No judgement stared back from Hannah. Just solemn stillness that made Vera feel heard and understood.
“The test he made me take ...” Vera trailed off, knowing what came next wouldn’t sound good. She had to get it out, though. Someone except her needed to know. “I didn’t check it for a couple of hours, and by then, you couldn’t even read the screen. I was two weeks late for my last shot; three times last week, I smelled something cooking and almost didn’t make it to the bathroom before I puked. And look.”
Lifting the hoodie she wore, Vera peeled up the shirt underneath for her friend to see the way her breasts seemed to overfill her sports bras lately. She wasn’t ashamed of Hannah seeing her body; they spent years dancing and training side by side, changing from one outfit or costume to another. Modesty was the least of Vera’s problems.
“They hurt, too,” Vera added.
Just to make the point clear.
Hannah cringed. “Yikes.”
“I’m probably pregnant,” Vera said.
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.
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.