“Your crazy wife nearly pushed me down the stairs today! Get home right now and deal with her! Avenge your mommy!”

“You finally came? I thought I wouldn’t live to see it.”

Andrei stepped over the threshold of his mother’s apartment, shaking off the weight of a long workday. The air was familiar, dense, heavy with the smells of valocordin and fried onions. All he wanted was to collapse into the old armchair, drink tea, and switch off his mind for half an hour. But the sight of his mother instantly erased the fatigue from his face, replacing it with worry. Zinaida Arkadyevna stood in the hallway, clutching her chest with one hand. Her usually neat hair was in disarray, and on her forearm, visible beneath the sleeve of her housecoat, a fresh, angry scratch blazed red.

“Mom, what happened? Did you fall?”

She let out a short, bitter laugh, full of theatrical tragedy. Her eyes darted toward the door, as if she feared someone might be listening behind it. She stepped closer to her son, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Your crazy wife almost pushed me down the stairs today! Go home right now and deal with her! Avenge your mother!”

The words hit Andrei like a slap. He froze, trying to make sense of them. The image of Olga—calm, almost phlegmatic Olga—did not fit the picture of a raging fury shoving an old woman down a staircase. But the scratch on his mother’s arm was real. Her frightened eyes were real.

“What… what are you saying? Why?”

“Why? For nothing at all!” Zinaida Arkadyevna threw up her hands, her voice rising with indignation and righteous anger. “I came to visit you, to see little Katya, brought her some treats. We were talking. I just took out a candy, wanted to give it to my granddaughter. And your Olga went berserk! Her eyes were wild, her face twisted. She started screaming that I was spoiling the child, that I should mind my own business.”

She paused to catch her breath and jabbed a finger at her scratch.

“I tried to say a word to her, to calm her down. And she grabbed me by the arm—look!—dug in her claws like a wildcat! Threw me out into the hallway like a bag of garbage, slammed the door right in my face!”

Andrei listened, and dark, heavy anger boiled in his veins. Every detail, every word of his mother’s story fell onto the fertile ground of his exhaustion and the dull, subconscious irritation that had been building for weeks. He pictured the scene: his mother arriving with kindness, and his wife making a scandal out of nothing.

“And then,” Zinaida Arkadyevna continued, reaching the climax of her story, “I started going downstairs, and she opened the door and shoved me in the back! Right on the stairs! I barely caught the railing, Andryusha! Barely stayed on my feet! One more step, and I would have gone tumbling down the flight! She wanted to kill me!”

That was it. The last straw. The mental image of his mother crashing down concrete steps burned away everything in his mind except one thing—the urge to act. Immediately. Harshly. He asked no more questions. His world narrowed to a single, clear task: to restore justice. To put in her place the one who dared raise her hand against his mother.

He turned without a word. His movements became sharp, precise. The fatigue was gone, replaced with cold, focused rage. He didn’t say goodbye to his mother, didn’t even look at her. He just flew out of her apartment, his hand already reaching for the car keys in his pocket. His pulse hammered in his head along with a single word his mother had dictated—“deal with it.” And he drove home to deal with it. Once and for all.

The key turned in the lock not with its usual soft click, but with force, as if Andrei wasn’t opening the door but breaking it down. He burst into the hallway like an icy wind, ready to smash everything in his way. He already had the script in his head: he storms in, Olga meets him at the doorway—yelling or silent with guilt—and he unloads on her all his righteous anger, all the resentment for his humiliated mother. He had already prepared the words—sharp, cutting, undeniable.

But the apartment didn’t greet him like that. It greeted him with silence. Not the ordinary silence of a sleeping household. This was different—thick, unnatural, swallowing all sound. No TV murmuring in the kitchen, no clatter of toys from the children’s room. Even the air felt heavy and motionless. His rehearsed accusations stuck in his throat. He stepped into the living room, and his blazing rage suddenly began to cool, replaced by anxious confusion.

On the couch sat Katya.

She was sitting unnaturally straight for a five-year-old child, staring ahead. At a single spot on the opposite wall. She wore her favorite yellow dress with little giraffes printed on it, but Andrei didn’t recognize it right away. His eyes were fixed on her face. It was monstrously wrong. The small, neat nose he loved to kiss had become a swollen, blue-purple mass. Beneath her nostrils and on her upper lip, a dark crust of dried blood clung, with several brownish stains frozen on the bright collar of her dress. She wasn’t crying. She was just sitting and staring, her usually lively eyes empty. Hollow.

All the rage, all the righteous fury boiling in Andrei seconds ago vanished. Gone. Replaced by a sticky, paralyzing horror that crawled up his spine like icy needles. His world shrank to that little, disfigured face. He forgot why he came, forgot his mother, her scratch, the staircase. All of it shrank to nothing before what he saw.

From the kitchen, Olga stepped out silently. Her face was as white as a hospital sheet, utterly still, carved from stone. She stopped in the doorway, arms crossed, and looked at him. In her gaze there was no fear, no guilt, no anger. Only cold, scorched calm.

Andrei shifted his gaze between his daughter and his wife. He opened his mouth, but no words came. Air caught in his lungs. He managed only a whisper, almost soundless:

“What happened?”

Olga didn’t move. Her voice was even, without the slightest intonation, as if she were reading a weather report.

“Your mother.”

She paused, letting the two words fall into the deafening silence.

“Katya took a candy from the table. Your mother grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face against that very table.”

She nodded slightly toward the low dark-wood coffee table. Andrei followed her gaze. The table that always held magazines and the TV remote. A simple piece of furniture. Now it loomed as a sinister weapon. Olga went on, her voice still dead and flat:

“I threw her out. Yes, I wanted to push her down the stairs. But I stopped. That woman will never cross our threshold again.”

Andrei listened, but his eyes stayed on his daughter. His mother’s words, her tale of a “harmless candy,” of “crazy” Olga—suddenly it all fit, forming one hideous, undeniable picture. The lie was so obvious, so pathetic compared to what he saw. He looked at Olga again. And for the first time in many years, he saw not a wife but an ally. A fellow parent facing something unthinkable.

The silence that followed Olga’s words wasn’t empty. It was filled with shards of shattered reality. The world Andrei had lived in just ten minutes earlier—a world of a wronged mother and a guilty wife—collapsed into dust. The house of cards Zinaida Arkadyevna had so skillfully built in his mind crumbled at a single glance at his daughter’s face. He looked at Olga’s pale, rigid face and saw not a stranger, but the only one who had been here when hell erupted right at that coffee table.

He didn’t answer her. No words were needed. Slowly, as if moving underwater, he stepped forward and knelt before the couch where Katya sat. His knees sank into the soft carpet. His eyes met her empty, glassy stare. Rage, horror, confusion—all gone. Only a dull, aching pain remained, as if he had taken the blow himself.

Carefully, afraid to hurt her more, he reached out. Not to her face, not to the wound. His fingers brushed her shoulder, gently squeezing the thin fabric of her yellow dress. He just needed to know she was there, real. Katya didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink. As if his touch belonged to another world she no longer had access to. And that mute, detached stillness of his child terrified Andrei more than anything.

At that moment, the silence was shattered by a sharp, demanding sound. His phone buzzed and played its ringtone. He knew who it was. He didn’t need to look. The one who craved a report. The one waiting for news of his punishment of the “crazy” daughter-in-law.

He slowly pulled out the phone. The screen glowed with one word: “Mom.” He lifted his eyes to Olga. She hadn’t moved, still watching him. It wasn’t the question “what will you do?” but “whose side are you on?” He realized the answer was owed not just to himself or to her, but above all, to that small, motionless figure on the couch.

Andrei swiped the screen and raised the phone to his ear, still kneeling before Katya.

“Well? Did you deal with her?” Zinaida Arkadyevna’s voice crackled with impatience, full of expectation and power. The voice of someone certain of her righteousness and her son’s loyalty.

Andrei was silent for a second, gathering what remained of his voice. He spoke quietly, but cold and clear, making sure Olga heard every word.

“Yes, Mom. I dealt with it.”

He paused, and in that pause hung everything: disappointment, contempt, and finality.

“Don’t ever call here again. Don’t ever come near my house. Do you understand?”

He didn’t wait for her reply—the sputtering, incredulous protest already rising in the receiver. He simply pressed the red button. Then, without hesitation, opened his contacts, scrolled to “Mom,” tapped it, and chose “Block contact.” Simple, mundane actions on a phone screen that, in that moment, felt like signing the death warrant of his old life.

He put the phone away. He was still on his knees before his daughter. He looked at Olga. Their eyes met. Silence returned to the room—but it was a different silence now. Not the silence of shock, but the silence of a burned bridge. Behind them, only smoldering ash. Ahead—just the three of them. And the cold knowledge that the war had only begun.

Half an hour later, Andrei brought a basin of warm water from the bathroom. Olga dipped a soft cloth into it and, inch by inch, gently wiped the dried blood from Katya’s face. The girl still sat motionless, like a porcelain doll with a broken mechanism, only flinching when the cloth brushed the swollen skin of her nose. Their fragile new world was pierced straight through.

The doorbell wasn’t just insistent. It was an assault. Short, furious rings, one after another without pause, like someone trying to drill through the door with the button. Not a summons but a demand. An ultimatum.

Andrei rose slowly. He said nothing to Olga—he didn’t need to. She understood. He walked to the hallway, his steps heavy, like a man heading to the gallows. He looked through the peephole. His mother’s distorted face swam in the lens, flushed crimson with rage, her mouth twisted in a silent scream. He felt no pity, no doubt. Only the cold, dull necessity of ending this.

He turned the key and opened the door.

Zinaida Arkadyevna lunged to push her way inside, shoulder first.

“Let me in! What has she done to you, what lies has she told?! You’ve gone mad, casting aside your own mother for that—”

Andrei blocked her with his hand pressed to her shoulder. That alone was enough to stop her. His face was impenetrable.

“Leave, Mom. I told you already.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” she shrieked, recoiling from his touch as if from hot iron. “This is my home too, I raised you! You won’t throw me out! It’s her! She turned you against me!”

At that moment, Olga appeared in the hallway. She didn’t hide behind her husband. She stood beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Her face remained pale and calm, but her eyes blazed with cold fire. Together, they stood like a solid wall, against which his mother’s fury splashed and broke.

The sight of Olga fanned the flames of her rage. Zinaida Arkadyevna turned all her venom on her.

“It’s you! You set this up! Twisted him, poisoned his mind! What lies did you pour into him?!”

Olga didn’t answer. She only looked at her mother-in-law, and in her gaze was such contempt it was more tangible than any slap. The silence drove Zinaida Arkadyevna even madder. Failing to break the adults, she made her final, fatal mistake. She turned back to Andrei, her voice dripping with poisonous justification.

“It’s all because of her! Always meddling where she’s not wanted! She wanted a candy! Someone had to teach her discipline, not indulge every whim! It would have done her good!”

Those were not words that could be taken back. They were a sentence she had pronounced on herself.

Andrei stepped forward. He didn’t yell. He didn’t raise his voice. He looked at his mother the way one looks at a stranger.

“Leave.”

He took her by the elbow. His grip was not strong, but it was unyielding. He simply turned her toward the hallway and nudged her across the threshold onto the landing. She stumbled, but stayed upright, spinning around with a face no longer twisted by rage but by devastating disbelief. She opened her mouth to say more, but Andrei cut her off, speaking quietly and firmly, severing every tie.

“You no longer have a son. Or a granddaughter.”

And he closed the door. Not slammed—simply shut it, severing her from their lives. The click of the first turn of the lock. The click of the second. The sounds echoed unbearably loud in the silence. Andrei leaned against the door, eyes closed. He didn’t look at Olga. He only stood there, feeling the cold wood against his back.

The war was over. There were no victors. Only survivors among the ruins of their family.