‘You’re a drab little mouse with no money,’ my friend said. Yet at my own birthday party, she was the one standing by the door with a tray.

“You just don’t know how to present yourself,” Kristina drawled, stirring her cocktail with a straw. A bracelet studded with stones glittered on her wrist. She said it with that light, almost careless condescension that was her calling card. “It’s not about presentation,” Olya Yeremina answered quietly, studying a crack on her cup of cheap […]

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It had been only three weeks since we buried Mom, and my brother had already called in an appraiser for the house.

It had been only three weeks since we buried our mother, and my brother had already called an appraiser for the house. In the yard of our parents’ home in Volgograd, apples were dropping one after another, thudding dully against the ground. The house—a small two-room place from the 1970s with a wooden veranda—seemed smaller […]

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