1.

Happiness in New York is a suspicious thing. Here it is customary either to flaunt it too loudly or to conceal it carefully, like a failed investment. If someone is doing well, it raises questions. If they are doing too well, it raises suspicions. And if things have been good, steadily good, for several years in a row, then either the person is lying—or they simply haven’t yet realized that they’re doing something wrong.

Emily Harper hid nothing. And that, precisely, was what had begun to exhaust her.

She was thirty-eight—an age at which a résumé already looks impressive enough to command respect, yet not tragic enough to inspire sympathy. She was a Managing Director at an investment bank where glass walls reflected the Manhattan sky and concrete walls reflected other people’s ambitions, usually unrealized. In this bank, even the cleaning staff looked as though they knew the size of everyone else’s bonus. Emily often said—half joking, half serious—that janitors and sanitation workers were the most honest employees in corporate life: if they didn’t like you, it showed in the way they looked at the trash in the neighboring bin. Which could not be said of the board of directors.

Every morning, Emily had two schedules—and both demanded unquestioning rigor.

The first was professional: color-coded, synchronized, ruthlessly optimized. This schedule did not allow her vocabulary, such as “reschedule,” “I’m tired,” or “I just need time to think.”

The second was domestic: magnetic, attached to the refrigerator, decorated with stickers of fruits, unicorns, and dinosaurs. On it were listed events that frightened successful people more than any market correction: “parent-teacher conference,” “eye exam,” “device-free day,” “Friday—pizza,” and “Help Ben build a volcano.”

Yet—what was especially awkward, almost indecent—Emily’s family was happy. Not performatively, not for Instagram, but genuinely so, which always looks suspicious.

Her husband, Michael, was a person of a type rare in New York: not burnt out, not “working on himself,” but simply calm, as though he had skipped some important collective anxiety. He taught art history at a private school and made sandwiches with the same attentiveness other people reserved for investment committee presentations. He could fry eggs, label lunch boxes, tie shoelaces, listen to extended monologues about dinosaurs, and still maintain the expression of a man to whom nothing posed a threat. Not even the mortgage.

There were three children—just the right number for sustainable chaos.

The eldest, nine-year-old Olivia, spoke slowly, condescendingly, and tolerated those around her purely out of a sense of responsibility.
The middle child, Ben, was a philosopher. He asked questions about death, taxes, and why adults pretended to like broccoli.

The youngest, Lucy, nearly four, could transform a neat apartment into an artist’s residency within mere five minutes, while turning an adult into someone whispering in the bathroom, I’m not complaining. I’m just tired.

Emily loved her home—more precisely, her apartment on the Upper West Side. Six rooms overlooking Central Park, the Metropolitan Opera, and other convincing proofs that life had worked out correctly and according to plan. She loved evenings when Michael cooked dinner and the children argued over who was really in charge of the family: Mom, Dad, or the cat named Goldman.

Thus, Emily had everything New Yorkers would call success—and that was precisely why, one morning, looking at herself in the mirror as she carefully applied mascara, she felt anxiety. Not sharp, not panicked, but the kind experienced by people who have lived too long without bad news.

Not because of the markets.

Not because of a Swiss client who had decided to “rethink the strategy” and move money somewhere no one would ever find it.

Not even because Lucy had eaten the cap of a felt-tip marker and now looked like a conceptual artist.

What worried Emily was something else: her life was too smooth. Suspiciously smooth—without cracks, without scandals, without the mandatory failure that, by all the laws of narrative, should have happened by now.

2.

Sometimes Emily thought about her friends and colleagues—and these thoughts came to her with the regularity of quarterly reports. Almost all of them were successful. Almost all were divorced.

She recalled specific cases, like an asset portfolio that simply could not be diversified. There was Sarah, once an M&A star, now living alone in an apartment overlooking her own past—where everything had gone wrong, but at least on schedule. There was David, who had left his wife “by mutual agreement,” meaning with the agreement of his lawyer. There was Katherine, who liked to say that marriage was a wonderful experience she strongly advised against repeating. All of them looked calmer after divorce, like people who had lost excess weight or finally identified the cause of a long-standing allergy.

Their solitude was not tragic but professional. It suited them. They spoke of their divorces with the same expression they once used for corporate restructuring: something unpleasant but inevitable, and—most importantly—beneficial in the long run. In their stories, divorce sounded almost like a promotion, just with less champagne.

Emily caught herself feeling that, in these narratives, her own life resembled a statistical error. Her marriage had not collapsed, had not cracked, had not required urgent liquidation. It continued to exist, as though ignoring all known economic and psychological laws. This began to feel not like a virtue but like a suspicious anomaly.

At times, she felt she had missed some crucial moment—like someone who failed to sell a stock in time and was now forced to pretend to be a long-term investor. In conversations with colleagues, she could not contribute to discussions about lawyers, alimony, or awkward Sundays without children. Her stories about family dinners sounded tactless, like bragging. Happiness, in this context, was not something one was supposed to mention at all—it sounded either like a lie or a provocation.

Emily began to feel like a professional outlier. In a world where successful people fell apart neatly and on schedule, she remained married like someone who still used cash. This irritated others mildly and confused her profoundly.

She increasingly thought that her happiness was not merely inappropriate—it disrupted the balance.

This thought did not frighten her.

It seemed logical.

3.

Over time, Emily developed a simple—and, she believed, elegant—theory: professional success and domestic happiness were inversely proportional. The higher the position, the lower the likelihood that someone was waiting for you at home not out of duty, but simply because they were used to the sound of your voice. This was not cynicism but empirical observation, based on years of work and dozens of biographies arranged in her mind like deals in a data room.

In the investment world, everything was built on sacrifice. No one asked what, exactly, you had sacrificed—marriage, health, your nervous system, or the ability to sleep without a phone under your pillow. What mattered was that there had been a sacrifice. Without it, success looked suspicious, like a deal without due diligence. A Managing Director with a happy family was perceived roughly the same way as a report without footnotes: pretty, but unsettling.

Emily always remembered her mentors—people who had taught her to “think strategically.” They spoke of corporations as though the corporation were a dragon, demanding constant offerings. Almost all of them had either ex-spouses or current ones in the process of becoming exes.

Divorce, oddly enough, often coincided with career advancement. After it, people became more focused, colder, more efficient. They stayed in the office longer, replied to emails faster, and never rushed home. Their schedules opened up—and it was magical. The family disappeared, and with it the need to explain why you hadn’t come, hadn’t called, hadn’t noticed.

Emily liked to think of divorce as a form of optimization. Liquidation of a non-core division. Sale of an asset no longer aligned with strategy. She sometimes caught herself applying business categories to marriage: synergies, costs, growth potential. And every time, the conclusion was the same—a happy marriage produced no measurable benefit. Happiness resisted quantification. Try explaining at a performance review that you didn’t answer an email at 11:47 p.m. because you were reading another bedtime story. It sounded like a pathetic excuse.
Unhappiness, by contrast, was persuasive. It explained everything: irritability, ambition, insomnia, the desire to earn more—if only to compensate.

At times, Emily thought her happy family undermined her professional reputation. As though someone might one day notice that she spoke too calmly about risk, smiled too confidently, complained too rarely. In a world where suffering was considered a hidden but mandatory component of success, her life looked like a model error.

She did not envy her divorced colleagues—rather, she felt like an illicit exception among them. As if she had gained access to something not covered by the rules of the game. And if rules truly existed, then sooner or later, breaking them would have to be punished.

This thought did not strike her as sad.

It struck her as rational.

And almost inspiring.

4.

On Tuesdays, she and Michael usually preferred to dine out. It wasn’t a tradition but an agreement—almost a contract: one evening a week without children, without papier-mâché volcanoes, without questions about death and broccoli. The nanny stayed with the kids, the apartment sank into rare silence, and Emily and Michael went to a restaurant—usually small, reliable, with waiters who remembered their patrons but were not too talkative. Emily appreciated such places. They reminded her of well-managed assets: no surprises, no emotions, no excess enthusiasm.

That evening unfolded as usual. The wine was at the right temperature. The steaks were particularly good. Michael talked about school, about a new principal who wanted to “modernize” the curriculum without quite understanding everything that was already modern about it. Emily nodded, listened, pretended to be deeply interested. She was always good at pretending.

“Mike,” she said finally, carefully setting down her fork as though concluding negotiations. “We need to get a divorce.”

He did not freeze. Did not go pale. Did not ask What?! He simply looked at her—with that same calm gaze that usually worked better on Emily than any argument.

“Is it something I did?” he asked after a brief pause.

“No,” Emily said too quickly.

“Someone else? Do you have an affair?”

“No.”

He tilted his head slightly, like someone trying to follow the logic of a poorly structured presentation

“Are we missing something?” he asked. “Because if we look at the latest data, we’re… happy.”

The word happy sounded inappropriate in the restaurant—almost indecent. Emily felt irritation rise inside her, not at Michael but at the wording itself.

“Exactly,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

Michael frowned.

“Emily, if you want to say there’s someone else, just say it. I’m an adult.”

“There’s no one else.”

“Then tell me what’s wrong.”

She looked at him closely, almost with professional curiosity, and suddenly realized that telling it straight would mean listing things that did not exist. It would be unconvincing. And she disliked unconvincing arguments.

“I have many reasons,” she said calmly. “Too many.”

“For example?”

“I don’t want to voice them.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Why not?”

“Pardon the cliché, but I don’t want to make a scene,” Emily said.

“Emily, we’re sitting in a restaurant. We’re talking about divorce. This is a scene.”

“Not yet,” she objected.

He looked at her with a faint smile, in which confusion and patience mingled.

“So you have your reasons, but you won’t tell me?”

“I won’t.”

“To spare my feelings?”

“To avoid sounding like an idiot.”

Michael sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“We live well. We have three children. We like being together. You’re proposing to destroy all of this for no apparent reason.”

“Not for no reason,” Emily said. “It’s a well-thought-out strategy.”

He fell silent, studying her as though trying to find familiar features in her face.

“You don’t want to be with me?” he asked finally.

“I don’t want to be an exception,” she replied.

He shook his head.

“You’ve completely confused me.”

“On the contrary.”

Michael looked at her again—attentively, without reproach.

“Let’s do this,” he said. “If you truly want a divorce, answer just one question: are you sure you’re leaving me—and not the idea of your own happiness?”

Emily did not answer right away. She took a sip of wine and stared across the table, somehow confident that the present reality should not exist.

“I just don’t want,” she said at last, “for everything to end too well.”

And for the first time that evening, it seemed to her that she had told the truth.

5.

The next morning arrived too punctually. That was the first thing Emily noticed when she woke up. There was no pause between yesterday and today. The world did not take a respectful break, did not allow time to process what had happened. The alarm rang at 6:20, as always, as though divorce were no reason to change the schedule.

Michael was already in the kitchen. That, too, had not changed. He was making coffee with the same calm with which he had accepted the news of the end of their marriage the night before—that is, with no visible signs of panic, which was especially irritating. The children were still asleep. Goldman was relaxing on the windowsill, demonstrating with his entire demeanor that family drama did not concern him, as long as the bowl was full.

Emily entered the kitchen and sat at the table. Everything looked suspiciously correct. The coffee smelled as usual. The toast was browned with the kind of precision that left no room for tragedy. She caught herself thinking that the morning after proposing divorce should look different. More fragmented. More symbolic. Someone should have forgotten to turn off the stove, or at least dropped a cup.

Nothing of the sort happened.

Michael set a mug in front of her—the same one, with a barely visible crack near the handle, which he had been meaning to throw out for years but never did: an object that didn’t interfere, yet demanded attention. Emily thought it was a bad metaphor—and immediately approved of it.

They barely spoke. Not because there was nothing to say, but because everything had already been said—and nothing resolved. Emily scrolled through her emails, flagging messages that required immediate replies. The markets were already open. Clients were waiting. The world once again reminded her that it was far more stable than family life.

A few minutes later, Olivia entered the kitchen—already dressed, with a focused facial expression. Ben followed, sleepy and philosophically irritated by the mere fact of being awake. Lucy ran in last, wearing pajamas that had been clean just yesterday.

“Mom,” she said, “you’re strange today.”

Emily flinched. It was too close to the truth.

“I’m just thinking about something,” she replied automatically.

“You always think,” Ben observed. “Other moms don’t think, and mine isn’t like the others.”

Emily wanted to say something ironic but stayed silent. Michael poured juice like someone who understood that stability was not the absence of catastrophe, but the ability to continue a certain routine.

At some point, Emily realized she was facing an entirely ordinary day, no different from other ordinary days. No one had become unhappier.
No one had become freer. Even she herself did not feel relieved—only slightly deceived, like someone who had signed an important document and then discovered it had not yet been filed.

On her way to work, she caught her reflection in the elevator glass. The same woman. The same suit. The same composure. Had she not remembered the restaurant chat with Michael, she would have noticed nothing unusual.

And that was the most disturbing part.

The divorce she had conceived was not beginning. It did not feel real. It left no trace. It did not even come with a morning-after hangover. It existed only in her head—as a strategy not yet approved.

As the elevator doors closed, Emily suddenly thought: perhaps the most frightening thing was not that she might destroy happiness.

But that happiness might turn out to be so resilient that even her determination could not harm it.

That thought followed her all the way to the office.

And refused to let go.

December 2025
 

Both versions–in English and in Russian– are the author’s.