Page 55 of The Breath Before Forever

And lucky her husband had not yet noticed the few, subtle changes. Mostly because he spent a good portion of the last couple of weeks in bed, the migraines coming and going without any real ease to his constant suffering.

“I just need to know,” Vera said. “If I am, I want to know for sure. Then, I’ll tell Vas.”

They could deal with what it all meant later.

For one single second, though, Vera needed to be absolutely sure. So be it if it was selfish, she also needed to know it when she was alone.

Hannah sucked in air through her teeth like a hiss. “Oh, wow.”

Yep.

That sentiment worked just as well, too.

“It’s a bit of a mess, I guess,” Vera said.

Understatement.

“What are we gonna do?” Hannah asked.

15.

It’s easy, Vera’s inner monologue ran inside her head. Come on, do it. A constant streaming loop of the same thoughts over and over, because frankly, she wasn’t wrong. This was easy. It wasn’t even the first time she’d done this very thing. Her thoughts ripped through her self-awareness with another line of instructions she should be able to follow through: Just take the fucking pregnancy test.

Yet, she couldn’t follow through.

Vera remained frozen on the toilet seat that had long since turned warm with her ass sitting on it. All the while, she couldn’t bear to rip her gaze away from the pregnancy test that sat on the sink directly across from her. Balancing precariously on the edge of the sink bowl, the cap side facing her, the test sat unused.

Early morning, muted daylight filtered in through the privacy frosted glass of the windows framing both sides of the mirror that Vera stared into—the face staring back, emotionless and paralyzed, didn’t entirely feel like her own.

She blinked.

The reflection blinked back.

Bathed in soft yellow warmth from the sunlight, one of her favorite features of the downstairs bathroom in the villa, she was still a little cold.

A knock on the other side of the bathroom door had Vera jerking out of her zoning as Hannah’s voice filtered through the painted white wood. “Did you do it yet?”

Vera let out a gusty breath, but it did nothing to soothe her frazzled nerves. She called back to her friend, “No.”

“You couldn’t take it yesterday, or last night, either.”

After releasing her last breath, Vera forgot to take another in until her lungs burned, and she opened her mouth wide to swallow a gulp of air that didn’t help until she’d taken a few more. Hannah’s reminder wasn’t needed; Vera knew good and well how obvious her cowardice was in that moment.

It changed nothing.

She still couldn’t take the test.

“I think I made a mistake,” Vera told the empty bathroom.

Too low for Hannah to hear on the other side of the thick door, or maybe her friend would have heard if she didn’t have her own pile of issues to currently deal with.

“So hey, Igor’s about to head out, and I want to say goodbye,” Hannah said, her voice slightly more muffled as she tampered her tone.

Vera didn’t feel any particular way about the news, and she’d done exactly what she’d promised to the night before when Igor showed up behind the wheel of his familiar SUV. She stayed out of sight, didn’t intrude upstairs while the two had their conversations ... or whatever.

She even pretended like she didn’t hear that bit, too.

By the time morning arrived, Vera had barely slept a wink, and the unused pregnancy test had not been far from her mind. Especially when her husband sent a morning greeting that proclaimed he both missed her, and didn’t sleep well, either.