TL;DR: Actually, either read the whole thing or don't answer. This is more complicated than it sounds.

My wife and I have been illegally subletting our apartment from my mother. It's the apartment my mom and I moved to when I was in my late teens. Sometime after that, my mom moved out and we started subletting from her.

My mother has a long history of being emotionally abusive and my relationship with her is extremely strained, but it's a really sweet apartment in a good area and has been rent controlled for fifteen years.

I seriously doubt my mom is going to evict us for practically any reason because that would involve giving up her last source of control over my life and allow me to finally go full No Contact. Which I happily would, and she knows it. 

So I'm not interested in practical advice on that front.

Anyway, my mom's lease says no smoking and no pets, but the real landlords have always been extremely laid back.

When my mom and I first moved here, the official superintendents were obvious full-on tweakers who left used needles lying around their porch. The people who replaced them smoked a big hookah indoors.

As for pets, there has usually been more than one tenant with at least one cat. The last time the actual landlord was here, she was worrying that there weren't enough cats on the property to control the rat problem.

Since then, the true landlord has come down with dementia. I think she technically still owns the place, but some corporate entity is overseeing it. I'm not sure exactly what the deal is. 

My mom says she once went to the proxy-landlord and started tentatively asking probing, "hypothetical" questions about subletting, and they were like, "Stop right there. We don't want to know. We just want rent."

My wife and I both smoke a lot of marijuana, myself for my panic attacks and my wife for her chronic pain. My wife has a fused spine. She is extremely stiff in the morning, and has a lot of trouble getting outside to smoke before she's had her morning smoke. 

Nonetheless, we avoided smoking in the apartment for the first couple of years we were subletting.

Then, one winter, my wife was sick, and I couldn't get her to drag herself outside, so I put a fan in the window and we smoked in the bedroom, and it was downhill from there. 

But for a whole year, we were able to keep the smell from collecting in the walls by putting the fan in the window whenever we smoked. In fact, we were able to control the smoke to the point where when my mom dropped by, she couldn't tell. There were times when we had ten minutes to air the place out before her arrival, and she still couldn't smell it. 

And in fifteen years, none of the real landlords or proxies thereof have come barging in on short notice the way my mom does. 

My wife didn't like the fan, especially during the winter, but I would fight with her to use it. 

Then, one day, I got sloppy, and I got caught. 

My mom was furious. I explained to her that we had been able to control the smoke for a whole year, and she hadn't noticed. I explained to her that if she'd given me just ten minutes warning, she wouldn't have noticed that day.

I also explained my wife's chronic pain issues, as I had before. 

My mom sneered at me and said "World's smallest violin." 

Now for some background. My mom has seldom hesitated to ask for concessions on account of her health problems. When I was an adolescent, she denied me access to public education, completely failed to homeschool me, and screamed at me nonstop for an hour every time I woke her up from a nap. She justifies this in terms of her chronic fatigue syndrome and my supposed autism, the latter of which has been diagnosed only by her. 

And what she had to say to the 19 titanium screws in my wife's spine is "World's smallest violin."

At that point I wasn't going to thanklessly fight with my wife on her account. We completely stopped using the fan. 

So now apparently the whole apartment smells like weed to those who aren't scent blind to it. Whenever my mom comes around, she starts going ballistic about it and demanding that we give her a deposit and saying the deposit won't be enough and the landlord is going to sue her when we move out. 

Mind, we never signed anything when we moved in here, least of all anything relating to a deposit. This is an illegal, under-the-table sublet, as with all three units in this building.

I also have my doubts about my mom's lawsuit fears. No one has ever had a problem finding smoker tenants for this place, so I doubt they'd bother suing anyone over having to do that. When we leave, I reckon they'll still get more money because the rent control will reset, but if they wanted to bother evicting us, they'd have cause regardless because of the sublet.

And because of the cat, but we won the fight over the cat with my mom years ago. 

AITA? 

