“Later,” Vera assured Mira, trying not to feel too guilty about her white lie. “I’ll tell him later if he’s in a better mood.”
Mira didn’t catch the lie. “Not even a better mood makes news about his mother easier to swallow. The hospital called with an update. Not that it was anything good.”
Oh.
Vera tried not to show her surprise that the cause of her irritation wasn’t exactly unknown. In a way. The few passing comments Vaslav made about his mother let her know the important things. They weren’t close, he didn’t care to be, and Vera should count herself lucky that she hadn’t met the woman personally.
“I didn’t realize she was so ... sick,” Vera said, choosing her words carefully.
Mira showed little sympathy. “Natalia spiraled quite badly these past few weeks. Eventually, every party ends.”
Given her age, Vera thought the woman might have said goodbye to the party decades ago.
“Either way,” Mira muttered in a sigh as she turned to face the bare, brown walls again, “she’s better where she is. And as Vaslav told me when the doctor first called, even that is more than she deserves.”
That statement should have ended whatever curiosity that remained in Vera about Vaslav’s mother. If even Mira, a woman who showed unwavering kindness, could say a woman deserved her agony without even her son knowing she was going through it, then who was Vera to argue with it?
Too bad curiosity didn’t work like that, though.
*
“H-hello?” Hannah’s groggy voice answered. After Vera’s second call. It almost went to voicemail like the first.
“Are you still sleeping?” Vera asked.
Crawling close to two in the afternoon, even that was a little long for Hannah to be sleeping in. Had that been Hannah in Vera’s shoes, she would have questioned it, too.
Hannah’s responding groan was only mildly annoyed. “I can hear you judging me, Vera.”
“Bullshit.” But it was midday, mid-week, and that truly said something. Hannah didn’t particularly have a lot to do in Moscow at the moment, but she also had practically no responsibilities. Vera couldn’t help but think her friend might be taking advantage of both those things. As she should. “Were you out last night?”
Hannah’s muffled laugh crackled through the speakers. “Who’s nosy now?”
“Shut up.”
They were both terrible.
It was what it was.
Hannah sighed, then, admitting, “I did go out—he was here when I got back. Stayed later than he promised this time, too.”
Vera’s eyebrows shot high. There was only one possible he that she knew about in Hannah’s life at the moment. “Who—Igor?”
Another groan was Hannah’s only reply.
That wasn’t enough for Vera.
“Are you serious?” she asked her friend in a rush despite trying to tamper her tone.
While she’d closed the connected doorway to the stairwell that led up to their private rooms, the man could sometimes hear a water drop falling from a tap at the other side of the house when the sharp sensitivity came in to torture his pain a little more.
“And you didn’t call to tell me—wait,” Vera said, stopping mid-sentence when she realized the more important thing Hannah had said. “This time? When did it happen the first time?”
“You’re too loud when I’ve just woken up.”
“It’s practically two!”
Hannah hemmed and hawed a while longer before muttering, “The night of your wedding, okay?”
Right.
Vera could have guessed.
So it brought her right back to the first thing she’d asked Hannah which was now more like a joking accusation. “And you didn’t even call me.”
Hannah’s soft, tired laugh told her friend they both knew that neither was all that mad. “It hasn’t even been a full week since you got married. I was trying to let you have time with your husband.”
Fair enough.
“But I also need time with you,” Vera said. “We should do that. Soon.”
That perked Hannah’s interest.
“How soon?”
“What are you doing this weekend?”
“Not much,” Hannah deadpanned, but she didn’t offer anything more to explain the change in her tone. Vera opted not to push.
She also chose not to mention the paperwork for a recent wire transfer that had been paid to a facility in the city that she found on Vaslav’s desk while chatting with her friend. He had a bad habit of letting private documents lay around where it could easily be found if someone was looking. Or more concerningly, it was a sign that Vaslav was having trouble remembering certain short-term memory things.
Vera would put the transfer invoice away, but she wouldn’t deny that she had also been looking for something like it when she stumbled on it, too. The call with her friend had simply been a justifiable excuse to wander mostly alone. If he found out, and asked.
It wasn’t a hospital, like Mira had said. Not according to the invoice. The facility currently housing Vaslav’s ill mother dealt more in psychiatrics. In fact, it’s name was Roseville Facility of Psychiatrics. While Vera had not called the number for the facility yet, she planned to.
“The better question,” Hannah said, drawing Vera back into the conversation, “what are you doing this weekend?”
“Pretty sure I’m coming to visit you.”
“Yay,” her friend crowed. “But remember, whatever we do, we have to bring your mom, too.”
Yeah.
Couldn’t forget that, either.
4.
The roads leading out of Dubna were more familiar than ever to Vera now. It was too early in the drive to be lost in her thoughts while the vehicle passed the long stretches of snow-covered trees and fields, but that’s exactly where she found herself.
Her driver—Igor lately, when possible and only if she really needed it because he, too, was busy—made her contemplative silence easier by focusing on the road ahead instead of attempting to engage his quiet passenger.
Her thoughts weren’t such a bad place to be at the moment. At least there, she could remember Vaslav’s tired smile and chuckle that morning when she told him her plans to spend Friday and Saturday with her mother and Hannah in the city. She hadn’t expected him to refuse her—and he didn’t—considering Demyan and Claire would travel home within a week or so.
“Get your time in with them,” he had told her, his voice still gruff with exhaustion. With his nose and mouth nuzzling her neck while he delivered those words, Vera was nearly willing to call her weekend plans off entirely.
Almost.
Vaslav, smartly, gave her a reason not to when he had added, “I need some sleep. I’ll be here.”
Rest—when he felt reasonably well—was impossible for Vaslav when Vera was near. A part of her adored it as much as she hated it only because exhaustion made everything worse for Vas. Oh, she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, complain that he wanted to spend every good day he had wrapped up in her, filling his every moment however he pleased because it pleased her, too.
But he paid for it, too.