Page 83 of The Lies Between Lovers

“Hmm.” The doctor pressed his lips into a thin line and unfolded his crossed arms to hold a large envelope down at his side. His white lab coat with his hospital tags clipped to the breast pocket looked like it could use a good ironing, but Vaslav figured a busy neurologist with a full patient load ... well, ironing wasn’t a priority.

“Lucky me to catch you this time, then,” Bogdan said, “seeing as how you can’t seem to pick up a phone when my office calls or call back when you’re left a half of a dozen messages.”

“Let’s not forget the appointments I refused to attend,” Vaslav added.

The real reason he hated this goddamn hospital was staring at him right in the face.

The doctor offered a tight smile. “Yes, or that.”

“What do you want?”

Vaslav didn’t even need to ask the man that question, frankly. He only did so because a part of him was mildly curious why the doctor would put in so much effort to track Vaslav down with only a third-party’s information to say that he had been around.

“Here.” Bogdan thrust the envelope, at least a centimeter or two thick, into Vaslav’s waiting hand. He nodded at it. “Everything we would have gone over had you actually shown up to my offices after the results and reports were finished is in there. And now that you have it, it’s off my hands.”

Vaslav stared down at the envelope suddenly aware of the weight in his hand and how it seemed to pull his arm down farther. The good doctor, a man Vaslav had paid good money to tell him what was happening inside his brain, looked like he was about to turn around.

Except he noticed Vaslav’s quiet stillness.

“Has it gotten worse?” the man asked him.

It was only because the corridor was quiet and empty that he chose to answer honestly. “The seizures, not the migraines.”

That was the same, at least.

“Or the memory and recall issues,” Vaslav added lower.

Bogdan nodded. “About what I suspected, yeah?”

He didn’t reply.

What would be the point?

A tall, slender man with thinning gray hair that looked more like tufts of cotton stuck to his head, Bogdan cleared his throat, seeming nervous as he opened his mouth and closed it more than once.

“Spit it out,” Vaslav uttered.

“There is medication that can help with the seizures—if we can pinpoint where it’s stemming from,” the doctor explained.

“Will it actually help?”

“You’ll have to give it time.”

He scoffed. Right, like everything else and nothing that worked.

“Is it what you thought it was?” Vaslav asked, glancing down at the envelope he held that might very well be his death sentence if he cared to know it. “The diagnosis?”

“I got the impression you didn’t want to know.”

Despite the truth to the doctor’s claim, that didn’t mean he still felt the same way. Especially not when he considered the woman he’d left behind with Igor and Kiril. If he tried hard enough, he could still hear Vera’s lingering laughter that had chased him out of the hospital room. He still had to find her a vase for the flowers, too.

“Well,” Vaslav muttered, his jaw tight with tension he couldn’t even grind away, “I might like to know now.”

23.

Vera’s evening took a turn for the better when her private physician strolled into her room just before the end of visiting hours. Igor and Kiril said a quick goodbye and a promise to be back if she was still stuck in the hospital tomorrow, and that was when Vera turned on her doctor expectantly.

“You can get me back home tonight, can’t you? Surely I can take whatever at home.”