Page 75 of The Lies Between Lovers

“What?” Vera parroted, internally cursing herself for letting her thoughts speak out loud.

“Never mind. As for your father ... Vera, he’s coming for a visit. That’s all he’ll say. Will you at least tell me what in the hell is going on now? You won’t pick up calls, you’re in and out of the country without a word, and—”

“I met a man.”

A long time ago, six-year-old, motherless Vera made a friend. Her first best friend. A sweet, soft woman named Claire who let her pick any book she wanted to read and smelled like cotton candy. Claire was her friend before she became her mother; and in a way, a part of Vera felt like she’d chosen her, too, and that was why the universe brought Claire to her father.

Of course, that was back when Vera was too young to know better.

Claire being her friend first never changed, though. It made things easier, there was no bitterness about the mother buried under a gravestone, and she was never afraid to go to Claire ... but especially when she needed a mother more than a friend, or vice versa.

“A man,” Claire echoed after a passing few seconds.

It was Vera’s chance to say more. Except she didn’t know what or how.

“When papa comes, will you ask him to bring the box?” Vera asked.

“I don’t know what you—wait, your birch box?”

Demyan had given her the keepsake treasure box the day she left for Russia at sixteen. But when she had sat down on her bed beside him and opened the hinged cover to see what was inside, she told him it wasn’t the right time. He promised to keep the box and its contents safe until she needed it.

“My birch box,” Vera said. “That’s the one.”

“Okay. And I won’t tell him about the man?”

Vera squeezed her eyes shut; her mind searched for a way around or over the proverbial wall currently facing her. There wouldn’t be one.

Vaslav was not a man who would be easy to love, but he had clearly decided to be hers nonetheless. At least, she wanted to make the choice he gave her—what one existed in the single option he intended for them both—before it was made for her.

And she wanted to protect her father.

“I’ll tell Papa about the man,” Vera said to her mother.

“Will he like him?”

That had Vera dying—of laughter.

Oh, but it hurt, too.

“Ma,” Vera said, gasping between the stabs of pain in her lower half and laughter she couldn’t control, “he’s going to hate him.”

21.

She should have known Feliks was a liar. Leopards didn’t change their spots, after all.

Feliks didn’t seem the least bit interested in Vera when she came to stand in the opened doorway of the man’s office at The Swan House. In fact, he looked her straight in the face, rolled his eyes as he muttered something under his breath, and went right back to digging in the drawer of a black filing cabinet that he had pulled open.

His blatant disregard for the fact she was standing right there only irritated Vera more than she had been when she saw the mess that waited downstairs in what had once been her studio. Her bad mood was made worse by the fact the pressure in her bladder and the pain in her lower half hadn’t eased in the last day, and the cranberry juice she’d been chugging to get her through to her late-afternoon appointment with her doctor had done nothing to help.

Her mother was right.

She needed antibiotics, and rest.

“Where did that stupid bitch put it?” Feliks asked in a hiss, shoving files back and then forward again in the drawer. Just as fast, he slammed it shut with a bang and yanked open another one with the same lack of grace that he’d treated the first. “It can’t be gone.”

“Are you busy?” Vera decided to ask.

Might as well break the damn ice.