“You can demand lunch at your own homes. Right now, you are going to gather your things and leave my apartment,” the daughter-in-law said, each word clipped and cold.
“Lena, have you lost your mind?” Tammy froze in the kitchen doorway with a ladle in her hand, as if someone had shocked her. “We only dropped by, the way we always do… I already stirred the soup, and I took the meat out…”
Lena stood at the door of her room, the headset with the microphone still on her head. On her laptop, the screen had gone still; the red recording indicator had disappeared only seconds earlier. Her face was drained of color, but her eyes burned with a sharpness no one there had seen before.
“Tammy,” she said quietly, yet with iron in her voice, “please leave my apartment. Right now.”
Slippers scuffed somewhere in the living room. Sophie, her sister-in-law, peeked out from behind her mother, phone in hand, the screen showing a live stream for her friends.
“Lena, are you serious?” she drawled, the mockery barely hidden. “We’re family.”
“Family rings the bell and asks whether it’s a good time to come in,” Lena replied without raising her voice. “Family does not let itself in at noon while I’m negotiating with Moscow, Idaho, and London at the same time.”
Tammy opened her mouth, then shut it again. The ladle trembled in her fingers, and a drop of beet-red soup splashed onto the floor like a dark warning.
It had all begun three years earlier, when Lena and Alex moved into that three-room apartment in a newly built condo development on the edge of Moscow. They had bought it together on a mortgage. Lena had put in her family assistance money and the savings she had scraped together from freelance work; Alex had contributed the bonuses from his recent projects. The deed was registered evenly: half in her name, half in his.
At first, only his mother came over. “Just visiting the kids,” Tammy would say, arriving with little pots, pies, and containers of food, staying for an hour or so. Then an hour turned into most of the day. After that, she stopped warning them at all. She had her own key—Alex had given it to her “just in case.”
Then Sophie started appearing. “I’ll only stop in for an hour. I’m going downtown anyway, and parking at your place is convenient.” After her came Aunt Gail from the Moscow area: “The bus only runs once a day, and since I’m nearby, I thought I’d look in on you.” Then Alex’s cousin Dylan arrived with his own excuse: “I have nowhere to sleep until I find a room to rent.”
Lena worked from home. She translated technical documents, interpreted at conferences, sometimes for twelve hours straight. Her clients were in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Her schedule was rigid, her deadlines unforgiving, and every minute mattered.
Meanwhile, in their kitchen, soup simmered. In their bathroom, strangers’ laundry spun in the washer. In the living room, a TV drama blared at full volume.
Alex always brushed it off. “Come on, Lena, they’re only here for a little while. Mom gets lonely. Sophie’s between jobs. We’re not going to throw family out.”
So Lena endured it. She smiled. She cooked for everyone. She washed the dishes. She cleaned up after them. At night, once the apartment finally emptied, she sat back down and translated until her eyes stung.
Until today.
Today was the decisive meeting for a yearlong contract worth about $33,000. A major German company was switching to new software and needed a regular German-English technical interpreter. This interview could change everything. Lena had prepared for it for two full weeks. Alex knew that. He had even promised, “I’ll tell Mom not to come by today.”
And yet there it was—noon. Lena sat in her headset, eight faces from Berlin and London filling the screen, while she interpreted a presentation about new algorithms in real time.
Then a key turned in the lock.
“Lena, we’re only here for a minute!” Tammy’s voice rang through the apartment. “I brought some chicken. I’ll fry it up quickly. I’m sure you’ve been eating sandwiches again, you and A—”
The sentence broke against the sudden commotion in the hallway.