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.”
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.
Hannah deserved to hear it, even if no one else had the nerve to say it.
“She’s gonna cut me off,” Hannah said, shrugging like it might make the reality facing her disappear. “Starting next month, I guess. If I don’t—”
“She’s not really going to do that to you. Because you’re pregnant?”
Vera couldn’t wrap her mind around that. She was just self-aware enough to comprehend that her own loving parents gave her a different experience and outlook on parenthood and what it meant than what others had to live through.
Look at Vaslav.
He hated his mother; swore to the heavens that she despised him, too, and that’s how his own hatred had started. How could a parent look in the face of their child and treat them like trash—important and useless?
How?
Hannah stepped around Vera to swing the front door closed. Once it latched shut, she sighed and said, “No, she will, because she knows it’ll work. Or she thinks it’ll work,” Hannah corrected, wincing at her mistake. “I’m not going to kill my baby just because she’s pissed off that I won’t tell her who the father is, and I won’t move back to Italy where I can—once again—be under her thumb twenty-four seven.”
Vera cringed. “She did help you with Viktor.”
“And it came at a cost,” Hannah returned. “My dignity. A lot of pride. Do you think it was any better for me to listen to her verbally abuse me day after day as opposed to Viktor hitting me every time I turned around?”
Vera knew Hannah also hadn’t been given much of a choice. At the time, her mother was the only person in her life with any money and influence to help her out of the bad situation with her ex-husband. Not all sacrifices made a person grow.
Hannah shrugged. “It still hurts, Vera. Abuse is all the same. It still kills.”
“People who can’t love themselves shouldn’t have kids,” Vera muttered, the first thing flying through her mind to also leave her lips. “How can they love their kids if they can’t even feel that way about the person creating the baby? It’s not like an actual child that depends on you to live for the first two decades of their life is going to fix all the things wrong in someone’s life, and then what happens? People put all their pain and trauma into littler people who grow up to have bigger problems because of it.”