Page 50 of The Breath Before Forever

“I beat my head into the white cement brick of my isolation room thirteen times before I finally knocked myself out on the first night my mother succeeded in getting me locked in that fucking asylum,” Vaslav muttered through a thick, audible swallow. “As much as everybody just saw me as fucking crazy, I needed it all out of my head.”

“The only thing I wanted to forget when I woke up—see, it didn’t take me a long time to learn how my memories were gone after concussions—it didn’t even matter, I haven’t been able to forget that. What they all did to me. This fucking disease is gonna take everything, and everyone else, from me before I can let go of those memories. And when it doesn’t,” he said, pointing at the folded, ripped paper where Vera left it, “... when there’s days that shit’s fuzzy, and I need to put together this goddamn picture in my head, I’ve got enough to do that.”

Vera’s gaze drifted to the desk. “The whole file?”

He had one on her, too.

She didn’t ask about it, though.

Vaslav rubbed the pads of his fingers roughly into his eye sockets. “Not even the weed is helping with this.”

“Stop that, you know it doesn’t even help,” she warned.

His hands slapped to his thighs, and he glared at her from the side. Not that it bothered Vera.

“How did you know it wasn’t yours?” she asked.

Before she lost the nerve.

“I’d not touched her in almost three months,” Vaslav said, a hand cutting through the air as if to wipe the words away as soon as he said them. Not that they could be. “Too long—she would have at least been starting to show. Business kept me away, but Vera, I wasn’t faithful, either. That’s a different mess ...”

“And a different man,” Vera noted.

Or that’s what it sounded like to her.

His shoulders dropped a bit as they loosened, but it was only enough to make him appear tired. She bet he was.

“Who do you talk to about stuff like this, Vas?”

“I don’t want to—that’s the point,” he muttered.

Vera, still vibrating with nervous energy and a new ache in her heart, could no longer stand where she did. So far away from him. Once she was tucked into his chest, bearhugged in his trembling arms, she barely had room to breathe.

Who needed air?

She understood now why little lies or even hiding something could be the tip of a much bigger, and dangerous iceberg for Vaslav. How pregnancy tests could upset his entire evening if he had nothing but himself to confide in.

Who else listened?

Who really knew?

When he told her that he didn’t think she was the same as Irina, that he hadn’t made the same mistake, Vera hadn’t truly realized what he was telling her. Not until that moment, smothered in the warmth of him.

“I want to go to bed,” he told her. “I don’t have to think about those things so much when I’m with you. I almost forget them completely sleeping next to you.”

It wasn’t even late enough for the sky to have darkened.

She wasn’t at all tired.

None of that mattered.

Vera couldn’t think of one other thing she would rather do.

14.

For the first time ever, Vera rang the doorbell on her villa, and even knocked on the window glass of the front door just to make sure the person inside heard that someone was waiting outside. Not because she couldn’t just use the spare on her keyring—the only extra key that she knew of except for the one Hannah now used. Hannah wouldn’t care if Vera just walked in and announced her surprise arrival, but the noise she heard coming from inside the villa as she walked up the steps to where the familiar welcome mat waited to greet her.

“You know what, fuck you, too, Mom.”