“What do you mean you sold your three-room apartment? I promised my daughter a long time ago that she would live there!” the husband yelled.

“What do you mean you sold your three-room apartment?” Oleg shouted, throwing his keys onto the dresser so hard they bounced to the floor. “I promised my daughter she’d live there!”
“Your daughter?” Marina turned slowly from the window. “Oleg, that was my apartment. Mine. I inherited it from my grandmother. What right do you have to decide who I leave it to?”
“What right? I’m your husband! We’re a family! And Lera is my daughter—your stepdaughter. She counted on that place!”
“Counted on it?” Marina laughed bitterly. “Last time she told me I’m a stranger and should stay out of her life.”
“She was fifteen! Teenagers say dumb things,” Oleg paced nervously. “She’s grown up since then.”
“Oh really? Last week I asked her to help me carry bags from the car and she said, ‘Ask your own relatives.’ She’s twenty-three, Oleg.”
“She just has a difficult personality…”
“I know exactly what personality she has. She whispers with you behind my back, stops talking when I walk in, looks at me like I’m a tenant here.”
“You’re exaggerating!”
“Am I? Last year she bought you an expensive watch for your birthday. Mine? A cheap box of supermarket chocolates.”
Oleg turned to the window, silent.
“That’s exactly why I sold the apartment,” Marina said firmly. “I used the money to help Artyom start his business.”
“Artyom? Your nephew? He’s thirty! Let him earn it himself!”
“He does earn it. He just needed a start.”
“And you couldn’t help Lera?” Oleg’s face reddened. “She wants her own place too!”
“She lives in your mother’s apartment rent-free. Works in your company, has the car you bought her, and vacations you pay for. Artyom never asked me for anything.”
“He’s your nephew. And my daughter is just… what? A stranger to you?”
“A stranger?” Marina stood up sharply. “For eight years I’ve been trying to get close to her. And all I get is coldness or contempt.”
Oleg opened his mouth, but no excuses came.
“She didn’t even call when I was in the hospital,” Marina continued quietly. “Artyom came every day. She had a ‘busy exam period’. For a whole month?”
Silence filled the room.
“Oleg, I’m tired. Tired of being the outsider. Tired of being expected to give and endure, yet never be accepted. So I helped the one person who actually treats me like family.”
“So that’s it? You just threw us away?” Oleg asked weakly.
“No. I simply used my property the way I felt was right.”
“That’s selfish!”
“What’s selfish,” Marina said softly, “is expecting me to give my apartment to someone who doesn’t even say hello warmly.”
She walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Oleg asked.
“To be alone.”
“We’re not done talking!”
“We are,” she said. “Because you still hear only one thing—that Lera didn’t get a free apartment. And you don’t hear that I haven’t had a real family here for eight years.”
She closed the door quietly behind her.
From the bedroom came the sound of muffled crying.
Oleg stepped toward it, stopped, pulled out his phone, thought of texting his daughter—then lowered it.
He sank into the chair and sat in the dark, finally realizing she was right.
Realizing it—and having no idea what to do next.