“Like I care that she’s your mother, Igor! She insulted my parents, which means I’ll treat her exactly the way she deserves! And if I have to, I’ll hit her again! Is that clear?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind?” Igor’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the steel grip of his fingers digging into Kristina’s forearm spoke louder than any shout.
He had practically dragged her out of the brightly lit living room, filled with the rising murmur of conversation, and into the dim, narrow hallway, where the smell of dusty coats and old shoes mingled with the aromas of hot food drifting in from the other room.
She tore her arm free with one sharp, furious movement. Four red marks immediately appeared on her delicate skin, perfect imprints of his fingers.
Kristina did not rub the bruised spot. She straightened her back, lifted her chin, and her eyes, which looked almost black in the half-light of the hallway, burned with a dry, furious fire.
Her entire posture was an answer—cold and merciless.
“Me? You’re asking what I think I’m doing?” Her voice was low and tense, like a string pulled tight. “You stood there and watched while your precious mother, Tamara Borisovna, spent the entire evening methodically humiliating my parents. She wasn’t merely hinting at things. She said everything openly, enjoying every word and every reaction around the table.”
He took a step back until his shoulders pressed against the coat rack, where his own raincoat was hanging.
He looked cornered. His face was pale, and beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead. He wanted to calm her down, make her lower her voice and force everything back within the boundaries of polite behavior, but instead he had run straight into a wall.
“She said my parents were penniless nobodies from some provincial backwater,” Kristina continued, pronouncing every word with such deadly precision that Igor winced as though suffering from a toothache. “She said they had raised me without the slightest understanding of good taste because I chose such a ‘simple’ wedding dress. Loudly, in front of everyone, she wondered how they had even managed to afford the trip to Moscow and whether they had sold their last cow to pay for it. And what were you doing, Igor?”
She stepped toward him, and now he was trapped between her and the wall.
“You sat there. You stared at your plate. You refilled her glass with her favorite semi-sweet wine when she called my father a drunk yet again and described my mother as a downtrodden country woman who could barely string two words together. You smiled while her friends nodded approvingly. You were her accomplice, Igor. You didn’t just remain silent. Your inaction showed that you approved of everything she said. You’re a coward.”
The word coward struck him harder than a slap.
He flinched and tried to object, desperately searching for words that might help him regain control.
“Kristina, stop it. She’s my mother. She just… she has a difficult personality. You need to understand—”
“I don’t need to understand anything,” she cut him off. “I endured it for two hours. For two hours, I listened to her humiliating my parents while staring at your expressionless face. I kept waiting for the man inside you to wake up. For the husband who was supposed to defend his wife’s family and their dignity. But he never woke up. And then I realized I would have to defend them myself. So I did.”
He remembered the moment that had caused him to drag her into the hallway.
Tamara Borisovna, her face flushed from wine and self-importance, had been standing in the doorway, seeing off one of the guests. Over her shoulder, she threw another spiteful remark at Kristina about women who entered marriage without a dowry.
At that exact moment, Kristina, who was walking past, appeared to stumble awkwardly.
Her shoulder slammed hard into her mother-in-law’s face.
There was a short, dull, strangely wet sound.
Tamara Borisovna gasped, grabbed her nose, and dark, thick blood immediately began seeping between her plump fingers.
It had not been an accident.
It had been a brief, calculated, brutal strike.
“You… you hit her,” Igor whispered, staring at his wife with superstitious horror, as though he were seeing her for the first time.
“I restored justice,” she corrected him coldly. “And if you think this is where it ends, you’re very badly mistaken.”
“You hit her,” he repeated, but this time it was not a question. It was a statement of fact, spoken with almost childlike disbelief.
It was as though he had just watched the laws of physics collapse before his eyes.
In his carefully constructed and protected world, things like this did not happen.
Wives did not hit their mothers-in-law.
Conflicts were handled through quiet sabotage, meaningful silences and restrained hostility, not physical violence.
Kristina gave him a crooked smile.
That smile was more frightening than open rage. There was no regret in it, only contempt for his naivety.
“What were you suggesting instead? That I stand there and keep listening? That I wait until she invites the guests to wipe their feet on me? Or until she decides my parents belong in the servants’ quarters?”
She stepped closer again, and under the force of her presence, he nearly pressed himself into the old wooden coat rack, which creaked pitifully beneath his weight.
“Your mother is a predator, Igor. She understands only strength. All evening, she was testing me, searching for a weak spot. And she found it—in you. She realized you would never defend me, and that gave her permission to do whatever she wanted.”
He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to mutter again about respecting one’s elders or being the wiser person.
But the words stuck in his throat.
He looked at her face—hard, determined and unfamiliar—and understood that any argument he offered would be shattered and mocked.
She was right.
He had remained silent.
He had allowed it to happen.
And now she was presenting him with the bill.
“You have exactly one chance to fix this,” she said.
Her voice became quieter, but that only gave it more weight. It became businesslike, like a surgeon speaking before a complicated operation.
“You’re going to turn around, walk back into that room, go up to your mother and tell her to shut her mouth. Permanently. Then you’re going to make her apologize. To me. Not in a whisper and not privately, but loudly enough for everyone who hasn’t left yet to hear.”
Igor froze.
His mind refused to process what he had just heard.
Make his mother apologize?
Tamara Borisovna, who had never apologized to anyone in her entire life because she considered it a sign of weakness?
It was not merely impossible.
It was unthinkable, like forcing the sun to revolve around the Earth.
“You’ve lost your mind. She would never—”
“This is your choice, Igor,” she interrupted, refusing to let him finish.
Her eyes locked onto his, and he suddenly felt completely naked and defenseless.
“Either you do it, and we try to save whatever remains of our marriage, or if you’re still standing here in two minutes, I’ll go in there myself. And believe me, after that, you won’t have anything left to save. I’ll finish what I started, and I won’t care about the consequences.”
A chill ran through him.
He looked toward the half-open living-room door, from where he could hear the muffled hum of voices, the clinking of glasses and artificial laughter.
That room contained his familiar life, his mother and his entire world.
But here, in this narrow hallway smelling of mothballs, stood his wife, offering him the chance to blow that world apart.
His will, trained through years of obedience to his mother, failed him.
He could not do it.
He physically could not do what Kristina was asking.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he whispered, clinging to one last fragile hope. “She… she’s my mother.”
That was when Kristina finally exploded.
Her calm fell away like a mask, and all the fury that had been building inside her for two long hours crashed down on him.
“Like I care that she’s your mother, Igor! She insulted my parents, which means I’ll treat her exactly the way she deserves! And if I have to, I’ll hit her again! Is that clear?”
“But—”
“Choose! Right now! Either you go in there and silence her, or I will! And after that, everything between us is over! Right here!”
She stepped back, giving him space to act.
To choose.
Igor stood there, paralyzed.
He stared at her face, twisted with rage, then at the door to the living room, and understood that he had already lost.
He could not choose his wife because that would mean declaring war on his mother.
And he could not choose his mother because he had just seen absolute, icy determination in Kristina’s eyes.
This was not a threat.
It was a sentence.
And he was the one who had to carry it out.
The two minutes she had given him stretched through the stuffy hallway like an eternity.
They were not filled with silence.
Fragments of conversation drifted in from the living room, followed by the muffled laughter of one of the guests and the clatter of a fork against a plate.
The sound of ordinary life continuing around them was the loudest evidence of his betrayal.
Igor did not move.
He stood pressed against the coat rack, his face transformed into a gray, lifeless mask.
He was not looking at her.
He stared somewhere past her, at the scratched doorframe.
There was no struggle in his eyes.
There was only surrender—not to her, but to the force that had kept him trapped in that house his entire life.
When the allotted time expired, Kristina said nothing.
She did not announce his defeat.
She simply turned around.
Her movements contained no fuss or theatrical drama.
She walked to the front door, took her handbag and car keys from the shelf.
She did not look at him.
She did not even grant him a final glance.
For her, he had ceased to exist the moment those two minutes ended.
She opened the door.
A wave of cool, clean air from the stairwell struck her face, washing away the sticky atmosphere of Tamara Borisovna’s apartment.
Kristina stepped across the threshold and carefully pulled the heavy oak door shut behind her without slamming it.
The dull click of the expensive lock sounded like the final period at the end of their shared story.
He remained behind in the hallway, together with his mother, her broken nose and his own cowardice.
The car was cold.
Kristina did not turn on the heater immediately.
For several moments, she sat in complete silence, her fingers gripping the leather steering wheel.
She stared at the illuminated windows of the third-floor apartment.
She felt no pain and no resentment.
Those emotions had burned away completely in the hallway.
Only a cold, crystal-clear anger remained, along with absolute clarity.
She started the engine, and its steady hum became the only sound disturbing her solitude.
The road home was almost empty.
The nighttime city rushed past in blurred lights from advertisements, streetlamps and the windows of strangers’ homes.
She drove confidently, changing gears and braking at traffic lights automatically.
Her thoughts worked just as mechanically, arranging themselves into a clear plan of action.
She did not think about what she would say to Igor when he came home.
She knew there would be nothing left to discuss.
Instead, she thought about what she needed to take.
Her passport.
The documents for the car.
Her laptop.
Clothes.
The gifts from her parents.
The jewelry box she had inherited from her grandmother.
Everything that had belonged to her before him.
Everything that would remain hers after him.
Their apartment greeted her with silence.
It still smelled of her perfume and his cologne.
A book he had been reading lay on the coffee table.
Two coffee cups from breakfast stood in the sink.
Only a few hours earlier, this had been their shared home, their fortress.
Now it was merely a room filled with belongings, some of which she needed to take.
She walked straight into the bedroom and switched on the light.
Bright light flooded the room.
She opened the sliding wardrobe.
His clothes hung on the right.
Hers hung on the left.
She did not touch a single one of his shirts.
Methodically and without hurry, she began removing her dresses, blouses and trousers from their hangers and folding them neatly on the bed.
Her movements were precise and efficient, like those of someone packing after a long business trip.
She took a large suitcase down from the upper shelf and began arranging her clothing inside in even stacks.
Jeans.
Sweaters.
Underwear.
Nothing unnecessary.
No sentimental souvenirs.
No photographs of them together.
She was dismantling their shared life piece by piece, taking only the parts that belonged to her.
After finishing with the clothes, she went into the bathroom and gathered her creams, shampoos and toothbrush with the same methodical care.
His razor and shaving foam remained untouched in their usual places, as though they belonged to a stranger with whom she had no connection.
She did not behave like a frightened wife fleeing in panic.
She behaved like a liquidator.
Coldly.
Efficiently.
Without emotion.
She was taking what belonged to her and leaving him alone with the world he had tried so desperately to protect.
When the final lock on the suitcase clicked shut, she knew she was ready.
Ready for the final act.
Igor heard the sound of her footsteps descending the stairwell while he himself was hurrying upward, taking the stairs two at a time.
His heart pounded in his throat—from running, from fear and from the delayed realization of the scale of the disaster.
He had calmed his mother down, seated her in an armchair with a wet towel pressed to her face, listened to a fresh stream of curses directed at “that monster,” and finally understood that Kristina had not been joking.
She had not been threatening him.
She had been carrying out the sentence.
The key turned in the lock with a sharp, scraping sound.
Igor burst into the apartment as though rushing into a burning building.
Then he froze in the doorway.
She stood in the entrance hall, already wearing her coat, her handbag over one shoulder.
Beside her, like two silent witnesses to his collapse, stood two suitcases.
She was not preparing to leave.
She had already left.
All that remained was for her to physically move her body through the door.
“What are you doing?” His voice was hoarse and breaking. “Have you completely lost your mind? Put everything back…”
The continuation is just below in the first comment.
“I don’t give a damn that she’s your mother, Igor! She insulted my parents, which means I’ll treat her exactly the way she deserves! And if I have to, I’ll hit her again! Is that clear?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind?” Igor’s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the steel grip of his fingers digging into Kristina’s forearm spoke louder than any shout.
He had practically dragged her out of the brightly lit living room, filled with the steady murmur of guests, and into the dim, narrow hallway, where the smell of dusty coats and old shoes mixed with the aromas of hot food drifting in from the dining room.
She tore her arm free with one sharp, furious movement. Four red marks immediately appeared on her delicate skin—the precise imprints of his fingers. Kristina did not rub the bruised spot. She straightened, lifted her chin, and her eyes, which looked almost black in the half-light of the corridor, burned with a dry, furious flame.
Her entire posture was an answer—cold and merciless.
“Me? You’re asking what I think I’m doing?” Her voice was low and tense, like a tightly stretched string. “You’re asking me that, Igor? You stood there and watched while your precious mother, Tamara Borisovna, spent the entire evening methodically dragging my parents through the mud. She wasn’t merely hinting at things. She said everything openly, enjoying every word and every reaction around the table.”
He took a step back until his shoulders pressed against the coat rack, from which his own overcoat hung. He looked cornered. His face was pale, and beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead.
He wanted to calm her down, silence her, and force everything back within the bounds of decency. Instead, he found himself facing a wall.
“She said my parents were penniless nobodies from some provincial backwater,” Kristina continued, pronouncing every word with such lethal precision that Igor winced as though suffering from a toothache. “She said they had raised me without the slightest understanding of good taste because I chose such a ‘simple’ wedding dress. In front of the entire table, she loudly wondered how they had even managed to afford the trip to Moscow and whether they had sold their last cow to pay for it. And what did you do, Igor?”
She stepped toward him, and now he was trapped between her and the wall.
“You sat there. You stared at your plate. You refilled her glass with her favorite semi-sweet wine when she called my father a drunk and my mother an ignorant farm woman who could barely string two words together. You smiled while her friends nodded approvingly. You were her accomplice, Igor. You didn’t merely stay silent. By doing nothing, you showed that you approved of it. You’re a coward.”
The word coward struck him harder than a slap.
He flinched and tried to object, desperately searching for words that might help him regain control.
“Kristina, stop it. She’s my mother. She just… she has a difficult personality. You have to understand—”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she cut him off. “I endured it for two hours. For two hours, I listened to her humiliating my parents while staring at your expressionless face. I kept waiting for the man in you to wake up—the husband who would defend his wife’s family and their dignity. But he never woke up. And then I realized I would have to defend them myself. So I did.”
He remembered the moment that had caused him to drag her into the corridor.
Tamara Borisovna, flushed from wine and her own sense of importance, had been standing in the doorway, seeing one of the guests out. Over her shoulder, she threw another cutting remark at Kristina about women who entered marriage without a dowry.
At that exact moment, Kristina, who was passing by, had supposedly stumbled awkwardly.
Her shoulder slammed forcefully into her mother-in-law’s face.
There was a short, dull, strangely wet thud.
Tamara Borisovna gasped and grabbed her nose. Dark, thick blood immediately seeped between her plump fingers.
It had not been an accident.
It had been a short, calculated, vicious blow.
“You… you hit her,” he breathed, staring at his wife with superstitious horror, as though he were seeing her for the first time.
“I restored justice,” she corrected him coldly. “And if you think this is where it ends, you’re badly mistaken.”
“You hit her,” he repeated.
This time, it was no longer a question but a statement of fact, spoken with almost childlike bewilderment. It was as though he had just witnessed the laws of physics being violated before his eyes.
In the carefully constructed and protected world he lived in, such things did not happen.
Wives did not hit their mothers-in-law.
Conflicts were handled through quiet sabotage and meaningful silences—not physical violence.
Kristina gave him a crooked smile.
That smile was more terrifying than open rage. There was no regret in it, only contempt for his naïveté.
“What exactly were you suggesting I do? Stand there and keep listening? Wait until she invited the guests to wipe their feet on me? Or until she decided my parents belonged among the servants?”
She stepped toward him again. Under the force of her presence, he nearly flattened himself against the old wooden coat rack, which creaked miserably beneath his weight.
“Your mother is a predator, Igor. She understands only strength. All evening, she was testing me, searching for weakness. And she found it—in you. She saw that you wouldn’t defend me, and that gave her permission to do whatever she wanted.”
He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to mumble again about respecting one’s elders or being the wiser person.
But the words became lodged in his throat.
He looked at her face—hard, determined, unfamiliar—and understood that every argument he made would be shattered and ridiculed.
She was right.
He had remained silent.
He had allowed it to happen.
And now she was presenting him with the bill.
“You have exactly one chance to fix this,” she said.
Her voice became quieter, but that only gave it more weight. It was now businesslike, like a surgeon speaking before a complicated operation.
“You’re going to turn around, walk into that room, go up to your mother, and tell her to shut her mouth. Forever. Then you’re going to make her apologize. To me. Not in a whisper and not privately, but loudly enough for everyone who hasn’t left yet to hear.”
Igor froze.
His mind refused to process what he had heard.
Make his mother apologize?
Tamara Borisovna, who had never apologized to anyone in her life because she considered it a sign of weakness?
It was not merely impossible.
It was unthinkable—like forcing the sun to revolve around the Earth.
“You’ve lost your mind. She would never—”
“This is your choice, Igor,” Kristina interrupted, refusing to let him finish.
Her eyes bored into his, and he suddenly felt completely naked and defenseless.
“Either you do it, and we try to save whatever is left of us, or, if you haven’t moved from this spot in two minutes, I’ll go in there myself. And believe me, after that, there will be nothing left for you to save. I’ll finish what I started, and I won’t give a damn about the consequences.”
A chill swept over him.
He looked at the half-open door leading to the living room. From inside came the muffled hum of voices, the clinking of glasses, and false laughter.
That was his familiar life.
His mother.
His world.
And here, in this narrow corridor that smelled of mothballs, stood his wife, asking him to blow that world apart.
His will, conditioned by years of obedience to his mother, failed him.
He could not do it.
He physically could not do what Kristina was asking.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he whispered, clinging to his last weak hope. “She’s… she’s my mother.”
That was when Kristina finally exploded.
Her composure fell away like a mask, and all the fury that had accumulated within her during those two long hours came crashing down on him.
“I don’t give a damn that she’s your mother, Igor! She insulted my parents, which means I’ll treat her exactly the way she deserves! And if I have to, I’ll hit her again! Is that clear?”
“But—”
“Choose! Right now! Either you go in there and shut her up, or I will! And after that, everything between us is over! Right here!”
She stepped back, giving him room to act.
Room to choose.
Igor stood paralyzed.
He looked at her face, distorted by anger, then at the door to the living room, and understood that he had already lost.
He could not choose his wife because that would mean going to war with his mother.
And he could not choose his mother because he had just seen the absolute, icy determination in Kristina’s eyes.
This was not a threat.
It was a sentence.
And he himself had been ordered to carry it out.
The two minutes she had given him stretched through the suffocating hallway like an eternity.
They were not filled with silence.
Fragments of conversation came from the living room, along with a female guest’s muffled laughter and the clatter of a fork against a plate.
The sound of ordinary life continuing around them was the loudest possible proof of his betrayal.
Igor did not move.
He stood pressed against the coat rack, his face transformed into a gray, spineless mask. He was no longer looking at Kristina but somewhere beyond her, at the worn doorframe.
There was no struggle in his eyes.
Only surrender—not to her, but to the force that had controlled him inside this house his entire life.
When the time she had given him ran out, Kristina did not say a word.
She did not announce his defeat.
She simply turned away.
Her movements were free of haste or theatrical drama. She walked to the front door, took her handbag and car keys from the shelf, and never looked at him.
She did not even honor him with a final glance.
To her, he had ceased to exist the moment his two minutes expired.
She opened the door.
A stream of cool, clean air from the stairwell struck her face, washing away the sticky atmosphere of Tamara Borisovna’s apartment.
Kristina stepped across the threshold and carefully pulled the heavy oak door closed behind her without slamming it.
The dull click of the expensive lock sounded like the final period at the end of their shared story.
He remained there in the hallway with his mother, her broken nose, and his own cowardice.
The car was cold.
Kristina did not immediately turn on the heater.
For several moments, she sat in complete silence, her fingers gripping the leather steering wheel tightly. She looked up at the illuminated windows of the third-floor apartment.
She felt neither pain nor resentment.
Those emotions had burned away completely in the hallway.
All that remained was cold, crystal-clear anger and absolute clarity.
She started the engine, and its steady hum became the only sound disturbing her solitude.
The road home was nearly empty.
The nighttime city rushed past in blurred lights from billboards, streetlamps, and the windows of strangers’ homes.
She drove confidently, shifting gears and stopping at traffic lights almost mechanically.
Her thoughts worked just as mechanically, arranging themselves into a clear plan of action.
She did not think about what she would say to Igor when he returned.
She knew there would be nothing left to discuss.
Instead, she thought about what she needed to take.
Her passport.
The documents for the car.
Her laptop.
Clothes.
Gifts from her parents.
The jewelry box she had inherited from her grandmother.
Everything that had belonged to her before him.
Everything that would remain hers after him.
Their apartment greeted her with silence.
It still smelled of her perfume and his cologne.
The book he had been reading lay on the coffee table. Two coffee cups from their morning breakfast stood in the sink.
Only a few hours earlier, this had been their shared home, their fortress.
Now it was merely a space filled with belongings, some of which she needed to take.
She walked straight into the bedroom and switched on the light.
Bright illumination flooded the room.
She opened the sliding wardrobe.
His clothes hung on the right.
Hers hung on the left.
She did not touch a single one of his shirts.
Methodically and without rushing, she began removing her dresses, blouses, and trousers from their hangers, folding them neatly on the bed.
Her movements were precise and economical, like those of someone packing after a long business trip.
She took a large suitcase down from the upper shelf and began arranging the clothing in even stacks.
Jeans.
Sweaters.
Underwear.
Nothing unnecessary.
No sentimental souvenirs.
No photographs of them together.
She dismantled their shared life into separate parts, taking only the pieces that belonged to her.
When she finished with her clothes, she went into the bathroom and just as methodically gathered her creams, shampoos, and toothbrush.
His razor and shaving foam remained untouched in their usual places, as though they belonged to a stranger with whom she had no connection.
She was not behaving like a wife fleeing in panic.
She was acting like a liquidator.
Coldly.
Efficiently.
Without emotion.
She was taking what was hers and leaving him with the world he had so desperately tried to protect.
When the final lock on the suitcase clicked shut, she realized she was ready.
Ready for the final act.
Igor heard the sound of her footsteps descending the stairs just as he was hurrying upward, skipping steps.
His heart was pounding in his throat—from running, from fear, and from the belated realization of the scale of the catastrophe.
He had calmed his mother down, seated her in an armchair with a wet towel pressed to her face, and listened to a stream of curses directed at “that vicious creature.”
Only then had he finally understood that Kristina had not been joking.
She had not been threatening him.
She was carrying out the sentence.
His key turned in the lock with a sharp, scraping sound.
Igor burst into the apartment like a man rushing into a burning building.
Then he froze in the doorway.
Kristina was standing in the entrance hall, already wearing her coat, with her handbag over one shoulder.
Beside her, like two silent witnesses to his collapse, stood two suitcases.
She was not preparing to leave.
She had already left.
All that remained was for her to physically move her body through the door.
“What are you doing?” His voice was hoarse and breaking. “Have you completely lost your mind? Put everything back.”
She slowly turned her head and looked at him.
There was neither anger nor hurt in her gaze.
Only a calm, detached assessment, as though she were looking at a stranger making a ridiculous scene in a public place.
“It’s too late to put anything back, Igor. Everything is already where it belongs. My things are with me. Yours are with you.”
He stepped toward her and reached out, intending to grab her elbow, stop her, shake her, and force her to become his wife again—the woman he believed he knew.
But she made a barely noticeable movement to the side, and his fingers closed around empty air.
That simple gesture showed him more clearly than any words that physical contact between them was no longer possible.
“You’re destroying everything! Over what? A few careless words? My mother’s broken nose? You want to throw away three years of our lives because of her personality?”
He was almost shouting, trying to fill the emptiness that had formed inside their home with the sound of his voice.
But his words bounced off her icy composure without provoking any response.
She waited until he ran out of breath before speaking.
Her voice was quiet, but every word pierced him like a shard of glass.
“They weren’t just a few words, Igor. It was a public flogging. She humiliated the people who love me more than anyone else in the world. And you sat there and watched. It isn’t merely her personality. It is who she is, and you encourage it with your silence.
“And as for our life together… Do you think I’m erasing three years? No. I’m erasing only this evening. Because tonight, I finally understood that there were never any three years of ‘us.’ There was you, and there was me, and your mother was always standing between us. I simply refused to see it.”
He sagged against the wall.
Her logic was merciless.
She was not accusing him of something vague or abstract.
She was dissecting his actions with the cold precision of a pathologist, exposing the essence of who he truly was.
“But… she’s my mother!” he blurted out, offering his final, most pathetic, and most honest argument. “I couldn’t—”
Kristina looked directly into his eyes.
He saw the same dry, merciless rage that had burned in them in the corridor, only now it had been sharpened to a razor’s edge.
“I don’t give a damn that she’s your mother, Igor,” she said almost in a whisper, and the sound sent a chill down his spine. “She insulted my parents, which means that you, as my husband, should have defended me and them. Is that clear? I gave you a choice. You could have become my husband. Instead, you chose to remain her son.”
She took hold of one suitcase handle.
“The problem isn’t really her, Igor. The problem is you. She is what she is, and she will never change. But you could have been different. You could have had a backbone. You could have made a decision for yourself at least once in your life instead of drifting along with her wishes.
“But you couldn’t.
“And I don’t want to spend my life with a man who will always look over his shoulder at his mommy before he even takes a breath. I don’t want to be nothing more than an accessory to her son.”
She opened the front door.
“So go ahead and live your life. Go back to her. Wipe the blood from her face, listen to her tell you what a horrible woman I am, and be a good little boy. That is all you are capable of.”
With those words, she rolled the first suitcase onto the landing and then returned for the second.
She did not look at him.
Not even once.
He remained standing there, pressed against the wall in the corridor of what had once been their shared apartment, listening as her footsteps and the rattling suitcase wheels gradually faded down the stairs.
Then the building’s front door clicked shut.
Absolute, ringing silence followed.
He was left alone.
In his home.
With his mother.
Forever.