanging a TV on her wall like he’d picked out the wallpaper himself.
“Sergey, don’t you think you should’ve asked me?”
“Asked you?” he was genuinely surprised, even stopping mid-chew. “It’s my mom. You have a three-bedroom place—why do we need that many rooms for just the two of us?”
“I need them! I work in there!”
“Oh, come on, you can open a laptop just fine in the kitchen.”
Alena asked him not to promise his mother anything until they’d had a real conversation. Sergey just waved his sausage and said it was too late—his mom had already borrowed boxes for her dishes from the neighbor.
“When did you two decide this?” Alena asked quietly.
“Back in September, I guess. Why?”
Alena looked down and saw she’d crushed the envelope in her hand—her cousin’s surname, neatly written in blue pen, now folded in half. She tossed the ruined envelope in the trash and grabbed a new one, but couldn’t bring herself to write on it.
The next evening Sergey came home from work with a yellow measuring tape and headed straight to the small room. Alena heard the tape snapping and him muttering numbers, calculating if the sofa bed would fit between the window and her filing cabinet. She closed her laptop, stood in the doorway, and asked him to stop measuring.
“Hold on, it’s just short by about twenty centimeters,” he waved her off, without turning around. “Your cabinet will go into the bedroom; it’ll all work out.”
“I said stop! No one is moving in here!”
Sergey straightened up, looked at her, and gave a conciliatory smile—the kind you give a tired child before bedtime.
“You’re just worn out. Let’s sit down on Saturday and talk things through calmly.”
“We’re talking about it right now! No, Sergey. I don’t agree.”
His smile faded instantly, and the tape measure flew onto the windowsill, snapping back with a loud click against the glass.
“Do you even realize that in two weeks you’ll be my wife?! Or do you plan to keep acting as if I’m just a tenant here?!”
“I’m marrying you, not your mother!” Alena shouted, her own ears ringing from the outburst. “I never agreed to live as a threesome!”
Sergey suddenly burst out laughing, loud and spiteful, and called her selfish. He waved his arms, listing how his mother raised him alone, used to send him money at the dorm, even sold her gold earrings when he lost his first job. Alena yelled back that she believed every word, but still didn’t understand why she had to pay for those earrings with her own room.
“After the wedding, these questions will be handled differently,” Sergey snapped. “Between a husband and wife there’s no such thing as ‘mine’ or ‘yours’.”
Later that night, Alena was the first to approach him in the bedroom and suggested that maybe they should postpone the wedding. He sat up so suddenly that the mattress creaked underneath him.
“Are you out of your mind? We’ve already paid forty thousand for the restaurant! Aunt Valya from Saratov has bought her tickets already!”
Then he lowered his voice, took her hand, and promised he’d talk to his mom if she’d just stop making scenes over nothing. Alena agreed to wait until Sunday, when Irina Pavlovna herself had set a family dinner.
The future mother-in-law arrived right at three, carrying a big rustling bag of cabbage pies, and the first thing she did was look around the apartment. She complimented the hallway, peeked into the bathroom, and spent a long time examining Alena’s shelf full of jars.
“So where are you going to put all this stuff when there are three of us here?” Irina Pavlovna asked cheerfully. “I’ll need a shelf too, you know I’ve got a whole bag just for ointments.”
Sergey poured tea and pointed out spots for his mother’s nightstand, and she nodded, running her finger over the door frames. Alena sliced the pies, trying to smile, even though the knife kept hitting the cutting board with a loud echo.
“The small room is perfect for me,” Irina Pavlovna said as she pushed her plate aside. “I don’t need much, just want to be close to Seryozhenka in case my blood pressure acts up.”
“Sergey and I haven’t decided anything yet,” Alena replied.
Irina Pavlovna looked at her son, eyebrows raised in a silent question, and he exhaled loudly through his nose.
“Mom, she’s at it again. Everything is decided, don’t listen to her.”
Her mother-in-law didn’t argue but started talking about how tough it was to wake up at 6 a.m. just to make it to the doctor with her appointment slip. Then, almost in passing, she mentioned that after the wedding, Alena could cook for everyone, since she was home three days a week anyway.
“I’m not sitting around! I work!” Alena threw her fork down on the plate.
“Yes, yes, you work,” Irina Pavlovna patted her hand. “But you still cook soup for yourself, so what’s the difference if it’s for one pot or three?”
“In a family, Alena, no one keeps track of who does what,” Sergey added, speaking with his mouth full.
“But does anyone care what I want? Anyone at all at this table?”
The kitchen grew so quiet they could hear the fridge hum. Irina Pavlovna dabbed her lips with a napkin and said young people these days only think about their own comfort. Sergey leaned in close to his mother and whispered not to pay attention, that Alena was just tired and didn’t know what she was saying.
Alena stood up and started gathering the plates, clanking them loudly so that the fork on top slipped off and clattered under the table. She didn’t bother to pick it up. Irina Pavlovna crawled under the table herself, groaning, retrieved the fork, and placed it in the sink with the look of someone who’s already forced to put this house in order.
On Tuesday, Alena was let out of work two hours early, and she entered the apartment almost silently because she had a headache. From the bedroom, she could hear Sergey’s voice talking on speakerphone. Alena only managed to take off one sleeve of her coat.
“Mom, the couch is coming Thursday, I’ll move Alena’s wardrobe into the bedroom, all your things will fit,” Sergey was saying. “And stop worrying so much. While we’re at work, you’ll be in charge there, arrange things however you like, you know best how to keep things in order. Alena will get used to it; she just needs time to realize we’re one family now.”
She walked into the bedroom, still with one sleeve on, her coat trailing behind her on the floor.
“What did you promise her?”
Sergey hurriedly ended the call and shoved his phone under the pillow, even though there was no point trying to hide it anymore.
“Nothing really. I was just trying to calm Mom down—she’s nervous.”
“You promised that she’d be running my apartment when I’m not here? Moving my things around?! Deciding things for me?!”
“After the wedding, it’s going to be our home,” Sergey grimaced. “Enough with this ‘yours’ and ‘mine’—honestly, I’m sick of hearing it.”
“A shared home means we both make decisions! But you’ve already decided everything!”
He got up from the bed and walked toward her with his arms open, just like he did after every fight when he wanted things to be over quickly. Alena planted her palms on his chest and pushed him so hard that Sergey stumbled back into the wardrobe, hitting the door with his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Are you out of your mind?!” he shouted, rubbing his shoulder. “You’re really willing to ruin everything over my mom?!”
Alena finally let her coat drop to the floor and stepped over it.
“Go live with her for a few days. We both need to cool off and figure out if this wedding should even happen.”
“This is childish!” Sergey kicked the coat towards the wall. “I’m not going anywhere—I’ve been living here almost a year!”
“Then there won’t be a wedding.”
She said it out loud for the first time and was startled by how calm her voice sounded. Sergey started to reply, but said nothing—instead, he went into the bathroom, turned the water on full blast, and stayed there a long time while Alena picked up her coat and shook off the dust.
On Thursday, Sergey invited his friend Dmitry over to assemble the wardrobe that he and his mother had ordered without telling Alena. The delivery guy hauled two huge flat boxes to the door, and Alena came out to the hallway in her house slippers.
“No need to bring them in,” she told the delivery guy. “Take them back.”
“What do you mean, back?!” Sergey burst out of the room. “Bring them in, I’m paying!”
“This is my apartment, and I’m not accepting anything!”
The courier glanced anxiously between them, gripping the edge of the box. Dmitry stood by the coat rack, screwdriver in hand, staring intently at his shoes. Alena braced her foot against the box and shoved it out into the hallway, scraping it across the tiles so loudly that someone downstairs peeked out their door.
“Take it back, I’ll write a refusal,” she said to the courier, sounding calmer now.
The courier took the boxes away, and a minute later Dmitry mumbled that he still needed to pick up his kid from daycare, then disappeared, leaving his screwdriver behind on the console. As soon as the door closed after him, Sergey turned to Alena, red-faced.
“You embarrassed me in front of Dima! Don’t you get it? He’s going to tell everyone now!”
“I just don’t want someone else deciding who gets to live in my apartment!”
“There you go again—your apartment!” He slapped his hand against the wall. “You always talk like I’m planning to rob you! I thought I was marrying someone close to me, not just a landlady letting me stay for a while!”
Alena reminded him that he was the one who moved in, and from day one, he knew exactly whose apartment it was. She never charged him for rent or reproached him for earning less, because she considered them equals. Sergey wasn’t listening and shouted that he wasn’t about to spend his days having to prove he was a real person in this house.
The next day, he told her that his mom had already called all their relatives and told them about the move, so now it would be too awkward to back out.
“But you thought it was okay to promise things on my behalf?” Alena asked.
“Sometimes, someone in the family just has to step up and make decisions instead of arguing for weeks!”
He stormed off to his mom’s, slamming the door so hard that the hallway mirror shook and the shoehorn clattered to the floor. That evening, Sergey returned with a bouquet of red roses wrapped in crinkly cellophane and handed them to her while staring somewhere over her shoulder.
“Let’s just forget about it, okay? So we fought, big deal.”
Alena took the bouquet and, since there was no vase in sight, stuck it in the mop bucket—plastic wrap and all—and left it standing right in the middle of the kitchen.
“Let’s live separately until the wedding. We’ll figure things out ourselves, without your mom or the rest of the family involved.”
“That’s humiliating!” Sergey threw his keys on the table. “Stop threatening to cancel everything! The invitations are out, the money’s paid—it’s all set!”
He went to bed, turning his back to the wall, and within ten minutes was breathing steadily, like someone confident that everything would sort itself out by morning. Alena lingered over the roses in the mop bucket, then stepped into the hallway, grabbed the yellow measuring tape from the windowsill in the small room, and stuffed it in the very bottom of his gym bag, under his sneakers.
***
On Saturday, Alena went to try on her wedding dress and got a message from Irina Pavlovna while still on the subway. Her soon-to-be mother-in-law had sent a photo of a new wardrobe that Sergey had reordered to her address, saying he’d chosen the perfect model for her room. Three smiling emojis and a flower were under the photo.
Two subway stops later, a message arrived from the dressmaker. She politely asked if the fitting needed to be rescheduled because Sergey had called her the night before saying the bride’s plans had changed and that the wedding might be uncertain.
Alena stepped off the train at the next station, even though she still had a long way to go. For about five minutes, she stood by a column, rereading both messages again and again. Finally, she crossed to the other side of the platform and took the train back home.
Sergey was sitting in the kitchen in front of his laptop, video chatting with his mother. Irina Pavlovna was holding up samples of curtains to the camera, beige and blue ones, while Sergey explained that the lighter ones would go better with the wardrobe and that she’d end up hating the blue ones within a month.
“Sergey, end your call,” Alena said from the doorway.
Without turning, he raised his hand to signal her to wait. Alena walked over to the table, closed the laptop right in the middle of his mother’s talk about curtain rods, and put her phone with an open chat in front of him.
“Did you call my seamstress? Did you tell her I changed my plans?!”
Sergey pushed the phone away with two fingers, as if it were something dirty.
“What was I supposed to do? Every day you scream that there won’t be a wedding. I just wanted to make sure we didn’t overpay for the dress.”
“It’s my dress! My order! My tailor! Why did you even call her?!”
“Because I’m paying for this wedding too!” he shouted, jumping up so fast his chair scraped loudly on the tiled floor. “Have you given me any reassurance at all in the last two weeks? Even one?”
The laptop on the table chimed again, and Sergey absentmindedly opened it. Irina Pavlovna’s face popped up on the screen—she had heard everything and was already sucking in a big breath to say something.
“Alena, my son is doing so much for you, and you’re counting every penny,” she said from the screen, leaning closer to the camera so her face filled it completely. “If you don’t learn to compromise now, it’ll be much worse for you after the wedding—take it from one woman to another.”
Alena leaned in just as close to the screen and spoke slowly, breaking up each word so Irina Pavlovna would hear her loud and clear:
“Irina Pavlovna, do not discuss the move with me again. I will decide who will live in this apartment.”
“Irina Pavlovna, do not discuss the move with me again. I will decide who will live in this apartment.”
Sergey slammed the laptop shut so hard it bounced on the table.
“How can you speak to my mother like that?! I won’t allow it!”
“Until Monday, Sergey,” Alena said, without raising her voice. “You have until Monday to decide if you’re ready to live like a grown-up.”
“You’ll regret this,” he said, sweeping his keys off the table and heading for the hallway. “You’re going to seriously regret being this stubborn.”
The front door slammed shut, leaving a folder of wedding documents and his forgotten charger on the table.
On Sunday morning, Alena opened her email looking for a confirmation for her bouquet order and came across a letter from a furniture store. The store was asking to confirm the delivery time for a new sofa and wanted to know when it would be convenient to pick up the old one, which, according to the order, was being sold to a friend of the buyer. Sergey’s phone was listed as the contact number, and the delivery address was hers.
She called the store, gave her order number and found out that Sergey had already asked last Friday to move up the delivery date so they could clear out the room before the end of the month. Alyona cancelled everything related to her address and asked them to send a cancellation confirmation to her personal email. The girl on the other end kept apologizing and asked twice if she was sure about cancelling.
The sofa had stood in the small room for six years. Alyona bought it with her first bonus, back when she was still paying off her mortgage and having buckwheat with sausages for dinner, and she would often come over just to touch it, as if it were alive.
Sergey came back by lunchtime, tossed his jacket on a chair and headed to the fridge. Without a word, Alyona turned her laptop toward him with the email open.
“Did you sell my sofa?”
He read the message, grunted, and pulled a jar of pickles out of the fridge.
“I didn’t sell it, I made arrangements. Lyokha from work will take it for his summer house. It’s old anyway, Alyona, and doesn’t go with the new wardrobe at all.”
“That sofa was bought with my own money! It was here before you even knew my name!”
“Oh come on, do I have to check with you about every single stool now?” Sergey banged the jar on the table. “In two weeks, you’ll be my wife! My wife, got it?”
“You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to change the furniture! You just decided that after the wedding you can do whatever you want here!”
Sergey sat on a stool, spent a long time silently trying to open the stubborn jar, and finally spoke in a completely different, tired voice. He said he had long promised his mother he’d bring her to live with him, since every weekend he had to cross the entire city to fix her leaky faucets and outlets, take her to tests, and couldn’t stand that road anymore. According to him, his own family was supposed to fix all that, and Alyona had a three-bedroom place, no rent involved, plus his mother’s clinic was only a twenty-minute walk away.
“I wasn’t hiding anything,” he said, staring into the jar. “I just thought you’d grumble a bit and get used to it. Everybody gets used to things.”
Alyona stood by the stove, gripping the edge of the counter with both hands.
“And what if I hadn’t started pushing back? Would you have talked to me at all? Ever?”
Sergey finally twisted off the lid and brine splashed onto his jeans. He cursed, wiped his knee with his palm, and didn’t answer right away.
“I expected you to be reasonable. I didn’t think you’d be so stubborn.”
Alyona picked up the pickle jar from the table, opened the cupboard under the sink, and dumped the whole thing—brine, dill and all—into the trash can.
“What are you doing?!” Sergey jumped up.
“Don’t touch the wedding documents until this evening,” she said, placing the folder next to the emailed printout from the store. “Don’t touch anything in here at all.”
Sergey looked at the trash can, then at her, said she was impossible to talk to right now, and left for his mother’s again. As he was heading out, he loudly declared from the hallway that she’d calm down by tonight, like always.
On Monday at nine in the morning, Alyona dialed the restaurant’s number. The manager, Polina, recognized her voice, sounded delighted, and started talking about seating arrangements—only realizing a minute later that Alyona was calling to cancel.
“Alena Viktorovna, if you cancel now, the non-refundable part will be lost, that’s twenty percent,” Polina said nervously. “Maybe we should move it to next month? We have some great Saturdays in November.”
“No, let’s not reschedule. Just cancel it completely.”
After that, she called the photographer, the host, and the baker, who had already drawn up a sketch of a cake with two swans. The baker sighed over the phone and asked if she might change her mind by the evening, but Alena replied she wouldn’t. After the fourth call, she went to the bathroom, washed her face with cold water, and came back to dial the florist.
By lunchtime, all the confirmation emails were printed and placed in the same folder, right on top of the wedding documents. Sergey came home at half past twelve, immediately noticed the folder, and flipped through it while still wearing his shoes.
“So, what date did you move it to? Did Polina find you a good date?” he asked, trying to sound calm.
“We didn’t move it. There’s not going to be a wedding, Seryozha.”
He looked up, his face turning pale with red spots on his cheeks. Sergey hurriedly pulled out his phone and scrolled through the messages, already seeing two questions from his cousin and a voice message from Aunt Valya.
“How could you make a decision like that without me?!” he shouted so loudly that Alena flinched. “Without my consent?! Are you even thinking straight?!”
“I’m not marrying you,” she said. “I’ve told you ten times how I want to live. Every time, you just thought I was in a bad mood.”
“What about the guests?! And the money?! My aunt from Saratov bought tickets, are you going to pay her back?! What am I supposed to tell people?!”
“I’ll talk to the people I invited myself. I won’t go into details, but I’m not going to lie for you either.”
Sergey threw the folder on the floor, and the papers scattered all over the kitchen, with one sheet sliding under the fridge. Then he suddenly sat down, rubbed his knees with his hands, and began to speak quickly and gently, choosing his words carefully.
“Alright. Fine, Alena. My mother won’t move in. That’s it, end of story, you hear me? Call Polina and get our reservation back, we still have time.”
“Will you tell your mother? Right now? Or are you just embarrassed in front of Aunt Valya?”
“We’ll talk about it later, when you’ve calmed down,” he grimaced. “You’re just emotional right now, and you can’t make good decisions like this.”
Alena crouched down, pulled the cake cancellation confirmation from under the fridge, and put it back in the folder.
“There’s nothing left to discuss, Seryozha. You still think I’m just being stubborn for now.”
The rest of the day, Sergey paced around the apartment, calling relatives and trying to find out who Alena had informed. He kept telling everyone that nothing was decided yet, that the bride was just stressed out, and that he’d sort things out by Wednesday. When Alena asked him to stop calling people on her list, he turned toward her, phone pressed to his ear.
“I’m not letting you decide on your own who gets to know what!”
“They were invited to the wedding, not to discuss my apartment and your mother.”
Sergey ended the call, threw his phone on the couch, and walked towards her, jabbing his finger in the air.
“You’ll end up alone, you hear me?! With a personality like that, nobody will want you! You’ll be forty and still sitting alone on your couch!”
Alena didn’t say a word. She opened the wardrobe in the bedroom, took four of his shirts off the hangers, and started stuffing them into the duffel bag that had been sitting in the hallway since Thursday. Something clattered at the bottom under his sneakers, and she pulled out a yellow tape measure.
“What’s that?” Sergey asked, looking at the tape measure in her hand.
Alena tossed the tape measure back into the bag, right on top of the shirts.
“Take your things from my apartment and go to your mother’s. You don’t live here anymore, starting today, and I’m not going to discuss it.”
Sergey froze in the hall and looked at her with his mouth half-open, clearly expecting her to start laughing. Then he grabbed the bag by the handle and yanked it toward himself so hard the shirts spilled onto the floor.
“You’re kicking me out?! After eight months?! Just like that, with a tape measure, like a dog?!”
“Those eight months meant a lot to me,” Alena said as she picked up a shirt and stuffed it back into the bag. “But I can’t keep living with someone who thinks my consent is just a formality.”
“My mom is sick! She needs help! Do you understand that or not?!”
“I understand. Help her yourself, hire a caregiver, take her to doctors. Just don’t sign me up for it without asking.”
He turned around and accidentally kicked a bucket of roses still standing in the kitchen. Water and petals spilled across the tiles under the table. Sergey kicked the bucket again, this time on purpose, and it rolled loudly across the floor and stopped by the radiator.
“Money! The deposit! Who’s going to return it, you?!”
“We’ll talk about shared expenses separately, I’ll figure it all out,” Alena stepped over the puddle. “There won’t be a wedding, and we’re not living together anymore.”
Sergey stood for a bit longer, watching the water spread across the floor, then went into the bedroom and silently started pulling his things out of the drawers. He stuffed socks into the pockets of his jacket, his laptop into a grocery bag, his razor into the side pocket of the duffel, making noise with zippers. At the door, he stopped, gripping the bag with both hands.
“You don’t even want to try again?”
“I’ve tried plenty of times, Seryozha. Every time you promised me something, then called your mom.”
He laid his keys on the hallway cabinet next to the shoehorn and left, closing the door quietly without slamming it. Alena stood in the hall in her wet socks for a long time, then picked up a rag and started gathering up the water and rose petals from the floor.
Three days later, Sergey came back for the rest of his things. Alena was just packing up her wedding dress in a garment bag to return it to the salon, and the dress was spread out on the couch in the small room, taking up all the space. Sergey peeked in, saw the white hem, and quickly looked away.
He’d lost weight in those days and spoke in a much quieter voice than usual. As he packed winter boots and wires into a box, it turned out that Irina Pavlovna had given him a hard time for coming back without warning and with nowhere to put his stuff. Now he was driving her to appointments at eight in the morning, getting time off work, and starting to find out if the clinic had a home nurse.
“Maybe we could have some coffee?” he asked, putting the box by the door. “Calmly, without arguing.”
Alena turned on the kettle, but didn’t put anything on the table or sit down herself. Sergey stood in the middle of the kitchen, fidgeting with the broken handle from the box.
“I really thought you just didn’t want to give in,” he said, staring at the box. “You always gave in before. Turns out you actually meant it this time.”
“I loved you, Seryozha. I spent six months picking out a dress and changed my shoes three times to match it. But I just can’t go on with you deciding everything, then telling me I don’t trust you.”
“What if I promise you? I swear, nothing more without you—honestly. Can we start over?”
The kettle clicked off, but Alena still hadn’t poured the hot water.
“You’re only promising because you’re scared right now. I don’t need that.”
Sergey lowered his head, picked up the box and went to the door, but halfway there he turned back and asked for the documents left in that folder. Alena took them out and handed them to him, and he awkwardly tucked the papers under his arm, holding them with the box. He quietly thanked her, left, and didn’t linger. When Alena returned to the kitchen, she saw a set of spare keys with a little kettlebell keychain lying on the table—the one she gave him for Defender of the Fatherland Day. She put the keys in the back drawer of the dresser, next to the receipts, and went to fasten the dress cover.
That evening Katya called—she had hoped to the very end they’d get back together, and had even bought shoes for the wedding.
“Are you sure you did the right thing?” she asked cautiously. “I mean, it’s just his mom, you could’ve waited another six months and maybe things would’ve worked out.”
“Katya, I put up with things for eight months, just hoping he’d hear me for once,” Alena said, holding the phone with her shoulder as she peeled the old sticker off the dress cover tag. “I don’t want that anymore. Don’t return your shoes—you can wear them to my birthday instead.”
The next day she took the dress back to the salon, where they refunded a bit more than half the price, then dropped by the florist’s to get her deposit back for the canceled bouquet. On her way home, Alena bought a chicken, a bag of tangerines, and a new desk lamp, because the old one had been flickering for a month. At home, she moved her desk back by the window in the little room—Sergey had pushed it toward the door just last Wednesday—and worked late into the night on a project she’d set aside for the wedding.
A week later, Sergey sent a short message saying he’d realized a lot and hoped they could talk someday without any hard feelings. Alena read it on the bus, closed the chat, put her phone away, and didn’t reply.
On Saturday, Katya invited her for a walk in the park. Alena got ready in twenty minutes without asking anyone what time she’d be back. She left the building and immediately spotted Sergey by the neighboring house, standing at the curb waiting for a taxi with his phone. He was wearing the same jacket, and the yellow case of a measuring tape stuck out of his pocket.
He saw her and raised his hand, as if he wanted to come over. Alena nodded to him briefly, adjusted her bag on her shoulder, and kept walking toward the bus stop without slowing down. Sergey stayed there on the curb with his hand in the air, then dropped it and stared at his phone as she turned the corner by the pharmacy.