Page 84 of The Lies Between Lovers

“Likely not,” her doctor replied with a smile.

The man sidestepped the ones leaving, his plainclothes telling her that the information from the first hospital must have been sent through to his office.

“I had a peek at your file—the doctor on call here is a friend from social circles,” he told her, shrugging. “I wanted to check in. Ivanka didn’t think the infection was that bad.”

Vera cringed at the mention of the nurse practitioner who also took calls from Wyatt’s patients as a go-between to ease the schedule. “I didn’t want her to think I was panicking. And it wasn’t that—”

“Vera, you had a fever of one-oh-three,” the doctor returned. “Even if the pain was manageable, the fever is dangerous. I know we’ve gone over this before.”

The raise of his brow had her sighing where she sat cross-legged on the bed. Pain became a part of the game that was her life, in a way. If there wasn’t some suffering in the dedication of her craft, then there was no love, either. Being the best meant learning how to work beyond her limits, and then more again. It meant days of aches and pains and still dancing ten hours a day.

But everybody had the point of no return, and the hardest thing for Vera to learn—and clearly, she was still trying—had been when to say enough was enough before she did more damage.

“I was getting antibiotics,” she said, and then pointed at the IV pole with the tube leading into the back of her hand. “I’m on them now. And if you talk to your friend, the one on call, maybe I could go home—”

“I think letting you get a good seventy-two-hour dose through IV is going to make sure the infection is entirely clear, actually. While they watch that fever.”

“It’s been low grade all day. The nurse told me.”

“And?”

His challenging tone and wide grin had Vera laughing. He often reminded her of her grandfather, Anton. A big bull of a man with a head full of black salt and pepper hair, and a friendly smile if he liked you. With a chest and arms that seemed to bulge out of the light blue silk dress shirt he’d stuffed himself into—but for all that muscle and looming size, he was a teddy bear.

Doctor Wyatt Hudson had been Vera’s general practitioner since she first came to Russia. Because she was still in the process of learning to speak and write in russkiy yaz’ik her father had her set up with Wyatt Hudson who came recommended by a family friend. Apparently, he’d moved to Russia with the wife he’d met in America and opened his practice shortly thereafter.

“Other than that,” the man said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his opened, black trench coat, “I had Ivanka put you in for an appointment in a couple of weeks. She should have messaged you with the time. I want to follow up, and we had other things to discuss that were left over from your last appointment. How’s the pain going in to fall season by the way?”

“We’re not doing a whole check-up now, are we?” she joked.

Wyatt shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Might as well.”

“I rolled it a little while ago, so it’s ached a lot on and off recently.”

“No steady pain in the mornings or evenings that seem to come on without aggravation? When it’s cold?”

“None.”

“You might get a few years yet then before any arthritis flares.”

But it was almost guaranteed to happen eventually, she knew. Or that’s what every doctor said. As it was, Vera had major surgery to set the bones and correct the connective tissue damage in her ankle and foot, but she’d been lucky not to need hardware to do it. That was still a possibility should her ankle, that was already weak, get re-injured or start to cause her a lot of pain.

She didn’t want to travel that road.

“So you’re really not going to break me out of here even though you took time out of your night to come all the way across the city to check in?”

Wyatt chuckled, and nodded at the balloons and the vase of colorful daisies and roses coloring up the corner of the room. “Looks like you’re being taken care of. I think you can manage the seventy-two hours.”

*

The doctor stayed less than a half hour, but it was long enough for the announcement to come over the speakers declaring visiting hours to be over in the meantime. As he said goodbye at her door, she could see the shadow of another man waiting just outside the room. It was only after Wyatt had left that Vaslav entered the room and closed the door to just a crack.

She laughed at the folded white blanket and thin pillow he hugged under one arm like a football. “Did you steal that from some cart?”

Vera couldn’t imagine Vaslav nicely asking for the items, and he also wasn’t a patient. Speaking of which ...

“Aren’t visiting hours over?” she asked knowing good and well he would have heard the announcement made had he been inside the hospital.

“I may or may not have paid a nurse to help me out with a few issues,” he said, strolling over to the wooden rocking chair where he’d left his coat earlier. He dropped the blanket and pillow over top the coat, and then pulled the simple, black folding chair Igor had found earlier to the side of her bed where he could sit.