“Seryozh, go on, let’s go,” comes the teasing laughter from my colleague’s room. “Your daughter will be here any minute. I need to get ready for the lesson. First, though—help me fasten the zipper on her skirt.
My heart drops to my heels, returns to my chest, and starts pounding against my ribcage at a wild speed.
I can’t breathe.
I’m standing at the door of the room and feel my knees begin to shake.
Kira comes to us a few times a week to help pull up our daughter’s geography grades—hers together with Seryozha’s daughter. And only now I realize that she comes not for my daughter, but… for my husband.
Twenty years of marriage are rushing into a bottomless pit: the family is tearing at the seams, my husband goes to a young lover, and my daughter wants to live with them.
Every day I see the new love in my husband’s school office, hear her cooing on the phone with him, and watch how sweetly she chats with my daughter during breaks—and I go out of my mind with pain, pain that tears my heart into pieces.
And when it seems to me that it can’t get any worse, someone from my distant past breaks into my life…
Betrayal by my husband, a young and cunning lover, a happy woman after divorce—and the secrets of the past that change the lives of the heroes forever.