— Have you forgotten? We’re divorced! Which means your claims are your mistress’s problem, not mine.
The air in the café was thick and sweet, scented with freshly ground coffee, vanilla, and the damp wool of passersby coming in from the street, where the October rain tapped out a slow, melancholy rhythm on the asphalt.
Katerina sat by the window, cradling a warm porcelain cup in her hands, watching as the drops merged into fanciful rivulets that twisted across the glass, sketching unrecognizable maps of nonexistent continents.
It was her ritual—to come here every Saturday, order a cinnamon cappuccino, and allow herself an hour of complete, blissful idleness, a disconnection from the bustle, from obligations, from the past. The past, however, had the annoying habit of showing up uninvited.
The café door flew open, letting in a rush of cold, damp air—and him. Sergey. He stood on the threshold, scanning the room, and his gaze, painfully familiar, nauseatingly so, found her almost at once.
He was without a coat, in a rumpled sweater, his hair wet from the rain, and on his face was an expression that she might once, in another life, have taken for despair. Now it struck her as nothing more than a bad piece of theater.
He headed for her table, and with every step Katerina felt the walls of her private little world closing in, dragging her back into the suffocating reality she had escaped with such effort.
“Katia,” he said, and his voice—hoarse from anxiety or a cold—creaked like a rusty door breaking into the carefully guarded peace of her life.
She didn’t invite him to sit. She didn’t take her eyes off the window. She simply waited, holding her cup like a shield.
“I need to talk,” he said, sitting down across from her without being asked and placing his hands clasped together on the table. His fingers were red from the cold, the knuckles white. “It’s urgent.”
“We don’t have anything urgent, Sergey,” her own voice surprised her with its icy composure. “And we don’t have any common topics of conversation.”
“Don’t pretend we’re strangers!” His tone carried that familiar, infuriating note of demand—the same one that had colored all their conversations over the last two years of their marriage. “It’s about the apartment. The one on Tverskaya. You know I put everything into it! And now that damn developer has gone bankrupt, the construction is frozen. My money… our money is hanging in midair.”
Katerina slowly set the cup down on its saucer. The light, ringing sound felt to her like the snap of a trap closing.
“First of all,” she said at last, looking at him, her gaze as cold as the glass she had just been staring through, “those are your money. You always emphasized that finances were your domain, and that my opinion on the matter carried no weight. Remember? ‘Stop sticking your nose into men’s business.’”
He winced, as if from a toothache.
“Now is not the time for reproaches, Katia! This is serious! You’re facing losses too, after all, we—”
“We?” she interrupted, and steel rang in her voice for the first time. “What ‘we’? We stopped being ‘we’ exactly four months and seventeen days ago, when the judge stamped our passports. Have you forgotten?”
He stared at her, genuine astonishment in his eyes. Apparently, he truly believed that all he had to do was show up, slap his forehead, and say “our money,” and everything would fall back into place. As if there hadn’t been his departures to the other woman. As if there hadn’t been her tears, her humiliations, her long and painful recovery.
“But the apartment…” he tried again, but she stopped him.
“The apartment you invested in so you could live there with your mistress,” she said, pronouncing each word with merciless clarity, “is your problem. Yours and your new partner’s.
You wanted so badly to be together, to build a shared future. Well then—build it. Deal with the developers, go to court, lose money. These are now your shared difficulties.”
He turned pale. Clearly, the scene was not unfolding according to his plan. He had expected hysteria, tears, maybe even an attempt to help—after all, she had always helped, always pulled him out of financial holes, found solutions while he played the role of the great provider.
“You don’t understand!” His voice broke into a shout, and several café patrons turned to look at them. “I could lose everything! I’ll have nothing to live on!”
Katerina leaned back in her chair. She looked at the man she had lived with for eleven years and felt nothing but mild disgust and fatigue. Fatigue from his endless “me,” from his selfishness, from his inability to admit his mistakes and take responsibility for them.
“And what does that have to do with me?” she asked with genuine bewilderment. “You made the decision to leave. You made the decision to invest everything in that ill-fated apartment. You chose as your companion a woman who, I assume, is in no hurry to share financial risks with you. This is your life, Sergey. Your choices. And your problems…”
He fell silent, breathing heavily, staring down at the table. He looked like a little boy whose toy had been taken away, unable to understand by what right.
“But you won’t leave me in trouble, will you? We’re family… or we were… once…”
That word, spoken by him, sounded so blasphemous, so out of place, that Katerina almost laughed.
“Family?” She raised an eyebrow. “Families don’t abandon each other for young secretaries. Families don’t humiliate one another, don’t count every penny, don’t call your career ‘a whim’ and your interests ‘nonsense.’ We never had a family, Sergey. We had an illusion—one you destroyed yourself.”
She took her bag, pulled out her wallet, and placed a few bills on the table for her unfinished coffee.
“So no,” she concluded, rising to her feet. “I won’t leave you in trouble. Because your trouble no longer concerns me. Have you forgotten? We’re divorced. Which means your claims are your mistress’s problem, not mine.”
She said the last sentence quietly, but in a way that drove every word into him like a nail. He sat with his head lowered, and his back—once so straight and confident—slumped, revealing the full depth of his collapse.
Katerina slipped on her coat and headed for the exit. She didn’t look back. Outside, the rain continued to drum against the pavement, but now its sound no longer felt melancholy—it felt cleansing, washing away the last traces of the past.
She stepped out onto the street, and the damp, cold air burned her face. She walked without paying attention to where she was going, feeling an invisible yet unbearably heavy burden fall from her shoulders—the burden of his problems, his ambitions, his endless “you must.”
She was free. Truly free. And his pitiful attempts to load his difficulties back onto her shattered against her newly found independence, hard as diamond.
He remained there in the café, with his ruined plans and empty wallet, while she walked away into her own life—difficult, solitary, but hers. And in that life, there was no place for other people’s debts or other people’s claims.
