– We'll eat less – the parents joked. This was Valentina's kingdom, there was a locker with her favorite books, there was an aquarium with fish on the windowsill, and Valya always carried her small laptop with her. Once upon a time, the Kotenko family of three people: Maria Semenovna, Nikolai Fedorovich and ten-year-old Valya moved to noisy and huge Moscow from a small provincial town in southern Russia. It was a terrible 1994, there was no work, a series of economic cuts took place in the city, Valya's father and mother were fired and the family was left without means of livelihood. Maria Semyonovna tried to sell pies on a busy highway that connected neighboring larger cities. Valya helped mom while Dad was working in the garden, so as not to be left without supplies for the winter. So they lasted a year, money was sorely lacking for food, there was nothing to say about clothes and shoes. At a family meeting, it was decided to sell the house and move to Moscow in search of work and a better life. The Kotenko family was very lucky, the buyer turned out to be a Muscovite who had been looking for a good brick house in an ecologically clean area for a long time, but this was not the main reason for a quick purchase without bargaining. The Muscovite, as it turned out later, was a bandit and tried to take his beloved wife, mother and two sons away from criminal squabbles as soon as possible. At the same time, Egor, no matter how strange it may sound, turned out to be not only a decent person, but also a good friend in relation to Valya's family. He instructed his lawyers to help arrange an apartment in the Marino area, called the school principal and effortlessly got Valya's mother a job. It turned out to be more difficult with dad, since the engineering profession was absolutely not in demand in the 90s, so Egor arranged for dad to be an administrator at his restaurant. Dad didn't have it easy at first, but he quickly got used to it, controlled suppliers, monitored waiters for fraud, learned how to make menus for banquets with the head chef and helped throw drunks and rowdies out of the restaurant.
All the money earned over 10 years, mom and dad changed into hundred-dollar bills and put them in a stash. It was for Valya's apartment. Wise parents decided not to spend money on expanding housing conditions, but to give their daughter, albeit a small, but their own, personal apartment, especially since the daughter, according to her mother, was already marriageable.