“Get out before I break you!” Tanya yelled, and the phone slammed into the wall.
The screen went black, scattering glass across the linoleum. Good. Let that snake stop calling. Let her choke on her questions, her nagging voice, her endless: “Why isn’t this done? Why didn’t you do that? Dennis’s mother would never…”
Dennis’s mother—at least she complained to your face. But his sister, Larisa, spun her webs behind your back and then, suddenly, you were the guilty one. Always guilty.
Tanya pressed her forehead to the refrigerator. The cold metal soothed her burning skin. Ten o’clock on a November Saturday. Outside, the drizzle blurred the world into a gray watercolor.
And the apartment smelled like burnt food.
She yanked open the oven. Smoke shot out. The duck breast—Dennis’s favorite—had turned into a blackened brick. She had cooked it perfectly so many times. Today she’d forgotten everything, except that phone call.
“Where is the holiday lunch? Get it ready fast, or you’ll regret it!”
Larisa had called at seven in the morning, hissing as if Tanya were her maid. Dennis was returning from a week-long business trip—so the table must be overflowing. Because “that’s how our family honors men.”
Sure.
Tanya ripped off her pink apron—Larisa’s gift with the idiotic slogan “Best Housewife”—and shoved it into the trash. She changed into jeans and a battered leather jacket Dennis hated. “You look like some biker,” he always said.
Good. Let her be a biker.
She grabbed her keys and left. Down the stairs, past the peeling walls and the nosy neighbor who constantly gossiped with Larisa.
Soon she was driving with no destination, only away—away from the apartment, from the expectations, from being useful and silent.
At a mall café, over a cappuccino she didn’t want, she met him: a man named Bogdan, calm, warm-eyed, with a quiet kindness she hadn’t felt in years. She surprised herself by talking. About Larisa. About Dennis. About being erased slowly, politely, day by day.
Bogdan listened. Really listened.
“You know,” he said eventually, “the hardest part of a relationship isn’t loving someone. It’s not losing yourself next to them.”
The words hit her like truth she’d been avoiding.
They talked for an hour. He asked for her number—just to talk, he said. And she gave it.
But home was waiting. And home meant voices.
When she walked in, Dennis, his mother, and Larisa exploded like a chorus: Where were you, where’s the food, how could you, you’re useless, you’re ungrateful, Dennis deserves better—
Something inside her finally snapped clean.
“You know what?” Tanya said quietly. “Go to hell. All of you.”
She packed a bag while they shouted. Dennis tried to stop her. Larisa called her crazy. His mother called her unfit.
Tanya didn’t care anymore.
She left.
Later, at Bogdan’s small, cozy apartment, she finally allowed the tears. He made her tea, gave her a blanket, didn’t push, didn’t pry.
“Sleep,” he said. “Decide tomorrow.”
Lying on his couch, in the soft glow of a lamp, Tanya felt the first breath of freedom she’d had in five years.
And she didn’t regret a thing.
