I had forgotten to turn off the stove and was already halfway there when I panicked, turned around, and went back home: as I entered the apartment, I accidentally overheard my mother-in-law talking on the phone — and when I realized what she was talking about, I was seized by sheer horror… 

I was almost out the door when a terrifying thought flashed through my mind: I hadn’t turned off the stove. The soup had been left on low heat, and that small detail suddenly felt like a catastrophe. And the worst part was that it was my mother-in-law’s apartment. After my husband lost his job, we were forced to move into her two-room apartment. I knew she didn’t like me, but I tried to be a good daughter-in-law and a good wife.

I turned around and hurried back, picking up my pace with every minute. Images flickered before my eyes: the smell of something burning, smoke, a fire, my mother-in-law’s angry face. My heart was pounding far too fast.

The apartment greeted me with silence. I entered carefully, trying not to make any noise, and was about to go to the kitchen when I suddenly heard my mother-in-law’s voice. She was talking on the phone. Loudly, confidently, as always when she was sure no one could hear her.

I stopped in the hallway. Not on purpose — it was as if my legs simply refused to move.

She laughed, then lowered her voice and began saying things that left me frozen in place…  Continued in the first comment 

My mother-in-law lowered her voice and began talking… about me.

She said I was a bad wife. That I wasn’t right for her son. That every day she tells him the same thing: with me, he’s wasting his time.

That a normal woman would have had a child long ago, and that I was “nothing.” I stood there with my hand pressed to my mouth, afraid to even breathe.

My mother-in-law said she had been trying for a long time to persuade my husband to leave me. That at first he resisted and defended me, but now he increasingly stays silent and nods. That he is beginning to agree.

And in my place, according to her, there is a much more “worthy option” — her friend’s daughter. Smart, obedient, from a “good family.” The one who will surely give her grandchildren.

I felt everything inside me turn cold, but then came what literally made my vision go dark.

— But you know yourself why they can’t have a child, — she said into the phone. — I give her those pills you gave me back then every day. By the way, they’re almost finished. We’ll need more.

She said it calmly. Casually. As if she were discussing a grocery list.

At that moment, I understood that everything that had been happening to me over those months — the exhaustion, the weakness, the diagnoses, the endless “it’s just stress” — had not been a coincidence. I slowly backed away, trying not to make a single sound.