“Ksyukha, here’s the deal. Lyuda and I figured out how it would work best for everyone. You give us your two-room apartment, and we give you our one-room place in Vyselki. And we’ll throw in another hundred thousand on top, just for the move. It’s gotten kind of cramped for us here, and your neighborhood is much better. You’re my sister, after all. You should understand our situation.”
Ksenia froze in the middle of her brand-new kitchen, the phone pressed to her ear. In her other hand, she held a cup of half-finished coffee.
For a second, she tried to process what she had just heard.
Then she exploded.
“Have you lost your mind, Gena? Completely lost it? What the hell do you mean, a one-room apartment in Vyselki? Are you even sane? I ate instant noodles for a whole year so I could buy out your share and turn this dump into an actual home! And now you’re offering me your mortgaged kennel for a hundred thousand? You can go straight to hell, dear relative!”
There was a confused silence on the other end of the line. Then Lyudmila’s smooth voice came through after she snatched the phone from her husband.
“Ksyushenka, why are you shouting right away? Gena didn’t put it properly. We’re family. This was Grandma’s apartment, after all. Shared memories…”
“Exactly, Lyuda! Grandma’s! And I paid your dear husband three million in cash for my half of those ‘memories.’ Have you already forgotten? I can remind you. I have the receipt sitting in a drawer. That’s it, this conversation is over. Call me with another ‘deal’ like this and I’ll block you to hell and back.”
Ksenia threw the phone onto the countertop. Her hands were trembling slightly.
A year. A whole year she had lived like a cursed woman.
After her grandmother died, the question of her two-room apartment in a Stalin-era building near the park came up. The apartment had been completely ruined: yellowed wallpaper, the smell of medicine soaked into everything, dried-out herringbone parquet, and an ancient gas water heater that roared like a wounded animal.
Gena, her cousin, immediately claimed his half. He had never visited their grandmother, never brought her medicine, but at the funeral he stood there with the most grief-stricken face and was already calculating how much he could make from his share.
“Ksyukha, you understand. I need money. Lyuda and I have a mortgage, and the baby’s coming soon. Let’s be fair. We sell the place and split it fifty-fifty.”
“Sell it? Are you serious? Grandma lived here her whole life. This is the only little island left from our family.”
“Little island, my ass. That island won’t pay off my mortgage. So either we sell it, or you buy out my share. The appraiser said the place is worth six million. Three from you.”
And she found those three million.
She took out a consumer loan at a brutal interest rate, borrowed from two friends, and emptied out all her modest savings.
She handed him a stack of money in a café. Without even counting it, he shoved it into his backpack and signed a notarized refusal of inheritance in her favor.
Then came a year of hell.
While working remotely, she stripped the wallpaper herself and sanded the walls herself. She ate buckwheat and the cheapest pasta. She only hired a crew for the things she physically couldn’t do: pouring the floor screed, replacing the wiring, and changing the plumbing. Everything else she did herself.
She hung wallpaper, laid laminate flooring, and assembled an IKEA kitchen by watching YouTube videos. She cried from exhaustion and helplessness whenever something went wrong. But every morning, she got up and kept going.
And now, a month ago, she had finally finished.
The apartment was clean, bright, and cozy. It smelled of fresh paint. For the first time in a year, she bought herself real whole-bean coffee instead of instant and brewed it in a new cezve. It was her triumph. Her fortress.
And now this freeloader called and, with a straight face, suggested she trade her fortress for a shack in the suburbs.
Ksenia hadn’t even recovered from the morning phone call when the phone rang again.
Mom.
Her heart dropped somewhere down to her heels.
“Ksyusha, Lyudochka just called me, all in tears. Why did you yell at them? They only want what’s best for you. They want to resolve things as a family.”
“Mom, what best? They want to kick me out of my own apartment! Did you even hear what they offered?”
“I heard. Well, maybe they got carried away. But you’re the older sister. You’re wiser. You should have talked calmly. They’re in a difficult situation. Gena got laid off, Lyuda is on maternity leave. They really are struggling.”
“Was it easy for me when I was killing myself over this renovation? When you kept telling me, ‘Ksyusha, why do you need this wreck? You should sell it and buy yourself a studio in a new building’? Where were all of them when I was hauling bags of construction trash?”
“Why are you bringing up old things? Family is family so that people can help each other in difficult moments. They’re not strangers.”
“Mom, they are strangers to me! Stran-gers! After Gena took my money and never once asked how I was doing here, whether I was even alive. He’s not my brother. He’s a counterparty in a deal. The deal is closed. That’s it!”
“You’ve become so angry, Ksyusha. So hard. Grandma wouldn’t have approved.”
Ksenia silently ended the call.
The conversation with her mother felt like a punch to the stomach. It was always the same. Be wiser, give in, you’re a girl. And Gena, apparently, was a boy, which meant he was allowed to remain an infantile idiot until he went gray.
Two days later, on Saturday morning, the doorbell rang.
Insistently. For a long time.
Thinking it was a courier, Ksenia opened the door without looking through the peephole.
Gena and Lyuda were standing on the threshold.
He wore a guilty expression. She looked ready for battle and held a large grocery bag from Pyaterochka.
“Hi, sis! We came to visit! We decided things like this shouldn’t be discussed over the phone,” Lyuda sang with a fake smile and stepped into the hallway without being invited.
Gena silently slipped in behind her.
“Oh, it’s gotten so bright in here! And it used to smell so… well, you remember. But now it’s like Europe!”
“What brings you here? I believe I made it clear that we have nothing to discuss.”
“Ksyush, don’t be so gloomy,” Gena cut in. “We just dropped by for some tea. Look, your favorite Prague cake.”
Meanwhile, Lyuda had already gone into the kitchen. Without any shame, she ran a finger over the countertop and looked into the refrigerator.
“You have a nice kitchen. Expensive, I bet. And that faucet… German? And do you know what kind of renovation we managed in Vyselki? We only had enough money for the cheapest stuff. And even that was on credit.”
“Lyuda, I’m asking you to leave,” Ksenia said in an even but icy voice as she entered the kitchen.
“Where are we supposed to go?” Lyudmila threw up her hands. “We came to talk. Ksyush, please understand our situation. Gena has no job. I’m about to give birth. The mortgage is hanging over us. We simply can’t manage. And you have a big apartment in the center. You’re alone. You’d be fine in a one-room place. What difference does it make where you sit and work remotely? For us, this would be salvation.”
“My salvation cost me three million and a year of my life. Calculate how much yours is worth. And leave.”
That was when Lyudmila changed tactics.
Her face twisted, and tears burst from her eyes. She collapsed onto the chair Ksenia had assembled herself over three consecutive nights and began sobbing.
“You… you’re heartless! We came to you with open hearts, with our last hope! And you… Do you think it’s easy for us to come here and humiliate ourselves like this? Yes! We have debts! Debt collectors are calling nonstop! Gena got involved in some shady schemes, tried to make quick money, and got scammed! We’ll have nowhere to live in a month! They’ll take the apartment! And you’re sitting here in all this beauty, sipping your little coffee! Some sister you are!”
Gena stood in the doorway with his head lowered. It seemed this performance was news even to him.
“What debt collectors, Lyuda? What are you talking about?” he muttered.
“Shut up!” she shrieked. “Everything I’m saying is true! Someone has to tell the truth! Yes, Ksyusha! We’re totally screwed! And the only person who can help us is you! But you’re selfish! You only think about your laminate flooring and your walls! You don’t care that your nephew will be born on the street!”
Ksenia looked at the scene, and everything inside her went cold.
This was no longer simple audacity. It was something beyond that. Desperate, shameless meanness.
They didn’t just want to “make room” for themselves.
They wanted to solve their problems by drowning her.
“Out,” Ksenia said quietly.
“What?” Lyuda asked, wiping her dry eyes.
“Out. Both of you. Out of my apartment. Now.”
She pushed them into the corridor. Gena mumbled something about how “Lyuda didn’t mean it like that,” but Ksenia wasn’t listening. She slammed the door behind them and turned the key in the lock twice.
Then she started shaking.
Not from anger, but from some cosmic sense of injustice.
She wandered through the apartment, touching the walls, the furniture, everything that had become part of her.
That evening, while going through old boxes of her grandmother’s things that she had never quite been able to throw away, she came across several thick notebooks with cloth bindings.
Diaries.
Grandma had kept them almost all her life.
Ksenia sat down on the floor and began reading.
She read all night.
About her first A in school, about a scraped knee, about how she tried to bake her first pie when she was ten.
Then the entries about Gena began.
“…Gena lied again. Said he needed money for textbooks, but bought fashionable sneakers instead. He lies without even blushing. He has his father’s character. Easy to get going, heavy on conscience…”
“…Gena came by. Asked for money. I said no. He got offended, left, and slammed the door. I’m afraid for him. The boy will go under. He doesn’t know how to do anything except demand…”
And the last one, written almost a year before her death:
“…I’ve decided. The apartment will stay with Ksyusha. She is the only one who sees a person in me, not a wallet on legs. She’ll chew through the earth if she has to, but she’ll achieve what she wants. And if Gena gets it, he’ll squander it within a year. He’ll sell it, blow the money, and then show up on Ksyusha’s doorstep. So it’s better for Ksyusha to have her own fortress. She deserves it. And she, kind soul that she is, will help him anyway. But only the way she herself sees fit, not because she owes him…”
Ksenia closed the notebook.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, but they were different now.
This was cleansing.
Grandma had seen everything. She had understood everything.
And she had given Ksenia not just an apartment.
She had given her the right to be strong.
In the morning, the phone exploded again with calls from her mother, then from Gena.
Ksenia waited until they came again.
She knew they would.
They stood on the stair landing. Lyuda had no tears now, only a cold, angry face.
“We’ll go to child protective services! We’ll tell them you’re throwing us out onto the street!”
“Go ahead,” Ksenia answered calmly, without opening the door all the way, leaving it on the chain. “And in the meantime, I’ll read something to Mom. Mom, are you here? Can you hear me?”
She opened the diary and loudly read her grandmother’s final entry across the whole stairwell.
At the words “he’ll squander it within a year,” Gena twitched.
At the words “show up on Ksyusha’s doorstep,” Lyuda shot her husband a scorching look.
“So, Gena,” Ksenia finished, “Grandma saw right through everything. She was only wrong about one thing. I am not a ‘kind soul.’ Not anymore. I will not help you. You made your choice when you took three million from me and rode off into the sunset. Now clean up your own mess.”
She slammed the door.
For another couple of minutes, Lyuda’s muffled swearing and Gena’s bleating could be heard behind it. Then everything went quiet.
Ksenia blocked their numbers.
Then she called her mother.
“Mom. I love you. But if you mention Gena and his problems to me even once more, even with one word, I will stop speaking to you. Completely. Do you understand me? My home is my fortress. And the gates are closed to invaders. All of them.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
Then her mother quietly said, “I understand, daughter.”
Six months later, Ksenia sat on her wide windowsill, drinking that same whole-bean coffee and watching yellow leaves fall in the courtyard.
She had bought herself a ridiculous but very cozy floor lamp on sale.
She assembled it herself.
Life had settled into a peaceful rhythm.
No one called, demanded anything, or pressed on her pity.
A couple of times, strange text messages came from unknown numbers asking to “borrow money until payday.” She silently deleted them.
People said Gena and Lyuda had eventually lost their apartment in Vyselki and moved in with Lyuda’s mother in a neighboring town.
But that was no longer her story.
Her story was here, inside these walls, soaked with the smell of coffee and her small but hard-won freedom.
The phone beeped.
A message from a friend:
“So, are we going to St. Petersburg this weekend? Tickets are going fast!”
Ksenia smiled and quickly typed back:
“We’re going!”
She could afford it.
She could afford everything.
