Oksana stood at the panoramic window of their Lviv apartment and formed the terrible thought in her mind: she needed to take a lover. Her marriage to Ostap was crumbling into a cold, hollow decoration. She had ignored the growing distance for as long as she could, but she no longer had the strength to lie to herself. She was deeply unhappy, and something had to change.
They had married three and a half years ago, genuinely in love. She had just finished university and started at a logistics company. He was already a financial analyst at a bank, consumed by ambition. “A typical achiever,” her best friend Iryna used to say.
At first, Oksana was proud of it. Wasn’t this the kind of man every girl dreamed of? But those ambitions became the wall their happiness shattered against. Ostap worked until late night, and even at home his eyes never left the laptop screen.
His conversations were all about capitalization rates, investment portfolios, and lucrative deals. Overtime, business trips, meetings — that was their life now. When she brought up children, he waved her off. Weekends together became rare.
He made good money, of course. He furnished the apartment with the latest designer furniture, bought her a new car, let her buy whatever she wanted. He planned to build a house outside the city. Her friends sighed enviously.
Her parents congratulated themselves on such a successful match. Oksana felt more miserable every day. He never shouted at her, never limited her freedom. He simply was never there.
In the first years, he at least apologized, made time for her, missed her. Over time, everything became icy routine. They ate at the same table, slept in the same bed, but talked only about trivialities. In the mornings he mechanically kissed her forehead and asked about her day without waiting for an answer.
She tried to fight. Romantic dinners. Expensive lingerie. She even tried learning about banking, but he only laughed condescendingly.
He praised the lingerie, told her to keep treating herself, turned to the wall, and fell asleep. “You need to make him understand he could lose you,” Iryna said firmly. “Make him jealous. ”
The idea seemed sensible.
Oksana tried everything: bought seductive clothes, sent herself a lavish bouquet claiming it was from a client. But her husband smiled, nodded, didn’t get jealous, and didn’t come home earlier. He sensed the performance. So she decided on the extreme measure.
She would actually take a lover. Not from her circle — no neighbors, colleagues, or acquaintances. It had to be someone completely unknown. She set up a profile on a dating site.
The process itself was oddly therapeutic: scrolling through photos, exchanging messages, remembering how to flirt, how to feel desirable instead of like furniture. Then Nazar appeared. He lived in Ivano-Frankivsk, just a few hours away by train. He taught at a private college, played tennis professionally, loved travel.
Intelligent, courteous, unmarried. His photo matched his official staff page. His reputation was spotless. They exchanged messages for weeks, then long, open video calls.
“I can come to Lviv this weekend,” he offered one evening. Everything inside Oksana tightened. Desire and fear collided. But more importantly, Ostap had begun to change.
He kept throwing anxious, confused glances at her. He studied her when he thought she wasn’t looking. He sensed the danger, she told herself triumphantly. “Let’s meet in Kyiv,” she suggested instead.
Neutral territory. Nazar agreed eagerly. The only problem was explaining her absence to her husband. But fate seemed to arrange the pieces itself.
The next evening, Ostap came home and said, without meeting her eyes, “I have an urgent business trip to Ivano-Frankivsk. I leave Thursday, back Monday. ”
“Of course,” Oksana said, hiding a triumphant smile. “I’ll go to Iryna’s dacha for the weekend.
”
He blinked, startled. It was the first time in years she had accepted his absence so calmly. Kyiv met her with noise and rush. The hotel room was mediocre.
It didn’t matter. She put on a new dress, applied her perfume, and looked at herself in the mirror: not the tired, lonely wife — a confident, alluring woman. She flew through the streets, adrenaline pulsing. Then she descended into the metro, and the euphoria burst like a soap bubble.
The heavy air, the roar of trains, the endless current of people pressing in on her. Panic hit her. What was she doing here? A hundred kilometers from home, about to meet another man?
Her carefully planned game suddenly seemed not just foolish, but dangerous and childish. She stumbled, colliding with the back of a tall man in a stylish coat. “Sorry! ” she muttered, trying to regain her balance.
He turned. The world stopped. Every sound died. Before her stood Ostap.
“You! ” they both breathed out at once. Her mind screamed. What was he doing in Kyiv?
He had sworn he was going to Ivano-Frankivsk. He stared at her, clearly believing she was drinking tea at Iryna’s dacha. Then a shrill female voice cut through the silence. “Ostapchik, darling, who is this?
”
A petite woman with a doll-like face and thick chestnut hair stepped out from behind her husband, holding his hand possessively. A living Barbie doll. The puzzle clicked together with a brutal, deafening snap. His recent anxiety, his distracted glances at home — they weren’t fear of losing his wife.
He had been working up the courage to confess his affair. “You came here for a reason too? ” Ostap asked hollowly, scanning her elegant dress and bright makeup. “You have someone too?
”
What could she say? That her “lover” was a desperate plan to save their marriage? It would sound pathetic. “Yes,” she said icily.
“I met someone too. I just didn’t know how to tell you. ”
Before he could react, she spun around and pushed through the crowd, stepping into a train car. The metal caterpillar carried her into the darkness, cutting her off from her past.
The next evening, the air in their luxurious apartment hung heavy and suffocating. They sat across from each other at the large oak table. Between them was a cup of cold tea and a chasm neither could cross. Ostap looked crushed, aged.
His flawless style had been replaced by crumpled home clothes. There was no trace of the confident careerist left in his eyes. “I completely dissolved in work,” he began quietly. “I wanted to prove my worth, reach the highest level, surpass the competition.
Every day became an endless chase after numbers. Then I started burning out — to nausea, to trembling hands. I came home empty. Like a machine for making money.
”
He looked up at her with hollow eyes. “I should have stopped. Taken a pause. Asked for your help.
But instead, I met Maryna. ”
The name cut through Oksana like a knife. “She was different. She didn’t care about my achievements, didn’t demand that I be a leader.
With her, everything was simple. An illusion of lightness. I could turn off my brain and hide from the pressure. It was like taking a strong sleeping pill when you have insomnia.
You sleep well at first, feel energetic. Then the effect fades, and you realize you’re just lying to yourself. ”
He laughed bitterly, hiding his face in his hands. “I understood too late that she was a stranger to me.
A hollow, empty person. It was a pathetic attempt to run from myself. ”
Oksana looked at the man she had once loved madly. The anger that had burned inside her for a day had evaporated.
What remained was a dull emptiness. “If you had just told me the truth back then,” she said quietly. “We had an ordinary family crisis. Ordinary fatigue.
We could have gone through it together, talked, supported each other. Instead, we chose different roads. ”
“I know,” he finished her thought. The room fell silent again, broken only by the ticking of the wall clock, each second measuring the end of their shared history.
The divorce was swift, like surgery without anesthesia. They packed their things and separated, leaving the keys to their once-happy apartment on the table. Oksana refused any claim to the property. Everything ended dry, official, and unbearably empty.
That night, on the train back from Kyiv, she deleted her dating profile. She never met Nazar. The entire desperate game now seemed not just stupid, but toxic and pathetic. She had been looking for salvation in illusions while their reality had long turned to ash that could never be glued back together.
Five years passed. Oksana remarried. Was she truly happy? Did she love her new husband the way she had once loved Ostap?
The answer was complicated. Two adult, lonely souls, slightly battered by life, had found refuge in each other. It was safe and calm. Sometimes, in the warm light of the nightstand lamp, she wondered if that quiet stability — mutual respect, steadiness — was the real foundation of a lasting marriage, not Hollywood passion.
Ostap’s fate was more predictable. He moved to Kyiv and quickly married his doll-like Maryna. The illusion of family happiness didn’t last long. He divorced her.
Running from problems hadn’t been the cure. He had no children. Neither did Oksana. After forty, disappointed and burned out, he returned to Lviv.
One cool autumn day, they ran into each other at a large shopping center. The acute pain had dulled long ago, replaced by a light melancholy. They sat down at a café table and looked into each other’s eyes without accusations or hidden anger. “You know,” Oksana said, surprising herself, “I never actually cheated on you before the divorce.
I talked to another man, even went to Kyiv for a date. But I did it out of incredible stupidity. I naively thought it would make you jealous, that it would save our marriage. ”
Ostap smiled bitterly, stirring his coffee.
“No, Oksana, I was the absolute fool. I traded real, sincere life for a cheap imitation. I looked for lightness where I should have simply worked harder. We were both afraid of difficulties.
”
They sat side by side — two people who had once been each other’s entire universe, now just old acquaintances with a shared past. The story has no Hollywood ending where everyone miraculously reunites. It’s about a harsh reality: about the importance of speaking up in time, of hearing your partner, of not looking for easy escapes outside your family when all you needed to do was take each other’s hands and walk through the darkness together.
