“Shut your mouth and don’t you dare boss me around in my own apartment! I’m not even going to ask your opinion about how or what kind of renovation I do here!”
“And how much is this nonsense going to cost?”
Anton’s voice fell into the room like a dirty stone into a clean well. Lida didn’t lift her head right away. She was squatting in the middle of the living room, on the old, threadbare parquet, and for a moment her world shrank to the size of a few rectangular planks. Laminate flooring. “Arctic Oak,” “Milan Walnut,” “Moroccan Wenge.”
She sifted through them with work-roughened fingers, stroked the cool, slightly rough surface, inhaled the faint chemical scent of new wood. These samples weren’t just wood shavings pressed under pressure. They held three years of her life.
Three years of eating plain buckwheat for lunch because a business lunch was an unaffordable luxury. Three years of darning her only pair of winter boots because new ones meant ten thousand rubles gone from the precious stash. Three years of turning down coffee dates with friends, lying about headaches, fatigue, urgent deadlines.
Every ruble saved, every desire trimmed back, every bitter drop of her own stinginess—all of it lay here on the floor, embodied in these neat, glossy boards. They were the materialized dream of cleanliness, of light, of a new life within the walls of this dreary two-room flat inherited from her grandmother.
Anton entered the room without taking off his shoes and disdainfully nudged the lightest, most expensive sample—“Arctic Oak”—with the toe of his scuffed boot. A dirty, smeared mark remained on the flawless pale surface. He either didn’t notice or pretended not to. To him, they were just planks. Trash.
“Three hundred thousand, I bet, you’ll just throw to the wind?” He wasn’t asking; he was stating, forcing the words through his teeth. He walked around her like an obstacle and flopped into the old armchair, which groaned under his weight.
Lida stayed silent, slowly running her finger over the dirty mark on the laminate. The stain wouldn’t wipe away. It had seeped into her dream.
“I’m thinking,” Anton continued, not waiting for an answer, crossing one leg over the other, “that what we really need right now is a car. Better than breathing in this construction dust of yours. Anyway, in a year everything will look shabby again. Put off your renovation, we’ll add a bit more and get a decent Logan. We’ll drive like normal people instead of rattling around on buses.”
He spoke of it so casually, so matter-of-factly, as if her money were a shared resource, something he, as the man, had every right to dispose of. As if three years of her humiliating thrift were merely a prologue to buying his personal vehicle.
He didn’t even say “I’ll buy myself one,” he said “we’ll get one,” automatically chalking up her sacrifice to the account of family benefit—a benefit that, somehow, always coincided with his own wishes.
Lida rose slowly, her knees cracking. She felt the blood drain from her face and a pounding in her ears. She looked at him—sprawled in the armchair, smug, contributing just enough to the household budget to cover pasta and the utilities.
A man who, all these years, had never once wondered where the money came from for a new frying pan or to fix a leaking tap.
“A car?” she repeated. Her voice was quiet but as hard as stone. “You need a car? Then go earn the money for it.”
Anton flushed—not all at once, but in slow waves. Blood rose to his cheeks and neck, blotching his face, making it ugly. He was used to her silence. Her endurance. Her agreement. But now—an answer, sharp as a shot.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he lunged forward, his body taut. “I’m your husband! I decide what’s best for the family!”
And that’s when the dam burst. All the bitterness, all the humiliation, all the anger that had built up over three years poured out. With one abrupt motion she snatched the soiled sample of “Arctic Oak” from under his foot, strode to the coffee table, and slammed it down on the dusty surface. The wood struck with a dry, cracking sound.
“Shut your mouth and don’t you dare boss me around in my apartment! I’m not going to ask your opinion about how or what kind of renovation I do here!”
“Wait! So what am I now, just a nobody here?”
“For three years you haven’t lifted a finger to help me! You’ve lived off everything ready-made, like a freeloader! So you can shove your opinion about my money and my renovation in the same place as your earnings for that car.”
For a moment it seemed he might hit her. His body swayed forward, fists clenching until the knuckles turned white. But he stopped. Physical violence was too simple, too quick.
It wouldn’t give him the satisfaction his wounded pride craved. Instead, he slowly, mockingly relaxed, and a crooked, spiteful grin spread across his flushed face.
“Oh, the queen has spoken,” he drawled, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe. He struck the pose of a man in control, looking down condescendingly at the rebellion of the help. “My apartment, my money… Lida, do you hear yourself? You sound like some market hag right now. Where’s your femininity, huh? Did you leave it all in those planks?”
He strolled around the room, ostentatiously peering behind the old sofa as if searching for something.
“And what exactly were you planning to do here? That so-called ‘Arctic Oak’”—he jabbed a finger at the sample thrown on the table—“is the cheapest taste imaginable. Pure vulgarity. Peasant chic. So all the neighbors can come in and gasp: ‘Oh, Lidochka, how fancy you are!’ Is that what you want? Recognition from the same gray little mice as yourself?”
His words weren’t just insults. They were a calculated strike at the very heart of her dream. He wasn’t merely trying to take her money; he wanted to trample the idea itself, to cheapen three years of sacrifice, to make her pursuit of beauty and comfort seem like a pathetic, tawdry whim.
Lida stayed silent. She watched him walk across her future floor, across the hard-won space she had imagined, spitting on it step by step. She didn’t shout back. The anger that had flared moments earlier was gone, leaving behind a cold, ringing emptiness and perfect clarity of thought.
“My taste, Anton, is my business,” she said evenly, without the slightest tremor in her voice. She walked to the table, picked up the same sample, and gently, with two fingers, wiped off the dirty mark from his boot. “As for your taste—we’ve already seen it. Remember how you wanted to paint the walls eggplant, because your buddy Seryoga has that in his garage and it’s ‘manly’?”
The smirk on his face faltered. He hadn’t expected such a calm, poisonous reply.
“Don’t twist my words! I’m talking about reasonable investments! A car is an asset! It’s freedom of movement! Your planks are a liability—money buried in the floor! I think strategically, as a man, and you’re led by emotions! Hoarding your pennies and clutching them like Koschei with his gold.”
“Pennies?” Lida tilted her head slightly, and a dangerous spark flashed in her eyes. “Yes, pennies. I scraped them together for three years out of my miserable salary, shuffling papers in the office, as you put it. And how much have you put into the family budget with your ‘strategic’ projects? Let’s count.”
“Last year’s crypto-mining farm on the balcony. What was the income there? Oh, right—minus five thousand for a new electrician because your genius miner fried the wiring. And before that? Sports betting? How much did you ‘make,’ strategist? I only remember you borrowing from me to pay off debts.”
Each of her words was a small, sharp nail she drove, coolly and precisely, into his swollen ego. She didn’t raise her voice; she simply listed facts—dry, undeniable, humiliating facts.
Anton froze in the middle of the room. His face turned crimson again. He opened his mouth to retort but found nothing. She had taken away his weapon. His posturing as “head of the family” crumbled to dust under the weight of her calm, deadly truth. He’d lost this round completely—and he realized arguing with her was useless. He needed another tactic, something dirtier.
The defeat was complete and humiliating. Anton stood in the center of the room, drenched in her quiet, factual contempt. His face, recently flushed with anger, grew pale and blotchy. He’d been routed in open debate; his authority as “head of the household” destroyed by a few precise phrases.
Anyone else might have fallen silent, walked away, tried to salvage some shred of dignity. But not Anton. In his mind, defeat didn’t mean the end of the battle; it meant only the need to switch to a dirtier weapon.
He stood there in silence for several seconds, staring at a fixed point. Then, without a word, he pulled a mobile phone from his jeans pocket. Lida tensed. The gesture was too calm, too deliberate. He wasn’t going to give up. He was about to strike from another angle.
Anton unlocked the screen, found the right contact, and pressed “Call,” putting it on speaker. The air in the room filled with shrill, unpleasant beeps. Lida watched him, not understanding what he was planning.
“Hey, Vadik, hi!” Anton said loudly, with forced cheer, into the phone. He kept his gaze locked on Lida, and in his eyes was a malicious, anticipatory gleam. “Listen, about that thing. Remember the silver Logan we looked at? Yeah, reserve it for us. That’s right—the money issue’s settled.”
From the speaker came the surprised voice of his friend: “Oh, really? What, Lida finally gave in?”
Anton let out a laugh—loud, echoing through the apartment.
“What else could she do?” he winked at Lida. “Women, you know—first they make a fuss, then they do what the man says. I laid everything out for her, explained how it is. So yeah, I talked her round. We’ll come by tomorrow afternoon and seal the deal. All right, talk soon…”
He ended the call — and smiled. It was the smile of a victor who had just checkmated his opponent in a dirty game. He hadn’t merely ignored her words; he had, in front of a witness, cast her as a spineless fool, a capricious woman who could be “talked round.”
He’d maneuvered her into a place where any objection would look like a petty domestic squabble aired in public. He was counting on her to stay silent, to shrink back, not daring to embarrass him in front of his friend. He thought he had her cornered.
He was wrong.
Lida didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She didn’t try to prove anything. She didn’t throw herself at him. Her movement was smooth, almost lazy, like a panther that had been waiting patiently. She took two steps forward and, before he could react, tore the phone from his relaxed hand. His smug smile froze, twisting into a grimace of confusion.
She unlocked the screen in silence; her fingers darted quickly over the display. She found the last dialed number—“Vadik.” She pressed “Call.” Anton jerked toward her but froze when he saw her face. It was the face of someone completely alien, cold.
The ringtone sounded again. On the other end, someone picked up almost immediately.
“Yeah, Antokha, what now?”
Lida lifted the phone to her lips. Her voice was calm and clear, like winter air.
“Vadik, hello. It’s Lida.”
For a moment, there was silence on the line.
“There won’t be any car. Anton’s lying to you. Goodbye.”
She ended the call before he could reply. Then, with the same icy composure, she placed his phone on the coffee table, next to the sample of Arctic Oak. The air in the room thickened, sticky as resin. It didn’t press down; it wrapped around, stealing the possibility of a normal breath.
Anton stared at her. There was no longer anger or smugness on his face. There was something new—something dark and primal. The face of a man not merely beaten, but publicly, demonstrably destroyed.
The silence after the call was worse than any shout. It was dense, material; it filled the space, pushing out the air. Anton stood thunderstruck, staring at his phone lying on the table.
He seemed not to breathe. His face, pale a moment ago, began slowly to flush with a dark, unhealthy red. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He looked at Lida, and in his eyes there was no longer wounded ego or a need to dominate. There was only pure, distilled hatred.
When he finally spoke, his voice was unrecognizable—low, strangled, as if forcing its way through muck.
“You… what have you done? You humiliated me in front of Vadik. Me!”
He stepped toward her, but Lida didn’t back away. She simply looked at him, and her calm, her absolute impenetrability seemed to enrage him even more than her action itself. He stopped a meter from her, trembling all over.
“You think you’ve won, huh? You think just because this is your little den, you’re the boss here?” He swept the room with a crazed gaze. “I despise all of this! Your cheap dreams! Your planks, your wallpaper, your damn coziness! I’ve lived in this pigsty for three years, breathed in your cooking, pretended I was fine with it! Pretended you were a woman, not a human calculator with ambitions!”
He was losing control. All the fuses had blown. Out spilled everything he’d apparently been storing up for years—a dirty, murky flood of contempt.
“I needed that car to get out of here! To spend at least a few hours a day not looking at your sour face and this shabby hell! And you clung to your pennies like they were your only achievement! That’s not an achievement; it’s a sentence! A sentence on your pathetic life, where there’s nothing but work and this dusty box!”
Lida stayed silent. She listened, but the words no longer hurt. They skimmed past. She looked at him as at some unpleasant stranger who, for no reason, was shouting in her apartment.
Something in her mind finally clicked into place. There was no resentment, no pain—only a cold, clear understanding that it was over. That this man had to disappear from her life. Right now.
“You think I’ll let you boss me around here?” he shrieked when he saw that his words had no effect. He jabbed a finger at her. “Shut your mouth and don’t you dare give me orders in my apartment! I’m the man here! And I’ll decide how we live! I’ll turn your life, your renovation, everything into such a nightmare that you’ll bring me that money yourself and beg me to take it!”
And at that moment, Lida began to act.
Silently, she turned and walked into the hallway. Anton fell silent for a second, thrown off balance. She went to the built-in cupboard where the tools were kept and opened the door. She rummaged through a drawer that smelled of machine oil and old iron, and her fingers found the heavy, comfortable handle of a hammer. She weighed it in her hand. A good, solid tool.
She came back into the room. Anton stared at her wide-eyed, uncomprehending. His tirade choked off.
“Are you out of your mind?” he croaked as she approached the coffee table.
Lida didn’t answer. She set the hammer on the table. Then she picked up the Arctic Oak sample, which still lay there—the symbol of her dream, defiled by his dirty boot. She placed it in the center of the table.
Then she took his phone—the source of his arrogance, his link to a world where he was “one of the guys” instead of a hanger-on—and carefully laid it face-up on the pale laminate board. A black glossy rectangle on a whitish plank. Like an offering on an altar.
She raised the hammer. Anton lunged forward but froze halfway when he saw her dead, empty eyes. He understood.
The blow wasn’t powerful, but it was precise and heavy. No backswing—just a short, sharp movement of the wrist downward. A dry, repulsive crack rang out. Not the tinkling of broken glass, but the crunch of something intricate breaking from within. A web of cracks instantly spread across the screen. Minute splinters sprayed out from under the hammer.
Lida set the hammer down beside it. Then she looked straight into Anton’s stunned eyes. There was no anger there, no triumph—only fatigue and finality.
“Now you can start earning,” she said. “For a phone, and for a car. But not here…”
