Page 56 of The Breath Before Forever

The knife of guilt stabbed deeper.

“Vera?” Hannah called. “Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she replied before Hannah spent one more second worrying about Vera’s selfish foolishness. She was a grown woman who made grown choices; these were simply the consequences, and now she had to deal with them. “Go say goodbye, Hannah, I hope you guys got everything figured out.”

“Uh, yeah,” her friend mumbled almost too low for Vera to hear. “Something like that. We can talk about it later. You know, after he’s gone.”

“Sure, right.”

Vera couldn’t hear Hannah’s retreat down the hall, but she did get a whisper of relief at the idea she was once again alone.

If you’re pregnant—

Her thoughts always shut off at that point in the question. Like her mind couldn’t wrap around moving further. If she was pregnant, what?

That was the thing.

The struggle.

Her reason for all of this.

She couldn’t answer that one question.

As quickly as being alone had brought her a sense of relief, it soon took her back to the cold grip of emptiness. Something she recognized came from the fact that she had waited almost two entire weeks to take the pregnancy test in her hand. She’d pretended as if it wasn’t a question hanging in the air over her head. She lied by omission every time she had a conversation with Vaslav because the knowledge of what might be stayed stuck to the back of her mind. There was no escape.

Now here she was.

Alone in a bathroom.

Simply thinking: This is not where I want to be. Or perhaps, in her heart she knew, this wasn’t where she should be.

Yet, having that awareness of where she should be—at home with her husband to do this—it didn’t change where she was. Never mind the fact that Vera couldn’t stand the idea of going one more second not knowing if she was pregnant.

The universe had a funny way of working. The second she reached for the test, the pressing urge of her bladder making itself known with sharp pangs, her phone beeped and the screen lit up with a blink of light. Not far away from where the pregnancy test sat on the rim of the sink, the phone laid on the counter around the elevated bowl.

Considering she’d been holding in her pee so that she didn’t waste the morning urine—the best to take the test—and she’d already yanked down her panties before sitting on the toilet, she had to make a conscious effort to keep the stream back.

While she checked her phone.

More surprising was the notification that waited for her on the screen. A request from a contact for a video call.

Vaslav.

That wasn’t like him at all. He did well to text, preferring a call more than anything else when he did want to talk on the phone. His ever-present paranoia didn’t allow him much more, and Vera tried more often than not to keep that in mind when all she wanted to do was check in throughout the day if she wasn’t at home with him.

Nonetheless, the opportunity was prime.

She couldn’t pass it up.

The simple request for a video call was the proverbial olive branch to correct every mistake Vera had made up until that moment regarding her new secret, and she grasped to it like a lifeline. She unlocked the phone, and accepted the request for a video chat, slipping her index finger through the ring handle to stabilize her video and give the camera a better angle.

Vaslav answered the call where he laid in bed, according to the slightly pixelated background. “Oh, that is how that works, yes?”

Vera smiled. “A video call?”

“I wondered if that’s what that icon did when I clicked on it.”

“You were just staring at my contact card wondering what the different icons did?”