Oksana stood before the panoramic window of their Lviv apartment and finally gave shape to the terrible thought forming in her mind: she needed to take a lover. Her marriage to Ostap was crumbling into a cold, hollow decoration, and she no longer had the strength to lie to herself. They had married three and a half years earlier, genuinely in love. She had just finished university and landed a job at a logistics company.
He was already a financial analyst, fully consumed by his career at the bank. “He’s a typical overachiever,” her best friend Iryna used to say. At first Oksana was proud of that. Wasn’t he the man every girl dreamed of?
Driven, ambitious, able to provide for a family? But those ambitions became the wall their happiness broke against. Ostap stayed at the office until late, and at home he never looked up from his laptop. His conversations were all about capitalization rates, investment portfolios, profitable deals.
Overtime, business trips, meetings — that became their routine. He waved off any talk of children: not yet. Weekends and holidays together became a rarity. He earned good money, of course.
He furnished the apartment with the latest designer pieces, bought her a new car, let her buy whatever she wanted. He planned to build a house outside the city. Her friends sighed with envy. Her parents were proud of how well their daughter had married.
And Oksana felt more miserable every day. He never shouted at her, never restricted her freedom. He was simply never there. In the first years he apologized, tried to find time for her, missed her.
Then it all turned to icy routine. The last months were the worst. They ate dinner at the same table, slept in the same bed, but spoke only about trivialities. Before leaving, Ostap mechanically kissed her cheek, called her sweetheart, asked how her day was.
He didn’t care about the answer. She tried to fight. Romantic dinners, expensive lingerie, even attempting to understand banking. He smiled condescendingly, told her to keep buying herself nice things, then turned to the wall and fell asleep.
“You need to make him understand he could lose you,” Iryna said firmly over coffee. “Make him jealous. They say a little fling can strengthen a marriage. Just handle it smartly.
”
Oksana tried. She bought provocative clothes, twirled in front of the mirror, bought herself a lavish bouquet and claimed it was from a client. Ostap smiled, nodded, didn’t get nervous, didn’t come home earlier. He seemed to sense the falseness of the performance.
So she decided on extreme measures. She would actually take a lover. It would shake him. It would restore her belief in her own desirability.
He would notice the change in her, feel the distance, and finally wake up. She wouldn’t confess, of course. Let him suffer. She told no one.
She decided to find the man on a dating site. It was terrifying — one thing to play a comedy, another to actually betray her husband. She ruled out anyone from her own circle. No neighbors, no colleagues, no acquaintances.
A complete stranger, and nothing more. The virtual world felt like a dark forest full of predators. Most profiles belonged to arrogant, crude men. But the process itself worked better than any therapy.
Scrolling through photos, answering messages, she remembered how to flirt, how to feel desirable instead of being a convenient fixture in an apartment. She gained a dangerous secret. Watching her husband hunched over his laptop, clicking his mouse endlessly, she felt a vengeful satisfaction. Go on.
Keep sitting there until someone takes your wife. After a month of this secret life, Nazar appeared. He lived in nearby Ivano-Frankivsk, just a few hours from Lviv. He taught at a private college, played tennis professionally, loved to travel.
Intelligent, tactful, unmarried. Oksana suspected a scam — an ideal facade hiding something. But his photo on the dating site matched the official picture on the college website. He genuinely headed a department, had an impeccable reputation.
They exchanged messages, then long, open video calls. “I could come to Lviv this weekend,” he suggested one evening. Everything inside her tightened. Desire on one side, paralyzing fear on the other.
What if someone she knew saw them? She didn’t actually want to destroy her marriage. But then why start this game at all? She convinced herself it was a necessary shake-up.
And the tactic was finally working. Ostap had changed. He kept glancing at her with worried, confused looks. When he thought she wasn’t watching, his eyes followed her like a hunter tracking prey.
He clearly felt he was losing control. He senses danger, she exulted. A little more, and he’ll beg for an honest conversation, apologize for his coldness. But until then, she had to finish the game.
“Let’s meet in Kyiv,” she suggested to Nazar unexpectedly. Neutral territory. He agreed with enthusiasm. A real date in the historical center of the capital.
The hardest part remained: how to explain her absence to her husband without raising suspicion. But fate seemed to arrange the pieces itself. The next evening, Ostap came home and, without meeting her eyes, said, “I have an urgent business trip next week. To Ivano-Frankivsk.
I leave Thursday, back Monday. ”
“I know you’re tired of my endless trips… ”
“It’s fine,” Oksana interrupted, hiding a triumphant smile. “If you have to go, you have to go.
I’ll spend the weekend at Iryna’s dacha. She’s been asking me for ages. ”
Ostap blinked, surprised and almost wary. It was the first time in years she had accepted news of a business trip so peacefully.
In her mind, she was already buying tickets to the capital. Iryna would cover for her. The plan was flawless. Kyiv met her with its frantic rhythm — the roar of traffic, endless streams of cars.
The hotel room was mediocre; she didn’t care. Getting ready for her first real date in years, she put on her favorite music, took out a gorgeous new dress, applied her expensive perfume. The mirror reflected a different woman: not the tired, lonely wife in a cold apartment, but a confident, striking beauty. She flew through the streets, adrenaline pulsing at her temples.
Guilt mixed with sweet triumph dissolved in the city’s energy. Then she descended into the metro, and the drunken euphoria burst like a soap bubble. Heavy, stale air. The roar of trains.
An endless whirl of people. The crowd merged into a single faceless mass — mechanical ants blindly following their routes. A wave of panic hit her. What was she doing here?
A hundred kilometers from home? Her carefully planned game suddenly seemed not just absurd, but dangerous and childish. Her legs turned to cotton. She stumbled, lost her balance, and collided with the back of a tall man in a stylish coat.
“I’m sorry! ” she muttered, trying to steady herself. The man turned sharply. At that second, Oksana felt the concrete ceiling collapse onto her head.
All the oxygen left her lungs. The world stopped. In front of her stood Ostap. “You!
” they both exhaled hoarsely, staring at each other with wide eyes. Oksana wanted to scream, grab his collar, demand to know what the hell he was doing in the capital when he swore he was going to Ivano-Frankivsk. Ostap, clearly, had believed his wife was drinking tea at Iryna’s dacha. They stood in silence, paralyzed by mutual shock, until a capricious female voice cut through.
“Ostapchyk, kitten, who is this? ” A petite girl with a doll-like face and lush chestnut hair emerged from behind his back. A real, living Barbie. She clutched his hand possessively.
In Oksana’s head, everything snapped into place. The puzzle clicked together with a cruel, deafening sound. This was why he had suddenly been sent to Kyiv. This was what his recent anxiety meant.
His confusion, his piercing looks at home — not the fear of losing his wife as she had naively imagined. He was simply terribly uncomfortable. He was tormented by guilt, gathering the courage to confess his affair and leave the family. It was so trivial, so dirty, that she wanted to howl with despair at her own stupidity.
“So you came here for a reason too? ” Ostap asked dully, scanning her elegant outfit and bright makeup. “You have someone too? ”
What could she say?
That her lover was fictional, a desperate plan to resurrect their marriage? It would sound pitiful. “Yes,” Oksana said in an icy voice. “I met someone too.
I just didn’t know how to tell you. ”
The irony was devastating. Two unfaithful spouses with perfect false alibis, colliding by chance in a city of millions. A one-in-a-billion coincidence.
Without waiting for his reaction, she spun around and pushed through the crowd. She slipped into a train car, and the metal caterpillar carried her into the darkness, cutting her off from the past. The journey back to Lviv felt endless, as though she were returning from another life. The next evening, the air in their luxurious apartment hung like a heavy lead cloud.
They sat across from each other at the big oak table in the kitchen. Between them was not just a cup of cold tea but an insurmountable abyss. Ostap looked crushed, older. His impeccable style had collapsed into wrinkled home clothes.
No trace remained of the self-assured careerist. “I really did disappear into work,” he began quietly, breaking the suffocating silence. “I wanted to prove myself to everyone. Reach the top.
Beat my competitors. Every day became an endless race for numbers. ”
He raised empty eyes to her. “Then I started burning out.
Coming home completely drained. I felt like a money-making machine. I lost all motivation to wake up in the morning. I should have stopped, taken a pause, asked for your help.
But instead, at that exact moment, I met Maryna. ”
The name — the Barbie from the Kyiv metro — cut at Oksana’s ears. She clenched her fingers to hide their trembling. “She was different,” Ostap went on.
“She didn’t care about my achievements. She didn’t expect me to be a leader. With her, everything seemed simpler. An illusion of lightness.
Excitement. I could switch off my brain, hide from the pressure, and it felt easier. Like taking a strong sleeping pill for insomnia. You sleep well, you feel fine, but the effect wears off.
Then you either raise the dose or realize you’re only fooling yourself. ”
He laughed hoarsely, hiding his face in his hands. “I understood too late that I was tied to a complete stranger. An empty person.
There was no lightness, no rest. Everything got worse. It was a pathetic attempt to run from myself. ”
Oksana looked at the man she had once loved without boundaries.
The anger that had burned her a day earlier had evaporated. In its place, only a hollow emptiness remained. She remembered how desperately she had tried to save their marriage, searching for the problem in herself, trying to provoke his jealousy. If only he had told her the truth back then.
But he chose to run, and that choice destroyed both of them. “Oh, Ostap. ” She shook her head sadly. “We had an ordinary family crisis.
Ordinary fatigue. We should have gone through it together. Talked. Waited it out.
Supported each other. Instead, we took different roads. ”
“Looking for escapes,” he finished her thought. Silence returned, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.
Each second measured the end of their shared story. “How did it happen? ” Ostap’s voice broke. “How did we let this happen to us?
”
Oksana said nothing. She could have confessed that she had never actually betrayed him. That the lover was just a desperate plan. But it would change nothing.
The mirror of their marriage had shattered beyond repair, and gathering the pieces was pointless. They had no answers. That conversation was their last confession before becoming strangers. The divorce went through quickly, like surgery without anesthesia.
They packed their things and went their separate ways, leaving the keys to their once-happy apartment on the table. No children, no joint property disputes. Oksana renounced everything. It ended dry, official, and unbearably empty.
On the train home from Kyiv, she had deleted her dating profile the moment the city disappeared behind her. She never met Nazar. All contact ended. The performance of a femme fatale now seemed not just foolish, but toxic and pathetic.
She had searched for salvation in illusions while their reality had long since turned to ash. Five years passed. Time heals, though it leaves scars. Oksana married again.
Was she truly happy? Did she love her second husband the way she had loved Ostap? The answer was complicated. Two adult, lonely souls, a little battered by life, found shelter in each other.
It was safe. It was calm. Sometimes, looking at the warm light of the night lamp in her bedroom, she wondered if true lasting marriage was built not on wild passion or Hollywood romance, but on quiet, steady stability and mutual respect. Ostap’s fate was harsher.
He moved to the capital, married his doll-like Maryna. The illusion of family idyll collapsed quickly. He divorced her. The escape had not been a cure; new love built on lies brought no happiness.
He never had children. Neither did she. After forty, Ostap, finally defeated and burned out, returned home to Lviv. One cool autumn day, they met by chance in a large shopping center.
The storm had long passed. The sharp, unbearable pain had dulled into a soft, 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 unexpectedly, stirring her coffee, “I never cheated on you back then.
Before the divorce. I had been talking to another man, I even went to Kyiv to meet him. But I did it out of incredible stupidity. I thought it would make you jealous, that I was somehow saving our marriage.
I was a fool. ”
Ostap smiled bitterly and stirred sugar into his cup. “No, Oksana. I was the absolute fool.
I traded a real, honest life for a cheap fake. I was looking for an easy way out when all we needed to do was hold on and try together. We both got scared of the difficulty. ”
They sat there, two people who had once been a whole world to each other, now just old acquaintances sharing a past.
The coffee cooled in their cups. Somewhere beyond the glass, the city went on, indifferent, alive.
