Page 73 of The Lies Between Lovers

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Vera couldn’t quite distinguish what the buzzing was that had woken her up, but despite the heavy confusion clinging to her senses that she couldn’t shake, she pulled off the thin Afgan blanket and sat up on the couch. Her quiet, dimly lit living room greeted her, but the muted flat screen with an unknown movie did nothing to help the thumping pressure causing pain in her temple.

She tried to blink the headache away. Even rubbed her knuckles into her temple to relieve some of the pressure there, but nothing worked. It probably didn’t help that lingering hunger pains worked their way through her lower belly—making Vera both breathless and nauseous at the same damn time.

How long was I sleeping?

Her thoughts seemed slow, too, as she was having trouble connecting the digital time on the satellite box under her television hanging on the wall to what she last remembered. How was it after twelve in the afternoon?

It was barely even sunset when she left Mr. Anatoly’s villa, locking it up tight and still feeling too heavy in her heart. Vera wasn’t the type to sleep on her couch, and after shoving a piece of toast and a glass of water down her dry throat the night before, she only meant to watch a bit of on-screen drama from her favorite television series before heading up to bed. She couldn’t even remember if she managed to get her phone plugged in upstairs where she kept the only charger beside her bed.

Except you didn’t make it that far.

Clearly.

Even her mind was against her.

The buzz that had first pulled her from a delirious dream came back with a vengeance. The slight movement in front of her on the oval glass coffee table had her blinking awake all over again. Not by much, though.

Vera still thought she was in a dream-like trance when she reached for the phone she’d left sitting screen down. Not something she usually did as it scratched both the glass of her phone screen and the table sometimes. Nonetheless, she swore she counted three seconds that it took for her to grab hold of the phone.

That churning nausea hadn’t waned.

Neither did the pain in her stomach that had moved more to her sides and back with a searing sharpness that felt nothing like hunger rumbling in an empty stomach. Vera’s lack of concern about the new pain should have been her first sign that something wasn’t right. But she figured it out when no matter how many times she blinked or how hard she focused on the screen of her phone, she just couldn’t distinguish between the different notification banners well enough to understand the many calls and messages she’d missed since yesterday.

Or that her phone was currently ringing.

Ma, she read.

Ma.

Ma.

All at once, Vera rushed out of the feverish state as a cold chill settled deep in her bones. She answered the call just before it would go to voicemail, but it took her more than a few seconds to be able to talk to the soft-spoken woman waiting on the other end.

“Can you hear me?” Claire asked for the third time. “Vera, are you there?”

“Ma,” she breathed, half relieved but still shivering. Except that for feeling as cold as she did, her forehead was hot to the touch.

“What’s wrong?”

As a mother does, Claire heard the new strangeness in Vera’s voice even over the phone, and an entire ocean away.

“Isn’t it like five in the morning there?” Vera asked.

“Your father was finishing business in Jersey this weekend. We took an early flight out, but—you sound like you’re in pain?”

Did she?

Apparently, she wasn’t ignoring the stabbing aches lower down.

“I think I have to pee so it’s giving me these cramps ... or something,” Vera said, trying to brush her mother’s concern off. “I just woke up—I turned the heat up too high, and it must have put me in a bad dream, so I was sleeping too hard.”

A pediatric nurse, back when her mother had chosen to work outside of the home, Claire heard something that sent her sirens wailing. “Fever?”

“I’m a little hot.”

“Where’s your thermometer?”