I was unbearable, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I left the breakfast table, not wanting to make myself any angrier. At night, when the house went quiet, the silence felt different from what it had been in the penthouse. There, silence had been charged, but here, it only felt suffocating. I kept replaying themoment when Fyodor had stepped out of the elevator. The look in his eyes was etched in my memory.
The fracture when he left still replayed in my mind every second of every day. He thought I had betrayed him, and that thought followed me everywhere. When I woke up the next morning, I barely made it to the bathroom in time when the nausea hit without warning.
It was sharp and violent, and I gripped the marble counter as my stomach twisted. I hadn’t eaten much in days. There was nothing substantial to bring up. Just bile and emptiness. I rinsed my mouth and stared at my reflection.
Pale. Hollow. Angry. And unrecognizable. I was no longer the girl I had been just one week ago in the yellow sundress.
“Stress,” I muttered to myself.
Of course it was stress. What else could it be? But the next morning, it happened again, and this time in the hallway. Clara found me kneeling on cold tile, one hand braced against the wall.
“Elisse,” she said softly, crouching beside me. “You need to eat.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are clearly not.”
“I said I am fine, please leave me alone.”
She didn’t argue and simply helped me up. I shrugged her off once I was steady. But by the next day, the staff had stopped offering sympathy and had moved to quiet concern, which irritated me even more. The nausea came in waves now, and it was happening all the time. Mid-morning. Late afternoon. Once in the middle of the night. I stood over the sink again, shaking slightly, when Ilana’s voice came from the doorway.
“That’s the fourth time.”
I froze.
“What?”
“In a week,” she said calmly.
I turned slowly.
“I haven’t even been eating.”
“That’s why it’s concerning.”
“I think it’s just stress. Please don’t tell my brothers, or they will start forcing me to see a doctor.”
“Are you sure it’s just stress?”
“Yes.”
Clara appeared behind her, arms crossed.
“You’ve barely eaten,” Clara said gently. “And yet—”
“And yet what?”
“And yet you’re still getting sick.”
“I am exhausted from all the crying and missing.”
“Yes,” Ilana agreed. “But this isn’t just exhaustion.”
I laughed once, humorless.
“What exactly are you implying?”
Neither of them answered immediately, but the silence and the careful look that passed between the two of them was enough to tell me exactly what they were thinking. Something flickered at the edge of my mind.
