Natalya calmly examined the documents. For reasons she couldn’t understand, she didn’t even feel angry.
“Have you really decided?” Vladimir fixed his gaze on her, irritation barely concealed. “And now? How are we going to divide everything?”
Natalya raised her eyes. No tears, no pleading—just the determination that came after a sleepless night spent reflecting on her shattered life.
“Take everything,” she said in a low but firm voice.
“What do you mean by ‘everything’?” Vladimir furrowed his brow, skeptical.
“The apartment, the dacha, the car, the accounts. Everything,” she said, sweeping her hand. “I need nothing.”
“Are you joking?” A smug smile spread across his lips. “Is this a woman’s trick?”
“No, Volodya. No jokes, no tricks. For thirty years, I put my life on pause. Thirty years of washing, cooking, cleaning, waiting. Thirty years of hearing that traveling was a waste, that my hobbies were frivolous, that my dreams were absurd. Do you know how many times I wanted to go to the sea? Nineteen. Do you know how many times we actually went? Three. And each of those three times, you complained it was too expensive and unnecessary.”
Vladimir chuckled.
“There’s your endless refrain. We had a roof over our heads, food to eat…”
“Yes, that’s true,” Natalya agreed. “And now you’ll have everything else too. Congratulations on your victory.”
The lawyer, a witness to the scene, was left speechless. He was used to tears, shouting, and mutual accusations. But this woman was simply letting go of everything people usually fight for until the very end.
“Do you realize what you’re saying?” Natalya murmured. “The law would grant you half of the jointly acquired property.”
“I know,” she smiled, as if she had just shed an invisible burden. “And I also know that half of an empty life is just a smaller empty life.”
Vladimir barely hid his satisfaction. He hadn’t expected such a turn of events: he had planned to negotiate, maybe threaten, certainly manipulate. But here was a gift from fate!
“There’s the adult behavior I’ve been waiting for!” He slammed his fist on the table. “Finally, you’ve shown some common sense.”
“Don’t confuse common sense with liberation,” Natalya replied, before signing the papers.
They drove home in the same car, but it felt like they had come from different worlds.
Vladimir hummed to himself—maybe a march, or an old childhood tune. The car bounced over the bumps, his whistling sometimes piercing the air, then suddenly stopping.
Natalya didn’t listen—she barely noticed the world around her, her eyes fixed on the fogged-up window through which the pines flew by, and her heart beat like a fledgling taking flight for the first time.
How strange it was: an ordinary road, a tired evening, and suddenly—an indescribable feeling of inner space. It was as if a huge knot had unraveled in an instant. Natalya smiled, brushed her cool cheek with her fingertips, and thought: there it is, freedom…
Three weeks later, Natalya found herself in a small room in Klin.
The rental was modest: a bed, a wardrobe, a table, and a small TV. On the windowsill, two pots of violets—her first independent purchase in her new home.
“You’re crazy,” her son Kirill’s voice thundered over the phone, full of irritation. “You gave up everything and moved into this dump?”
“I didn’t give up everything, my son,” Natalya calmly corrected. “I left it. Two very different things.”
“Mom, how? Dad says you gave him everything willingly. Now he wants to sell the dacha—says he doesn’t want to deal with it anymore.”
Natalya smiled as she looked at herself in the small mirror on the wall. For the past week, she had been sporting a new haircut she would never have dared with Vladimir around. “Too young,” “not professional,” “what will people say?”—the usual comments still echoed in her memory.
“Let him sell it,” she answered lightly. “Your father has always known how to manage his properties.”
“And you? You’ve got nothing left!”
“I have the most important thing, Kirill. My life. And do you know what’s surprising? At fifty-nine, you can start over.”
Natalya accepted a position as an administrator at a small private nursing home. The work wasn’t easy, but it was interesting. And, most importantly, she had new acquaintances and free time, which she finally managed herself.
Meanwhile, Vladimir was savoring his “victory.”
For the first two weeks, he wandered through the apartment like the master of a new castle, inspecting every object with a sense of total ownership. No one would scold him anymore, no one would remind him of dirty socks or unwashed dishes.
“You’re lucky, Volodya,” his friend Semyonych commented while sipping brandy in the kitchen. “Other men lose half or more, and you—you’re in heaven! The apartment, the dacha, the car—all of it’s yours.”
“Yeah,” Vladimir smiled smugly. “Finally, Natalya showed some common sense. Apparently, she realized she’d be lost without me.”
By the end of the first month, however, the euphoria gave way to the first problems.
Clean shirts mysteriously stopped appearing in the wardrobe. The fridge was empty, and preparing a decent meal turned out to be harder than he had imagined. At work, his colleagues noticed that Vladimir seemed less neat.
“You look tired, Vladimiryich,” his boss observed. “Everything okay at home?”
“Perfectly fine,” Vladimir replied cheerfully. “Just a little domestic reorganization.”
One evening, he opened the fridge and found only a bottle of ketchup, a pack of spreadable cheese, and a half-empty bottle. His stomach growled, reminding him that he had only eaten a sandwich that morning.
“Damn it,” he muttered, slamming the door shut. “This can’t go on… I need to do something.”
To distract himself, he immediately ordered food—what else could he do, with a fridge like a spring desert, empty except for a few wilted leaves on the bottom shelf? While waiting for the delivery, he flipped through some bills. And there, like a cold shower, the numbers forced him to look: utilities, internet, credit card payments, electricity…
At first, it had all seemed like distant background noise, a problem from another reality. It happens, he thought: as long as someone takes care of it, life just goes on.
Then the doorbell rang—a real jolt to his thoughts. The delivery man dropped off the package and the payment terminal.
“Five hundred eighty rubles,” he said in a detached tone.
“What?!” Vladimir jumped, almost dropping his keys. “For what, excuse me, a stew and some water?”
“Well… that’s the standard rate these days,” the delivery man shrugged, used to this kind of reaction.
Vladimir paid in silence, then returned to the kitchen and stopped at the threshold. Silence hung in the air. Even the fridge seemed to hold its breath, solitary. The apartment was big, with trendy lamps and mirrors, all the furniture he had always dreamed of… Yet it now resembled a waiting room. Cold. Empty. So vast that the wind could howl in the hallway—just like in Vladimir’s heart.
Natalya, meanwhile, stood by the Black Sea, her face turned toward the sun and the salty breeze.
Around her, a group of her peers on an organized excursion—the active retirees club had arranged a week in Crimea. For the first time in her life, she traveled without the endless complaints about “wasted money,” no grumbling, no calculations about the savings she’d make by staying home.
“Natalya, come take a photo!” called her new friend Irina, an energetic sixty-year-old widow she met in a painting class.
Natalya joyfully ran toward the group ready for the picture. Who would have thought she could wear a colorful dress, let her hair down, and laugh like a young girl at her age?
“Now a selfie!” ordered Irina, pulling out the phone holder. “And we’ll post it right away in the group!”
That evening, sitting in the armchair in her room, Natalya scrolled through the photos. A woman with bright eyes and a radiant smile—a woman almost unrecognizable. When had that crease in her forehead disappeared? When had her shoulders straightened, and her posture lightened?
“I should post these on social media,” she thought, and after a moment of hesitation, she posted a few pictures on her almost-forgotten profile.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Vladimir faced a plumbing leak in the kitchen. Water flooded the floor, damaging a nightstand, while the plumber complained: “We can’t find that replacement part,” and the entire pipe system needed to be replaced.
“Bad plumbing!” cursed Vladimir as he wiped the floor with old towels. “Where do I have that plumber’s number who always had the parts on hand?”
Suddenly, he realized that his wife had known dozens of numbers by heart—from the plumber to the hairdresser, from the butcher to the cobbler. This subtle domestic comfort had collapsed in an instant, leaving him alone with problems he had once solved like magic.
“Bad plumbing!” he muttered again, furious. “And now I have to cook, do laundry, and work…”
That evening, after finally shutting off the water and wiping the puddle, Vladimir remembered that he hadn’t checked social media in a while. Out of boredom, he scrolled through his feed and suddenly stopped—on the screen, Natalya’s radiant face by the sea. Colorful dress, new haircut, and she looked… happy?
“What nonsense,” he muttered, zooming in on the image. “She left with practically nothing!”
The comments under the photo only added to his confusion:
“Natalya, you look so young!”
“You’re gorgeous, dear!”
“The sea suits you so well!”
He kept scrolling and discovered other surprises: reunions at the library, a group of easels in a park, Natalya holding a bunch of wildflowers on a bench.
“This is crazy,” he put down his phone and gazed at the deserted kitchen with the dirty dishes in the sink. “She should have… she should have…”
He didn’t have time to finish the sentence before it dawned on him—he had actually expected Natalya to suffer without him, without all the things he considered important. But in the photos, there was a woman reborn, as if she had shed years of burden and found freedom.
A few days later, a storm damaged the roof of the dacha. The barometer predicted an impending storm, and the attic needed repairs.