Vera shook her head. “I don’t understand. You said the fight—”
“At that time, to me, it was only a possibility.”
Oh.
Her stare lifted from the paper, then, realizing how it must have felt for him to have fought with his wife about a possible pregnancy days before her death only to learn after it wasn’t a possibility at all. And after she was gone, well, it would never be a possibility again.
To have something, and then lose it—only to get it back but still be giving it away; grief like that could tear a soul apart.
Vera saw how it left Vaslav’s soul tired and tattered.
“You blew up a doctor’s office because they faxed a positive pregnancy result to your wife two days before she died?” Vera asked quietly.
She needed to ask it under her breath—like she was trying to give him the option to pretend he didn’t hear it—because she was scared of the answer. All the information Vera had managed to gather about Vaslav’s past was never far from her mind, even if the two didn’t talk about it. That was by his choice; her only option was to deal with it.
“Her private doctor,” Vaslav clarified. Then, his tone and brow lifted when he added, “A friend, really.”
“What does that mean? Why did you say it like that with your whole face just—”
His fist slammed sideways into the desk with a snap. “I loved my wife, Vera!”
The yell, mostly just his raised voice from clearly being overwhelmed, silenced Vera instantly. Sometimes, she’d noticed that when high emotions were involved, it took Vaslav practically no time at all to get frustrated as he tried to talk. His way of dealing with that was getting louder.
To anyone who had knowledge of Vaslav’s violent background, his sudden bouts of aggression could be frightening or a warning.
His size alone meant when he was loud, everyone was sure to hear it.
Vera had to remind herself that she couldn’t shrink under Vaslav the same way the rest of the world did because she wasn’t scared of him. “You know, if you let people have more than ten minutes in a room with you, it’s not hard to figure out how to avoid shit like this. If you need a second, then take it. You dumped a lot on me with this.”
Across the desk, her husband cocked his eyebrow in challenge. “You dropped a lot on me upstairs.”
She heaved a breath.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she returned.
Even if she didn’t entirely understand why yet.
Vera placed the old fax back to Vaslav’s desk while he left his chair and headed for the wet bar. Only stocked with bottles used for decoration, and some wine Vera liked, he opted for the pitcher of fresh water that Mira kept stocked and chilled every couple of hours. Except in the evenings. She filled it one last time, and she went back in the morning. He didn’t have a complaint to make about the probably lukewarm water after downing a good half of a glass.
“Do you know why I really don’t want you to meet my mother?” Vaslav asked, smacking what water remained from his lips as he turned to Vera.
“Because she’s sick; you’ve cut her from your life, and—”
“She tormented Irina,” Vaslav interjected, more amused in his tone than Vera thought he should be considering the subject.
“Excuse me?”
Vaslav rolled his eyes, and after setting the glass upside down on the bar top the moveable wetbar, explained, “My apologies—it sounds heartless, yes? I sound heartless.”
“Well ...”
“Irina tormented her right back; they enjoyed it. I was a year into my marriage when my mother looked at me and remarked how boys married their mothers. I couldn’t forget it. I wish I had paid more attention when she said it. There’s a lot of history with this, some I can’t even remember that explains what I’m trying to convey here, but—” Vaslav sucked in a deep breath at the sudden cut off of his ramblings, and squeezed his eyes shut.
Vera didn’t move a muscle.
She didn’t even breathe.
“I didn’t make that same mistake a second time around, and I want you to know that first before anything else, Vera,” he said.
“But what does any of this have to do with what I asked?”
“Vera,” Vaslav said sharply, his eyes snapping open to land on her with enough heat to silence her questioning. “You’re not a replacement for Irina. You’re not her, and to me, you’ll never be. I didn’t make the same mistake my mother saw before I did, okay? I didn’t do that this time.”
His plea made her listen.
She nodded. “Okay.”
“I didn’t blow up a fucking doctor’s office because I knew the pregnancy existed; I did it so no one else would. It wasn’t mine, and Irina was already dead, so why give my mother fodder to disgrace a dead woman? I already had plans for the reason why it happened.”
Vera blinked.
Only a handful of things happened because of Vaslav after Irina’s murder.
“Do you mean her father—”
“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.