Page 20 of The Breath Before Forever

His fists clenched into tight balls. He couldn’t deny that even standing there having this conversation about his mother with a woman who was nothing like Natalia, and deserved to be kept far away from her poison, took more effort than he wanted to give.

“I’ll be the happiest on the day she dies,” he admitted.

“I know,” Vera returned softly. “I hear it, and I’ve heard it before.”

Except she didn’t yet feel it.

Not like he did deep in her chest, woven into her sinew, and constantly racing through her bloodstreams.

Not like him. Not yet.

She couldn’t.

It was entirely possible that Vera didn’t have the capability to feel hatred—not true, unabashed hatefulness like he did for his own mother. It also couldn’t be ignored that she didn’t experience the life he had under the harmful, violent hands of a mother like his, too.

That certainly shaped the child.

And their love.

“She’s not like yours,” he told her. “She won’t be like Claire. She won’t make you feel safe, or loved, or even wanted. They are not the same, and if all you need is to know that, I’ll make it happen.”

Vera still didn’t move from her position just inches from the bedroom’s doorway. “What does that mean—you’ll make it happen?”

“It means exactly what I said. You didn’t need to sneak an attempt at a phone call to her doctor for that. Did you at least put the transfer papers away somewhere?”

“Why didn’t you?” Vera threw back.

They both knew why. It was how she used it as a weapon—even if it was only words—that cut the deepest. Maybe it was just defensiveness that pushed her to do it, but he had to remind himself that Vera’s desire to understand all the facets of his life and mind stemmed from the fact that she loved him, and was always trying to find a way to help. She meant no harm, but that very sentiment took on a whole new meaning for Vaslav with Vera when it did, in fact, hurt.

That’s why it stung like betrayal.

It wasn’t.

So why did it still have to sting?

“It’s not as if I made a hundred copies and sent them to every name in the phone book, Vas.”

“Why don’t you go find Mira like you said,” he settled on saying to the waiting woman by the door. “She’ll enjoy a second pair of hands to help wash the floors. She likes her work more when there’s someone to talk to.”

If anything, he thought that made his desire to end the conversation clear.

6.

“Can you believe that idiot?” Vaslav asked, ranting to himself as he crossed the bedroom floor and headed for the bathroom with a garment bag swinging from his grip. “Cashmere, he says. Better suited for retirement!”

“Who or what now?”

After a half of a week with little talk between Vaslav and Vera, spent mostly avoiding one another other than meals, he had started to think she was simply going to move her belongings right down the hall to the small guest bedroom. He’d woken up every morning alone, so what was he to think?

Not that he blamed her.

He did need the space.

“Are you using the drain as an ashtray?” Vaslav asked as he came to a stop just beyond the master bathroom’s threshold.

Vera barely glanced up from the opened book spread open on her bare thighs before she went right back to reading. Perched on a wooden foot stool in the open shower, she pulled another drag from a lit, white-filtered cigarette before extending her arm over the drain, and flicking a non-existent ash over top. Her actions spoke for themselves.

“Are we acting like you haven’t been hotboxing the bathroom all week with that weed Igor brought for you, then?” Vera asked as she flipped a page in her book. “Because the exhaust fan in here is better than anywhere else in the house?”