The thin plume rising from the porcelain seemed to be the only honest, living thing left in the kitchen.
Emily waited until Linda paused to draw breath, then looked straight into her eyes. The silence stretched. Her mother-in-law understood that persuasion was not working, and her voice took on a harder, metallic edge.
“Emily, Jason is going through a difficult time. He is searching for himself. You have to support him, try to understand what he’s facing…”
That sentence, delivered in that syrupy tone, felt like a trigger being pulled.
With deliberate care, Emily set the kettle back on its stand. The dry, sharp click of plastic against plastic cut through the kitchen like a gunshot.
Then she turned around slowly. Every trace of hospitality had vanished from her face. Her gaze was level, cold, and fixed on Linda. Jason, sensing the shift in the air, instinctively pulled his shoulders up and sank lower in his chair.
“Linda, please stop with the sweet little names,” Emily said evenly. There was no emotion in her voice, and that made it sound even more dangerous. “Your son is a forty-year-old man, not a lost puppy who needs to be rescued and cuddled.”
“I explained everything to him perfectly clearly, without your sighs and hints. Either tomorrow he goes to a job interview—any job interview, whether it’s for warehouse work or delivery—or he packs his things and moves in with you to continue his search for himself there.”
The mask of compassion slipped from Linda’s face. Beneath it appeared something hard, offended, and unpleasant. She straightened in her chair, suddenly looking almost monumental.
“How dare you—”
“Exactly like that,” Emily cut in, still without raising her voice. She stepped closer to the table and rested her fingertips on its surface. “You raised him this way, so you can deal with the result. I married a man, a partner, not a high-risk project requiring endless investments with no return. Unfortunately, I don’t have room around my neck for dead weight.”
The words dead weight seemed to hang in the air.
Jason flinched as if he had been struck, and at last found his voice.
“Emily, how can you say that… in front of Mom…”
But neither woman even looked at him. They had already entered battle, and his weak muttering was nothing more than background noise.
“I always knew you had no heart,” Linda hissed, her eyes narrowing. “Just a calculator in your head. Money, money, money… But what about the soul? You have no idea what creative burnout is! It is not laziness! It happens when a person has given everything to his work and now needs time to recover, to rebuild himself! And you’re talking about interviews! You want a genius delivering pizza?”
Emily let out a quiet, soundless laugh. It was more frightening than shouting would have been.
“A genius? Linda, please don’t make me laugh. Your son doesn’t have a finely tuned soul. He has a thick layer of infantilism, and you have been fertilizing it carefully for forty years. Since childhood, you ran after him with pies, brushed every speck of dust off him, and told him how special and misunderstood he was. So he grew up exactly that way—absolutely convinced of his own exceptional nature, without a single achievement to prove it, unless you count meaningful sighs over cold coffee. His ‘burnout’ began the very day someone asked him to take responsibility.”
Each word landed with clean, measured force. Emily was not accusing him. She was stating facts, and that icy precision was more humiliating than any outburst could have been. She was passing judgment not only on Jason, but on Linda’s entire method of raising him.
“My son is a talented man!” Linda slapped the table so hard the cups jumped. “And you are a cold, money-hungry witch who cannot appreciate his gift! All you care about is whether he brings money into the house. You don’t care at all what is happening inside him!”
“That’s right,” Emily said with a calm nod. “I don’t care what is happening inside a man who spends two weeks lying on the couch while his wife works to pay for the apartment he is lying in. So please don’t lecture me about feminine wisdom. You have already put that wisdom into practice.”