“Where Would You Go?” My Husband Was Certain I Had Nowhere to Leave. But I Had My Mother’s Apartment
“Sveta, you won’t believe it—Kostya called! He and Marina are coming to stay with us for the weekend. I already told him we’d be expecting them.”
Svetlana turned off the water, dried her hands on a towel, and looked around. Andrei was standing in the kitchen doorway with his phone in his hand, as delighted as a schoolboy who had just been promised a trip somewhere. The July morning was only beginning to heat up. It was peaceful at the summer house, and she had just been about to sit down and work. She had an urgent assignment—three hundred pages to proofread by Monday.
“This weekend?” she asked.
“Why put it off? We haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”
“My deadline is Monday. Could they come next weekend instead?”
“Oh, forget about your proofreading.” He waved his hand as casually as though he were brushing away a fly. “It’s Kostya, Sveta! They aren’t strangers. They’re our people.”
Our people.
Svetlana turned back toward the sink so that he would not see her expression. They were his people, not hers. She had met Kostya only once, at her and Andrei’s anniversary celebration, and the only things she remembered about him were how loudly he laughed at his own jokes and how he addressed the waiter as “Commander.”
“All right,” she said aloud. “I’ll ask to extend the deadline and explain the situation.”
She could not extend the deadline. But she did not feel like arguing. Arguing with Andrei was like pushing against a warm feather mattress—soft, pointless, and in the end, you still did things his way.
Her irritation rose slowly and steadily, like water in a kettle just before it begins to whistle. She forced it down and went to find a cleaning cloth. If guests were coming, the veranda needed to be wiped down.
She spent two days preparing. Andrei did not take part. He arranged the wicker chairs around the garden, wiped down the barbecue grill, and decided where they could set up the table “properly.” Svetlana drove to the supermarket, carried heavy shopping bags, marinated the meat, and mentally calculated how much these joyful weekends were going to cost them.
And through all of it, one thought kept gnawing at her.
Not the guests.
Money.
The truth was that Svetlana had been lying to Andrei for a long time. Not maliciously or deliberately. It had begun as a small omission, the kind that gradually turned into something large and heavy.
When they first got together, she had let him believe that almost nothing had been left after her mother’s death.
“The treatment consumed everything. The apartment wasn’t worth much. I sold it for next to nothing.”
In reality, her mother’s one-bedroom apartment remained untouched. It had been quietly rented to an elderly couple, and the money her mother had left was sitting in a separate bank account. Svetlana had not touched a single ruble in eight years.
She did not fully understand why she had hidden it.
At first, it was because she did not want money to come between them. Later, it was because her mother’s apartment was the last thing she had left of her, and even imagining dividing it with someone felt as though she were giving away her mother herself.
Then hiding it simply became a habit.
And that habit regularly made her sick with shame.
“I live with the man I love and lie to him about the simplest thing,” Svetlana thought as she arranged the meat in containers. “What a wonderful wife I am.”
That shame was the only shadow over their life together. In every other respect, those eight years had been good. Andrei was warm and easygoing. He kissed the top of her head whenever he passed her. They were comfortable together.
And she intended to keep carrying that comfortable lie.
Kostya and Marina arrived around noon on Saturday.
They were not alone.
“We brought Gleb with us!” Kostya announced as he unloaded bags, a crate of drinks, and a speaker the size of a bedside cabinet from the trunk. “And his girlfriend, Nastya. Why should they suffer in the city in this heat?”
Gleb turned out to be a grown man of about twenty-five. He immediately plugged the speaker into an outlet on the veranda and blasted music through it.
Nastya, his girlfriend, walked down the path, looked around the property, and asked whether there was Wi-Fi.
Marina kissed Andrei enthusiastically, glanced briefly at Svetlana, and said:
“Oh, everything here is so… simple. Charming.”
Svetlana forced a smile and went to put the kettle on.
By evening, the summer house no longer felt like her home.
Music was playing. Kostya was grilling meat on her barbecue and giving orders in her kitchen. Marina had settled into a wicker chair with a glass of wine and was talking about how they had recently “taken a little week-long holiday in the Emirates.”
Gleb and Nastya sat staring at their phones.
Svetlana carried food, served drinks, cleared dishes, and washed everything.
Andrei was in his element. He laughed louder than usual, poured drinks, gave the guests the best pieces of meat, and told them how “Sveta and I built all this with our own hands.”
He was playing the generous, confident master of the house.
Svetlana watched him from a distance and hardly recognized him.
At home, he never said that they had done everything with their own hands.
At home, she did everything with her own hands.
“Sveta, why are you just standing there? Bring the salad!” he called over his shoulder without even turning around.
The owner of the summer house had been transformed into a waitress in front of the guests.
She assumed they would leave that night.
They did not.
The following morning, Kostya stretched, yawned, and announced that they would probably stay for another couple of days.
“When will we ever get a chance to spend time together like this again?”
Andrei beamed.
Svetlana went to change the bedding in the guest room for the second time.
By Monday, it became clear that she had missed her deadline.
She wrote honestly to the editor, explaining that family circumstances had interfered and promising to finish by Wednesday. The three hundred pages now hung over her like dead weight, but there was nowhere to work. The speaker was still pounding away on the veranda.
On Tuesday afternoon, Marina picked at her salad with a fork and casually remarked:
“I see you stay at home all the time, Sveta. That’s the right thing to do. At least you don’t have children, so you can relax. I’ve been running around like a squirrel my entire life.”
Svetlana placed her napkin on the table.
Something unpleasant stirred inside her, something murky and thick.
“I work, Marina. I edit texts.”
“Oh,” Marina drawled, smiling as though Svetlana had said that she embroidered pictures for fun. “So it’s more of a hobby.”
Andrei chuckled and did not correct her.
A hobby.
Svetlana stood up, gathered the plates, and went into the kitchen. She stood there for a minute, staring out of the window at Kostya, who was watering her flower bed so violently that the stream of water was beating the blossoms flat.
You don’t have children.
That remark had cut deeply.
It was true. She did not have any children, either of her own or with Andrei. Things simply had not worked out. They had met too late.
Usually she did not think about it. But now a strange woman sitting at her table had pressed a finger against that sensitive place and moved on without even noticing.
Svetlana took out her phone and called Nina.
Nina was an old friend from her previous life, before Andrei and before the summer house. They rarely spoke these days, but Nina was the kind of person who answered on the first ring.
“Sveta? What’s wrong? You sound exhausted.”
“We have guests. Andrei’s friends. They’ve been living here for three days.”
“And you’re waiting on them.”
It was not a question.
Svetlana remained silent.
“I cook and clean. I missed my deadline because of them.”
“Listen,” Nina said calmly. “I’m going to ask you one thing. For eight years, you’ve been telling me how wonderful Andrei is. So why have you been hiding your mother’s apartment from him all this time? What is there to hide from such a wonderful man?”
Svetlana opened her mouth and closed it again.
Loud laughter erupted on the veranda. Kostya had apparently told another hilarious story.
“I’m not hiding it,” she finally said. “I just… never told him.”
“Sveta, that’s the same thing.” Nina did not pressure her. She spoke almost lazily. “You aren’t stupid. You know something about him that you’re afraid to admit to yourself. Anyway, call me if you need anything. I have an empty room now that Lenka has moved into the dormitory.”
They said goodbye.
Svetlana slipped the phone into the pocket of her apron and stood for a long time, staring at the flower bed that had been destroyed by the hose.
“What am I afraid to admit to myself?” she repeated silently.
After that conversation, she became unusually quiet.
She carried plates, washed dishes, and answered in single words. But she was no longer thinking about the guests.
She was thinking about Andrei.
Everything finally broke on Wednesday evening.
Kostya brought over a second speaker. The music became louder, and new bottles appeared on the table.
Svetlana, who had barely eaten for two days, carried out another frying pan and quietly leaned toward Andrei.
“Andryusha, I need to work all day tomorrow. The assignment is urgent. I won’t be able to cook for everyone in the morning, all right?”
And then Andrei, warmed by alcohol and delighted with himself, spoke loudly enough for Kostya, Marina, Gleb, and Nastya to hear.
“Sveta, why are you acting like a stranger? We have guests. Is it really so difficult for you? This is my house, and these are my rules. I decide when you rest and when you work.”
Everything went silent.
Even the music seemed quieter.
Marina hid a smile behind her glass.
Kostya gave an approving grunt.
“Now that’s a commander!”
My house. My rules.
Svetlana straightened, still holding the frying pan.
She had expected to feel hurt.
Instead, she felt disgust.
Not fear. Not the thought, “Where would I go?”
She felt disgust at the sight of the man she loved putting her in her place for the entertainment of strangers, inside the home she had maintained for all those years.
“Turn the music down, please,” she said evenly.
Confused, Gleb lowered the volume.
“No, Andrei. Listen to me. Just once.”
He was still smiling. He still thought she would make a joke, bring out the salad, and continue serving everyone.
“Eight years,” Svetlana said, and her voice did not tremble. “For eight years, I let you believe that I had nothing. That my mother left me pennies. That I lived in your house, ate your food, and slept under your roof. Do you know why I kept quiet? Because I didn’t want money to come between us. I thought it was more honest that way.”
She looked directly at him.
“But it seems I gave you a wonderful gift. Now you feel entitled to remind me, in front of strangers, whose house this is.”
“Sveta, what are you—” Andrei began, half-rising from his chair.
“I never sold my mother’s apartment, Andrei. It still exists. It belongs to me. And I have enough money not to depend on you or anyone else sitting on this veranda.”
Marina lowered her glass.
Kostya stared at his plate.
“I stay up at night proofreading those ‘unimportant texts I do for fun’ so that we can afford the food you’re serving Kostya right now. And in front of them, you treat me like a waitress and remind me whose house it is.”
She removed her apron and placed it over the back of a chair.
“You’re right. It is your house. Completely yours. I understand that now. And I’m going to mine.”
“What do you mean, yours?” Andrei’s face turned red. “What are you talking about? We have guests!”
“Guests,” she agreed. “You can stay here with them.”
She went upstairs, took a travel bag down from the storage shelf, and calmly packed her belongings: her laptop with the unfinished assignment, documents, a charger, two changes of underwear, and a cosmetic bag.
Her hands obeyed her perfectly.
Downstairs, she could hear Andrei explaining something to Kostya, trying to justify himself. Then he shouted something up the stairs about her “throwing a tantrum over nothing.”
A taxi from the village to the city at that hour was expensive, almost fifteen hundred rubles.
Svetlana ordered one without looking at the price.
She came downstairs carrying her bag and walked across the veranda, past the suddenly quiet guests and past her husband.
Andrei followed her to the gate.
“You’ll calm down and come back,” he said. “Where are you going this late at night?”
Svetlana opened the car door.
“I have somewhere to go, Andrei. That’s the whole point.”
The door closed softly.
Through the rear window, the village began to move away: the fence, the barbecue, the wicker chairs, the speaker.
Svetlana looked ahead at the road.
She felt empty inside, and the emptiness was almost pleasant.
Her mother’s apartment greeted her with the smell of an unoccupied home and a thin layer of dust on the windowsill. The tenants had moved out in the spring, and Svetlana had kept postponing the search for new ones.
She turned on the light, sat down on her mother’s old sofa, and simply remained there for a while.
Everything belonged to her mother.
The clock on the wall, which Svetlana had forgotten to wind. The cups in the cabinet.
For the first time in a year and a half since the funeral, Svetlana did not cry from grief while sitting there.
Instead, she felt as though she had come home.
Her mother would not have pitied her. She would have said:
“Finally, my daughter.”
But her mother was no longer there to say it, and that hurt.
Still, it was a different kind of pain now.
Cleaner.
During the first week, Svetlana hardly left the apartment. She finished the cursed assignment, submitted it, received the second half of her payment, and accepted another project.
Working there felt strangely easy.
No one played loud music.
No one called for her to bring the salad.
She put the kettle on her mother’s stove and wound the wall clock.
Andrei sent her messages.
At first, they were angry.
“This is childish.”
“What was the point of that entire performance?”
Then his tone softened.
“Come back. We need to talk.”
Svetlana read the messages but did not answer immediately. It was not revenge. She simply had no reason to rush.
She called Nina herself on the third day and laughed for a long time about something for the first time that week.
Nina said she was still keeping the room empty, just in case.
Svetlana later learned that the guests had left that same evening.
The following morning, Andrei had made them leave himself. Without Svetlana there to run the house, cook for four extra people, and allow him to play “Commander,” entertaining everyone was no longer nearly as enjoyable.
A month later, he came to see her.
He stood in the doorway of her mother’s apartment, shifting awkwardly and not knowing what to do with his hands.
He seemed to have aged.
“I’m an idiot, Sveta,” he said.
It was not a simple apology followed by a request to forget everything. It was something different.
“When I was around Kostya… He’s achieved so much, and whenever I’m beside him, I feel as though I’m worth nothing. So I started showing off. And I did it at your expense.”
He lowered his eyes.
“The worst part was that I did it to you because I thought you would never leave. But you did.”
Svetlana listened silently.
It was the first truly honest thing she had heard from him in a long time.
“I don’t want to live without you,” Andrei said. “And don’t give up this apartment. It should remain yours. I understand now.”
She let him in.
Not immediately and not within the same hour, but eventually she did.
They sat together on her mother’s sofa and talked for a long time. For the first time in years, they spoke honestly and directly, without avoiding anything.
They are together again.
Their love, it turned out, had not disappeared. They had simply removed the thing on which Andrei’s version of that love had rested: his certainty that Svetlana had nowhere else to go.
Now he knew that she did.
And strangely enough, that made him treat her with greater care.
She did not give up her mother’s apartment, and she did not remove its key from her key ring.
Andrei never questioned her about it again. He simply knew that it existed.
And because she now had somewhere else to go, for the first time in eight years, she no longer wanted to leave.