How often, especially in our youth, we fight against locked doors. We try to find behind them ardent love, African passions, a non-boring life full of incredible events. Alas, usually these doors remain locked. But in our unbridled desire for a “cinema” life, we do not notice that next to a closed door there is usually an open one. We are welcome there, they are waiting for us. And in ordinary life, calm love and stability are happiness, and a volcano of passions is good only in novels. Maria Metlitskaya needs no introduction. Her books are loved, read, passed from hand to hand. They are the kind that can help in difficult times, when you don’t know what to do or with whom to share. Under the cover of the book there is a novella and two stories, united by a through line. Which is better - a bird in the hand or a pie in the sky? What to choose: to knock all our lives on a locked door or to enter an unlocked one behind which they are waiting for us? After all, passion does not live forever, but calm, “ordinary” love, as it turns out, does.