Page 51 of The Breath Before Forever

Hannah hadn’t shouted again after Vera made herself known at the front door. In fact, when her friend pulled the brown door open, she didn’t even have a phone in her hand. The corner of the sleek, black device peeked out of the pocket of Hannah’s pink, oversized cardigan.

No smile waited for Vera.

Hannah didn’t even look happy to see her.

“What’s wrong?” Vera asked.

Visibly, her friend’s shoulders dropped a good inch or two. “Since when do you ring the doorbell and knock like that? It’s your house.”

“So?”

Hannah let out a shaky gust of breath, and raked a hand through the frizzy curls she had tossed high in a messy bun.

“I heard you on the phone with your mom,” Vera admitted when Hannah couldn’t hold her gaze across the threshold for more than two entire seconds. “And I was trying to make it less awkward because I didn’t even call to tell you I was going to come to the city and spend a night with you.”

“Maybe a call might have been nice.”

Yeah.

The way Hannah hugged her cardigan closer to her body, using her own arms to hug around her thin frame, told Vera a lot. It had been one too many days since she called to check in on Hannah after she left the house in Dubna. Vera took the blame for that entirely.

Sometimes, her husband just took up all the space in her head and life. All a once, too. He needed that unbridled, unapologetic attention from her, though, so she couldn’t regret or change that she might be spacey at times. A couple or a few days without a phone call could happen more often than it didn’t.

Not that knowing as much helped with her guilt.

Not at the moment when her best friend wiped at her eyes with the heels of her palms like she was a breath away from crying. Clearly, the news of Hannah’s pregnancy had not landed well, and she suffered for it.

That’s not how this should be.

Vera stepped over the ledge at the bottom of the door, and wrapped her friend in a tight hug right where they stood. Cold air rushed in through the open doorway, but neither of the two women bothered to close it. The entire street could see them embracing, or the way Hannah’s shoulders had started to tremble the second Vera hugged her, but none of that mattered.

“It’s okay,” she told Hannah the longer they lingered in the chilly entry of the villa.

The cold wasn’t good for the plants, either, but a few minutes wouldn’t do any damage to the hanging pots of vines in the hallway.

“It’ll be okay,” Vera corrected when Hannah sniffled, and still didn’t relent in the way she hugged back like a lifeline in a raging storm. Vera could be the lifeline. Her own issue—the reason why she’d made the surprise trip—could wait a bit longer.

Mumbled against Vera’s neck, her friend admitted the real reason for her current emotional state and why her phone call had gotten loud enough for people walking by the villa to hear.

“She said she’d pay for it.”

Vera almost didn’t hear Hannah.

Except she had.

“Pay for what?” she asked.

Not that she really needed to. Vera was almost positive of the thing her friend alluded to without needing all the details. She still wanted confirmation that Hannah’s mother, instead of choosing kindness and compassion for the situation her daughter found herself in, instead opting to pile more pain on top of an unplanned pregnancy.

“The abortion,” Hannah whispered.

Yeah.

Fuck.

Vera couldn’t imagine those words coming from the mouth of her own mother, and the flinch that raced down her body—secondhand pain from Hannah that she could feel soaking through to her—left her anger simmering all at once.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated again.