At three in the morning, my mother-in-law kicked my door in: “Hand over the money for our Vitenka.” And what happened next is now being discussed by the entire apartment block.
At three in the morning, someone started pounding on my door as if Osama bin Laden were hiding behind it.
“Alena! Open up, we know you’re home!” came the voice of my mother-in-law. My former mother-in-law, to be precise. Tamara Anatolyevna. The woman who, eight years ago at my wedding, hissed to my mother, “Well, we’ll see how long yours lasts.”
It lasted seven years. Sorry for the spoiler.
I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. My daughter was asleep in the children’s room—thank God, she sleeps like a partisan after an interrogation; even a cannon wouldn’t wake her. But the neighbors had surely woken up by now. Granny Zina from the fifth floor was definitely glued to her peephole—for her, this was better than a crime show.
“Alena, I’ll call the police!” That was my sister-in-law, Ritka. Her voice sounded like a crow that had been hoarse since childhood.
“Go ahead, dear,” I thought. “Call them. That, by the way, is exactly what I need.”
I got up, threw on my robe, and checked my phone. The app was working. The camera in the hallway had been recording for three weeks. The camera in the kitchen—for two. The microphone in the entryway—since Monday.
Thank you to my friend’s husband, Seryoga. He works security at some bank. He said, “Alena, install them. I have a bad feeling about these relatives of yours.”
His gut feeling didn’t fail him.
I walked up to the door. A blow. Then another. The doorframe cracked—Ritka was clearly kicking it with her market-bought “Adibas” sneakers.
“Tamara Anatolyevna,” I said calmly through the door. “It’s three in the morning. The neighbors are sleeping. What do you want?”
“Open up, you scum! Vitya told us everything!”
“Vitya told us everything.” Remember that phrase. It will come up again.
I opened the door.
But it had all started exactly one month before that night.
Vitya and I divorced a year and a half ago. Quietly, decently—or so I thought at the time. There was no need to divide the apartment; it had belonged to me before the marriage, inherited from my grandmother. He took the car. Our daughter stayed with me. He paid child support. Or rather, he was supposed to.
In a year and a half—three payments. Tiny ones. “Alena, you understand, I’m between jobs.”
I understood. I always understood everything. Apparently, that was my main diagnosis.
Then, a month ago, Tamara Anatolyevna called me. With a voice that could make even my cat’s ears curl.
“Alenochka, dear…” By the way, I became “dear” for the first time in eight years. “Here’s the thing… Our Vitenka was deceived. At work. He was set up, can you imagine? Now he owes three hundred thousand. If he doesn’t pay it back, they’ll put him in prison.”
“Tamara Anatolyevna,” I said. “And what does that have to do with me?”
“How can you say that? You were still his wife. You have a daughter together. He is her father!”
“Former wife. And a father who hasn’t paid child support for a year and a half.”
A pause. Heavy. Brick-like.
“Alena,” her voice changed. Dropped half a tone. “You do understand you have a child. Anything can happen in life. It would be better if you handled this nicely.”
That was when something clicked inside me. Not loudly. Quietly. Like a switch.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you back.”
I hung up. Then I called Seryoga.
“Seryoga, I need cameras. And a microphone. And a lawyer.”
“What happened?”
“Looks like they’re planning to milk me. I want to be prepared.”
After that, the circus began. The calls came every day. Sometimes Tamara. Sometimes Ritka. Sometimes Vitya himself—“Alena, come on, you’re not a monster.” I recorded everything.
Then the visits started. Without warning. The intercom rang at eight in the evening.
“Alena, it’s Mom. Open up, I brought a cake.”
In eight years of marriage, “Mom” had visited me with a cake exactly zero times. And now—three times in two weeks. With a cheap “Prague” cake from the supermarket and a look like the one people in my childhood used when choosing a calf at the market.
“Alenochka, have you thought about it?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“And no.”
“Alena. This is family. Don’t you understand?”
“Tamara Anatolyevna, what family? We’re divorced. Vitya is separate. I’m separate. You have your family—without me.”
She pressed her lips together. Put the cake on the table. And said a phrase that I later replayed on the recording a thousand times:
“Well, look here, girl. We can do this the hard way too. We have connections. They’ll throw you out of that apartment before you can even blink.”
At that moment, I smiled. For the first time in a month—genuinely.
Because that phrase in court is worth about as much as a three-room apartment in the city center.
The lawyer Seryoga sent me to—Marina Viktorovna, a woman with two divorces behind her and the gaze of a sniper—listened to the recordings and nodded.
“Blackmail. Threats. Psychological pressure. Alena, by the way, your ex-husband also owes child support. I’m filing a claim. And at the same time—a police report under Article 163, extortion. By a group of persons by prior conspiracy. Up to seven years, by the way.”
“And if they show up at my home?”
“Well then,” Marina smiled, “that’s Article 139. Illegal entry into a dwelling. Especially if there are threats. Especially at night.”
“So I need them to come?”
“You need them to come and say stupid things. And you will record it. And don’t open the door until they’ve said enough.”
I left her office with a light heart. For the first time in a month.
And now—three in the morning. Monday. I opened the door.
On the threshold stood Tamara Anatolyevna in a robe with roses on it—she had been showing off in that thing since the 2000s—Ritka in a puffer jacket over her pajamas, and Vitenka himself. Vitenka stood behind them, eyes lowered to the floor. Good boy, Vitenka. Little bunny.
“Hand over the money, you bitch!” Tamara screamed from the doorway. “Three hundred thousand! They’ll put Vitenka in prison!”
“Good evening, Tamara Anatolyevna,” I said evenly, stepping back slightly into the hallway—the camera was capturing them full-length; their faces were perfectly visible. “Would you like some tea?”
“What tea?! Ritka, go in!”
Ritka stepped over the threshold.
“Stop,” I raised my hand. “You have just entered my home without invitation. I am asking you to leave.”
“I’m not leaving!” Ritka barged into the hallway. “This is my brother’s apartment! We lived here before you!”
“My brother’s apartment.” From my grandmother. My grandmother. Before the wedding.
“Tamara Anatolyevna, I repeat for the last time: leave my home.”
“You’ll lose your child!” my mother-in-law screamed. “We’ll make you look like such a mother that they’ll take your daughter away! We have connections! We know a lawyer! Three hundred thousand—and we’ll forget about you!”
“So,” I said slowly, “you are demanding three hundred thousand rubles from me under the threat that you will try to have me deprived of parental rights. And at the same time, you are currently inside my apartment without my permission. Did I understand that correctly?”
“Correct!” Ritka shouted. “And a brick will come flying through your window too if you don’t pay!”
Vitya lifted his head in the hallway.
“Rit, what are you doing…”
“Shut up, Vitka!” Tamara barked. “This is all because of you!”
I looked at my ex-husband. At the man I had lived with for seven years. The man with whom I had a daughter. And I realized that I felt nothing. Nothing at all. As if I were looking at some stranger on a bus.
“Vitya,” I said. “Do you also think I should give you three hundred thousand?”
He was silent.
“Vitya.”
“Alena, well… what else can we do…” he muttered. “They’re right, you got the apartment, it’s not hard for you…”
“I see.”
I took out my phone. Opened the app.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Your entire evening speech has been recorded. I have three cameras and a microphone at home. The recording is being uploaded to the cloud in real time. At the same time, my lawyer already has a prepared police report for extortion. By a group of persons. By prior conspiracy. Article 163, part two. Up to seven years in prison. Now I will press one button—and in twenty minutes, they’ll be here.”
Tamara turned white. As white as the curtain in my kitchen.
“You’re bluffing.”
I turned the phone screen toward her. On the screen—there she was. In the robe with roses. Mouth open. And at the bottom, the caption: “REC 03:14.”
“Vitenka,” I said sweetly. “By the way, you owe me two hundred eighty-six thousand rubles in child support for the past year and a half. According to a court decision, in case you suddenly forgot. So if anyone should be bringing three hundred thousand to anyone—it’s you bringing it to me, not the other way around.”
“Alena…” he stepped toward me. “Listen, let’s settle this like normal people…”
“Like normal people was a year and a half ago. When your daughter had the flu and you couldn’t find money for Nurofen.”
Ritka tried to slip past me into the room—I have no idea why. Apparently, purely by instinct: the money had to be lying somewhere. I calmly blocked her with my shoulder.
“Miss, leave my apartment. This is the last verbal warning before Article 139.”
“What Article 139, you idiot?!” Ritka shrieked.
“Illegal entry into a dwelling. Up to two years. With threats—up to three. Would you like to test it?”
Tamara grabbed Ritka by the sleeve.
“Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
“Mom, are we really just leaving like this?!”
“I said let’s go!”
They spilled out into the stairwell. Vitya lingered on the threshold.
“Alena… you won’t file anything, right?”
I looked at him. At my former husband. At the father of my child.
“Vitya. Leave. Please.”
He left.
I closed the door. Put the chain on. Walked to the kitchen. Poured myself tea into a mug that said “Best Mom”—my daughter had given it to me for March 8. I sat down. And I cried.
Not from fear. From relief.
I filed the police report in the morning. With a printed transcript of the recordings. With the video. With screenshots of WhatsApp messages where Tamara had written: “Alena, we’ll ruin your life.”
Two weeks later, a case was opened. First under Article 163. Then, when it turned out there had been no “deceived out of three hundred thousand” at Vitya’s workplace—he had simply gambled it away in an online casino—attempted fraud was added too.
Tamara Anatolyevna cried during questioning. Said they had “misunderstood” her. That she was “worried as a mother.”
The investigator—a man of about forty, with the face of someone who had seen worse—told me after her questioning:
“Alena Igorevna, you have ironclad evidence. Don’t worry.”
At the same time, Marina Viktorovna filed a child support claim. Vitya was pressured through the bailiffs. From his salary—turns out, all this time while he was supposedly “between jobs,” he had been working under the table at an auto repair shop—money is now deducted every month.
My daughter knows nothing. And she won’t know—until she grows up and asks.
Granny Zina from the fifth floor, by the way, turned out to be gold, not an old lady. She gave witness testimony about the nighttime chaos. With details. With such relish, as if she had been preparing for that moment her whole life.
“Alenochka,” she said to me in the elevator a month later. “You did well. I always said that Tamarka was a snake. I figured her out back in 2010, when she came to your housewarming and stuck her fingers into the herring under a fur coat to taste it.”
“Zinaida Pavlovna, thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, dear. Don’t mention it. We women have to stand by each other.”
Six months passed.
Tamara received a suspended sentence. Ritka got a fine. Vitya got a criminal record and a child support debt that he will be paying off for another five years.
And I installed a new door. Steel. With good locks.
And you know what? Now I sleep like a baby.
Patience is, of course, a virtue. But every virtue has an expiration date. And if you don’t use it in time, it turns sour. Like a cheap “Prague” cake from the supermarket left in the sun.
And I used mine. Exactly at three in the morning. With a camera in my pocket.