Sergei twitched his shoulder nervously.
— I’m tired of this double life. Everything has been heading towards this for a long time.
— A long time ago? — Marina grinned crookedly. — And you can imagine I didn’t see anything. She lived next to a man for twenty years and did not notice when he became a stranger.
She walked up to the window. Behind the glass the garden, which she had been growing with her own hands for so many years, was darkening. The apple trees were already preparing to bloom. The evening wind quietly moved the branches of the lilac.
Sergei once helped her here. In the first years, they painted the fence together, fried meat on the grill, and laughed until late at night. Marina suddenly clearly remembered how one day they were sitting right on the wet grass in the rain and eating strawberries from the garden.
Was all this also a deception?
— I didn’t want to hurt you, — Sergei said quietly.
Marina turned around sharply.
— Then why did you cause it?
He was silent for a few seconds, then sat down on a chair and said dully:
— Because next to her I feel alive again.
These words hurt worse than treason itself.
Marina felt something heavy and hot rising in her chest. Not tears. Humiliation.
— So you were dead next to me?
— You lived all the time in this dacha, work, your reports… We have long become just neighbors.
— Don’t you dare pass this on to me! — for the first time she fell into a scream. — I’ve been around all my life! When you lost your job — who pulled us out? When did — debts appear, who took out the loans? Who?
Lena quietly went out onto the veranda, leaving them alone.
Sergei tiredly rubbed his forehead with his palms.
— I don’t want to make a scandal.
— Sure. You’ve already decided everything for both of us.
Marina suddenly felt terrible fatigue. It’s as if in just one evening I became ten years older.
She slowly took off her jacket, put the keys on the table and calmly said:
— Okay. Then leave you.
Sergei raised his head.
— What?
— This is my dacha. Mine. I won’t sell it. And you won’t build your new happy life here either.
He stood up.
— Marina, come on without hysterics.
— Hysteria would be if I broke your head with this vase now, — she answered coldly.
For a second, Sergei was really scared.
Heavy silence reigned in the house again.
And then a sharp pop of the gate came from the street.
Lena disappeared.
Sergei rushed into the yard.
Marina was left alone.
She slowly sat down on a chair and only then noticed someone else’s phone on the table.
Lena’s phone.
The screen suddenly flashed.
And the message that appeared on it made Marina’s fingers cold:
«He still hasn’t told her about the child?»
Marina looked at the glowing screen for a long time, unable to even move. These words seemed to pass through her with a hot blade.
«He still hasn’t told her about the child?»
There was such silence in the house that you could hear the old wall clock ticking measuredly. The same ones that he and Sergei found at the flea market ten years ago. Then he laughed and said that things with the past fill the house with soul.
Now this house seemed alien.
The car door slammed outside. Sergei returned alone. Apparently, Lena left, not wanting to remain a participant in this conversation.
He entered the room and immediately saw the phone in his wife’s hands.
His face has changed.
— Don’t touch other people’s things, — he said sharply.
Marina slowly looked up at him.
— Child?
Sergei froze.
And this answer was enough for her.
Marina felt how everything inside was completely collapsing. Not loud, without screaming, without hysteria — is quiet, scary, irrevocable.
— Will you have a child? — she asked almost in a whisper.
He sat down tiredly on the chair opposite.
— Yes.
One word.
Short.
But it was this that divided her life into «before» and «after».
Marina suddenly laughed. Quiet, nervous, almost crazy.
— What an irony… For twenty years we could not become parents. I was treated, cried at night, went to the doctors… And it turns out that it was not about fate at all.
Sergei sharply looked away.
And at that moment Marina understood everything.
— Wait… — her voice trembled. — Did you know?
Silence.
Heavy.
Destroying.
— Sergey… Did you know that you can’t have children?
He covered his face with his hands.
— I didn’t want to lose you.
Marina felt as if the air was stuck in her chest.
— Lord…
The years of their lives flashed before their eyes. Hopes. Pain. Humiliation in doctors’ offices. Endless tests. Tablets. Tears in the bathroom that she hid so that her husband would not hear.
And he knew all this time.
— The doctors told me even before the wedding, — Sergei quietly admitted. — But then you started getting treatment, hoping… I couldn’t tell the truth.
— And you let me consider myself inferior for twenty years?