Larisa, hi! I’ve got news—and not just any news, great news!” Yegor’s voice, booming and smug, burst into the cozy silence of the kitchen like a draft into a heated room. He tossed his briefcase onto a chair—it landed with a dull thud—and strode in after it, looking like a triumphant conqueror.

Larisa lifted her eyes from her laptop screen, where she’d been rereading—happily, for what felt like the hundredth time—the itinerary for her upcoming vacation. A vacation she’d fought and begged her boss for: those exact two weeks at the start of the velvet season. She could already smell the pines in the seaside park, already see herself sitting with a book on the veranda of the small guesthouse she’d picked out back in spring. She blinked slowly, returning from her daydreams to a kitchen that smelled of freshly brewed coffee and Yegor’s sharp cologne.

“What kind of news? You got a bonus?” she asked, taking a small sip from her favorite mug.

“Better!” Yegor spread into a wide grin—the same grin he used when he thought he’d just made all of humanity happy. “Sveta called. My Sveta. They’re coming to stay with us! For two weeks—right during your vacation. Can you believe what a perfect coincidence? She, her husband… and their little brats—both of them. The whole circus, all together!”

Larisa set her mug down on the table. The coffee suddenly tasted bitter and cold. Inside her, something tightened into a hard, icy knot. Coincidence. What a precise word. What a lethal one.

“To us?” she repeated, and there wasn’t a drop of joy in her voice. “To our two-room apartment? All four of them?”

“Well where else would they go?” Yegor said, genuinely surprised. He was already rummaging in the fridge, pulling out a pack of sausages. “They can’t stay in a hotel—family’s family. We’ll take the couch in the living room, give them our bedroom, do it properly. I’ve already thought everything through! And you’ve got the car, you’ve got a license—you’ll show them around, drive them out to the suburbs, the fountains. They’ve never really been here. And me—well, you know, I’m at work all day, buried. But you? You’ll be on vacation anyway—you won’t have anything to do. It’s perfect!”

He said it so casually, so confidently, as if he were reading out an official order that had already been approved and couldn’t be appealed. As if her vacation wasn’t her personal, hard-earned time—but some spare resource he, as a thrifty manager, had found a use for. In his picture of the world, everything really was perfect: he was a caring brother and hardworking provider; she was a wife free of obligations, happily in charge of entertaining his relatives.

Larisa stared at his broad back, at the businesslike way he tore open the sausage pack, and felt that cold knot inside her begin to unwind—twisting into a red-hot spiral of rage. She stayed silent for a few seconds, letting that rage reach the right temperature—not boiling, but the kind that melts steel.

“I’m not going to be a personal driver and tour guide for your sister and her family when they arrive!” she said. “Just because my vacation falls during that time doesn’t mean I have nothing to do. I have my own plans, and I’ll be doing those—not running around for your relatives, who I don’t need even for free!”

Yegor froze with a sausage in his hand and turned slowly. His smile slid off his face, leaving a confused, almost wounded expression. He clearly hadn’t expected a rebellion this blunt and unmasked.

“What’s wrong with you? Have you lost it? What ‘plans’ could you possibly have?” He tried to make it sound like a joke, but it came out weak. “Lar, don’t start. It’s Sveta—my sister. They’ve been planning this for years. It’d be awkward to say no.”

“It would be awkward for you,” Larisa snapped, looking him straight in the eyes. Her gaze was granite-hard. “For me, it’s perfectly convenient to spend my vacation the way I planned it. No guests, no other people’s kids, and no daily mandatory trips to ‘sights.’ You’ve thought everything through? Wonderful. Now you can think through how you are going to entertain them.”

Yegor put the sausages down and stepped closer, looming over her, trying to crush her with his height and bulk. His face showed irritation mixed with bewilderment—he couldn’t understand how his flawless plan had cracked.

“Larisa, come on, what’s it to you?” he said—the classic phrase, simple and selfish enough to kill. “You’re home anyway! Big deal—drive them somewhere a couple of times. You won’t break. What kind of attitude is that? You can’t be that selfish!”

Right then Larisa understood that continuing the conversation was pointless. Arguing, proving, explaining would be like lecturing a cat on higher mathematics. He didn’t just not understand—he didn’t want to. She was a function. A useful feature. And now that feature had malfunctioned. He wasn’t going to fix it—he was going to force it to work.

So she quietly looked away from his furious face and back at the laptop screen. Only now she no longer saw a vacation itinerary. She saw a plan—cold, clear, and inevitable.

“You’re right. Absolutely nothing to do,” Larisa said softly, almost offhandedly.

With detached neatness, she pushed aside her cold coffee and pulled the laptop closer. Yegor, still standing in the middle of the kitchen, didn’t understand the sudden change. He expected the argument to continue—accusations, maybe tears he could ignore and later magnanimously “forgive.” But this calm surrender threw him off. He watched, frowning, trying to guess what new kind of protest she’d invented. Maybe she was going to demonstratively look up plane tickets somewhere far away. Childish.

But Larisa didn’t open airline websites. With surgical precision, she clicked a bookmark. The homepage of a local countryside sanatorium appeared: “Pinewood Grove”—a pastoral image of pines, tidy paths, and buildings in Stalinist Empire style. In their city it was considered an expensive, prestigious refuge for people tired of the hustle.

Yegor kept watching her fingers move over the keyboard. They weren’t tapping—they were pressing keys slowly, heavily, as if each press had irreversible consequences.

She opened the booking section. Chose the dates. Check-in: the exact day his sister Svetlana was due to arrive. Check-out: the day they were supposed to leave. Two weeks. Fourteen nights. Then she scrolled past the standard room options and confidently clicked: “Single Deluxe Suite.” A photo appeared of a spacious room with a large bed and balcony, and a line reading: “Included: three meals a day, doctor consultation, neck-and-shoulder massage, and oxygen cocktails.”

Yegor still hadn’t grasped the scale of what was happening. He assumed it was a stupid, empty demonstration—an ultimatum that would go nowhere. He even smirked to himself. Sure, go on—play independent.

Larisa calmly entered her passport details. Then she stood up, walked to the hallway key holder where they kept a wallet with shared cash and his spare cards, and took his salary card. Yegor jerked, instinctively stepping toward her.

“What are you doing?”

She didn’t answer. She returned to the table, typed in sixteen digits, the expiration date, and the three digits on the back. Then she clicked “Pay.” The system thought for a second, and then a green window flashed on the screen: “Payment successful. Your reservation is confirmed.”

Yegor stared at the screen, and it started to sink in. This wasn’t a bluff. This was sabotage.

The buzzing of the old printer in the hallway sounded in the silence like a church bell. Larisa got up, went out, and returned with a warm, freshly printed sheet of A4 paper. She didn’t throw it down or slap it into his face. She placed it smoothly on the countertop beside the hand he was leaning on. The text faced him.

“These are my plans,” she said, her voice completely even, without a trace of emotion—like a weather presenter reading a forecast. “Check-in is the day your sister arrives. I’ll be resting, getting massages, and drinking oxygen cocktails.”

His eyes raced over the lines. Sanatorium “Pinewood Grove.” Full name: Larisa Viktorovna K. Dates. Room: Suite. And at the bottom, in bold: “Total paid: 84,000 rubles.” The number hit him harder than a fist. Blood surged to his face, his ears rang.

“And you,” she continued in the same lethal calm, “can take unpaid leave to entertain your relatives. Or sick leave. Or whatever works for you. Since you planned everything so well for me, I decided not to bother you with my plans either. Surprise.”

He finally looked up at her. His face went from stunned to purple.

“You… what the hell are you doing?!” he rasped, his voice catching in a sudden spasm. “Have you completely lost your mind? Eighty-four thousand?! From my card?! I’ll— I’ll cancel all of it to hell!”

Larisa didn’t flinch. She watched his distorted, furious face with the same detached calm an entomologist uses to watch a butterfly beating against the glass of a jar.

“You won’t,” she said quietly, absolutely certain.

“And why not?!” he exploded. “I’ll call them and tell them the payment was a mistake! That you did it without my knowledge!”

“You can call,” she shrugged faintly, as if brushing off dust. “But first, read what’s written at the bottom of the paper. Under the total. There’s a footnote in small print—like there always is. I didn’t choose this sanatorium by accident, Yegor. I chose the best one. And the most careful one. They have a non-refundable discounted rate. And I, as it happens, caught a promotion. If you cancel, they keep one hundred percent of what was paid.”

She paused so the information could crawl into his brain and detonate.

“So if you want to donate eighty-four thousand rubles to this wonderful establishment simply for existing—go ahead. It’s your card, your money. You can afford it.”

Yegor snatched the sheet off the counter. The paper crackled in his trembling fingers. His eyes skittered over polite phrasing, hunting for the core. And he found it—an italicized paragraph in tight print:

“In the event of cancellation under the ‘Velvet Season’ rate by the guest, the prepaid amount of 100% of the service cost is non-refundable.”

He clenched his fist so hard the paper turned into a shapeless wad. It was checkmate in three moves. A perfectly played game where he wasn’t the grandmaster—he was the pawn just knocked off the board. His face went from purple to ashen gray. He realized she hadn’t just “snapped.” She had calculated everything. This wasn’t an emotional outburst—it was a cold, precise strike.

“You… you did this on purpose,” he breathed, and there was no anger left—only helpless, choking spite. “You planned all of this. Every word.”

“I planned my vacation,” Larisa corrected him without raising her voice. “My only vacation in this damn year. The one where I wanted to sleep till noon, read books, and think about no one. And you, without even asking me, decided my vacation was a free add-on to your desire to impress your sister. You decided my time was worth nothing. That I’m a function, not a person. I simply defended my space and my plans—the only way that turned out convincing enough for you. Since words didn’t work.”

He stared at her, hatred mixed with something animal and uneasy. For the first time he saw her like this—not compliant, not compromising, not smoothing corners, but a stranger with eyes like polar ice.

“But… what am I supposed to tell them?” he tried one last, pitiful argument—appealing to public opinion in the form of his family. “Sveta already bought the tickets! They’re coming in two weeks! What am I supposed to tell them, Larisa?!”

Larisa stood, went to the sink, and poured out the rest of the coffee. The thin stream against metal was the only sound in the kitchen.

“No idea,” she said without turning around. “Tell them the truth—that you’re a genius planner who forgot his own wife exists. Or lie and say I suddenly came down with something contagious. Or that aliens abducted me. It’s your sister, Yegor. Your family. Your promises. You deal with the consequences of your decisions. I have nothing to do with this circus anymore.”

She rinsed her mug, placed it on the drying rack, and left the kitchen without looking at him—leaving him alone in the cold, hostile space, a crumpled bill in his hand: the invoice for his own self-confidence.

He found her in the living room. She wasn’t hiding, wasn’t locked in the bedroom. She sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, reading a book. The light from the floor lamp fell over the pages and her calm, focused face, forming an island of peace in their apartment, where the air seemed to have thickened and started to crackle with tension. Yegor burst into that quiet like a rhinoceros into a flower shop. He still gripped the crumpled sheet—his symbol of defeat.

“You’re going to pick up the phone right now, call your sanatorium, and cancel everything,” he growled, stopping in the middle of the room. It wasn’t a question or a request. It was an order—the last shot of a sinking admiral trying to keep control of a mutinous ship.

Larisa didn’t flinch. Slowly, as if reluctantly, she lifted her eyes from the book, slid a finger in to mark her page, and looked up at him. There was no fear, no guilt. Only cool, polite curiosity.

“I’m not going to do that, Yegor.”

“I’m not asking if you will or you won’t—I’m telling you!” He stepped toward her, his shadow covering her. “That was our money! Our savings! You had no right to spend it like that!”

“And you had no right to spend my vacation, my time, and my nerves,” she shot back in the same level tone. “But for some reason you decided you did. Consider it payment for a service I’m not providing. A fee for being a chauffeur and entertainer. Apparently, it turned out to be pretty expensive. You should’ve studied the market first.”

His face twitched. He understood that straight threats weren’t working. He switched tactics sharply—from assault to siege. His voice dropped, gaining a wheedling, almost pleading note.

“Fine. Okay. You win. I was wrong not to ask,” he began, stepping back, trying to look peaceful. “Let’s make a deal. Not two weeks! Go for one. The second week. And the first week you stay with them. I’ll tell them you had urgent business. Huh? Just one week, Larisa. What’s that to you? Are you really that stingy?”

It was his old, reliable trick: concede a little to win the main point. Create the illusion of compromise that was, in truth, just another form of her surrender. Before, it worked. Not today.

“Yegor, this isn’t an eastern bazaar, and I’m not selling carpets,” she said, and a faint smirk touched the corner of her mouth—which made him even angrier. “We’re not bargaining. I made a decision based on your behavior. And it’s not up for revision or adjustment. All fourteen days. Or eighty-four thousand rubles thrown into the wind. The choice is yours.”

He understood that road led nowhere too. Desperation and anger pushed him to the last weapon: guilt.

“Do you even realize the position you’re putting me in?!” he shouted, nearly losing his voice, waving his hands. “What am I supposed to tell them?! That my wife is a selfish bitch who hates my family and ran away just so she wouldn’t have to see them?! They’re coming to me! To me! And you, as my wife, are supposed to—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I’m ‘supposed’ to do,” Larisa cut him off. She set the book down and sat up straighter. Her calm irritated him more than any hysteria. “Exactly—they’re coming to you. Not to us. Because ‘us’ means shared decisions. And you decided everything alone. You presented me with a done deal. So this is your situation, Yegor. Your personal, idiotic situation. And you can wriggle your way out. What you tell them is none of my concern. Use your version about the selfish bitch if you want. It sounds very much like your style. And your family will probably accept it with full understanding.”

That was a low blow. This had stopped being an argument about relatives visiting. It had turned into a reckoning—an inventory of their life together.

“You always hated them!” he spat. “Always looked down on my sister and her husband! Like they’re second-class people! Simple provincial nobodies! And you’re some kind of queen!”

Larisa stood and walked to the window. She looked at the lights of the night city.

“I never hated them,” she said softly, addressing the dark glass more than him. “I just never understood why I was supposed to love them by default. Why I should act wildly delighted by their surprise invasions. Why I should listen to your mother’s advice on how to cook and clean in my own home. I didn’t look down on them. I simply lived my life, and they lived theirs. You’re the one who kept trying to forcibly glue us into one big ‘happy family’ from some cheap soap opera. And I didn’t want to star in that series, Yegor. I have a different role. The role of a person who values her peace. And today you tried to take that peace away from me—roughly and without a shred of respect. And it didn’t work.”

His shoulders, tense and squared in an aggressive posture, suddenly sagged. He deflated like a punctured balloon, air leaking out with a quiet hiss. His rage, unable to break through and crashing against the unmovable wall of her calm, evaporated—leaving only bitter, caustic ash: exhaustion and confusion. He looked at her by the window and, for the first time in many years, didn’t see “his wife Larisa,” but a stranger. A woman with a straight back, clear boundaries, and a steel core he’d never even suspected existed.

Without a word, he turned and trudged back to the kitchen. He sat on the very chair where, an hour earlier, she’d been planning her perfect vacation. His world had flipped.

He took out his phone. Fingers that usually flew across the screen now moved slowly, uncertainly, as if they belonged to an old man. He found his sister’s number and stared at it for a long time, gathering courage.

Larisa didn’t move, but she heard everything. His heavy breathing. The chair creaking under his weight. The way he canceled the call a few times before forcing himself. Finally, from the kitchen came his muffled, unfamiliar voice:

“Sveta, hi… Yeah, I… Listen, there’s something, um. You can’t come… No, no, of course we were waiting—we really were… It’s just… Larisa… Yeah, she’s not well. Really suddenly. The doctors say she needs complete rest… The diagnosis? Well, you know, nerves… severe overwork. Yeah, they’re admitting her… more like sending her to a sanatorium. For two weeks, right away. Under supervision… No, visitors aren’t allowed. Strict regime. I’m shocked too. Just like that, out of nowhere… Yeah, of course it’s a shame. But what can you do… All right, we’ll talk later.”

He was lying—clumsily, pathetically, getting tangled in his own story like a guilty schoolboy. Every word was soaked in humiliation. The man who always decided everything, who was the “head,” the “support,” the stone wall—was now mumbling absurd excuses into a phone. Larisa listened, and felt no gloating, no triumph. Only a quiet, ringing emptiness—and a bitter sadness. Sadness that it had come to this. Sadness at how many years she’d allowed herself to be treated like something self-evident: a convenient piece of furniture that was always there and never required attention.

Buying that voucher wasn’t revenge. It was desperation—a scream from a soul she herself hadn’t expected to hear.

When he finished the call, an oppressive silence hung over the apartment. The kind that follows a storm: the wind has stopped, but the air still smells of ozone and broken branches. He didn’t return to the living room.

Larisa waited a few minutes, then calmly went into the bedroom. She opened the wardrobe, took down her small wheeled suitcase from the top shelf, and set it on the bed. The clicks of the latches sounded in the silence like shots from a starter pistol.

She began packing. Slowly, methodically. A light robe. The swimsuit she’d bought specifically for her vacation. Two books she’d been meaning to read for ages. Comfortable sneakers for walking through pine forest paths. She didn’t throw things in—she folded them into neat stacks. This wasn’t packing for exile. This was packing for a new, if temporary, life. A life where her wants came first.

Yegor appeared in the doorway when she was almost done. He leaned against the frame—haggard, as if he’d aged ten years in a single evening. He wasn’t looking at her face, but at her hands—how she slid a charger and headphones into the side pocket. There was no anger left in his eyes. Something else sat there: emptiness, and a belated, painful realization.

He looked at the suitcase and understood she wasn’t just packing for two weeks. She was packing an entire life separate from him—her interests, her space, a boundary he was no longer allowed to cross. And he could do nothing about it. With his own hands, he’d built the wall; she’d simply bought a ticket to the other side.

“Larisa…” he started quietly, then stopped, realizing any words now would sound false and useless.

She zipped the suitcase shut, ran her hand over it as if saying goodbye, and then looked up at him—clear-eyed and calm.

“Don’t worry, Yegor. I’ll be back in two weeks. And then we’ll see.”

She didn’t say what, exactly, they would “see.” But he understood. They would see whether anything of their old life would survive this earthquake. Whether he could learn to see her as a person, not a function. Whether she could forgive him for years of blindness.

He stared at the neat suitcase by the bed and finally grasped a simple, terrifying truth:

In that moment, he realized eighty-four thousand was the smallest thing he’d lost today.