Page 48 of The Breath Before Forever

“Helpful, Vas.”

He shrugged. “It’s not really for you.”

Well, that was fair.

So, why worry about it?

A sigh from across the room—filled with more relief than his last—drew Vera’s attention back to Vaslav. He extended his hand, a single piece of folded paper waiting for her to take if she felt like getting up from her chair. “Here it is—don’t mind the rip, Irina didn’t exactly intend on me finding it. She left it like that in the trash. I think she pulled it out of the fax too fast.”

“Where was it faxed to?”

“Here,” he answered. “The house. Two days before she died. The date’s on the doctor’s report. Take it and look for yourself.”

Vera tried not to be too bothered by the large hole in the floor as she walked around it to retrieve the paper from Vaslav. As she did, she figured out what about it had her so ... on edge. The hatch, although it opened from the top up, reminded her of the one that hadn’t opened on stage for her during her last show.

At least, the trap door built into the stage hadn’t opened when it was supposed to, and now, Vera was ignoring phantom pain in her ankle at just the thought alone because of the hole in Vaslav’s floor. Wonderful.

Trauma could be a bitch.

Vaslav, not aware of Vera’s inner war she wished didn’t exist, kept a studious eye on her after she took the tri-folded paper, half ripped across the very middle, and opened it right where she stood next to his desk. His unrelenting gaze kept her hyperaware as she carefully opened the document—a mistake.

She couldn’t hide the way her face fell.

Confused, her gaze skimmed down the doctor’s report, addressed, dated, and signed by a physician with a name Vera recognized.

Not for a good reason, either.

“You see?” Vaslav asked.

She did.

She didn’t want to.

Life had little care for her feelings—or so she had come to learn. The doctor’s notes had also been short-hand written in English, so she couldn’t mistake the news that had befallen Vaslav and his first wife just days before her murder.

“She was pregnant,” Vera said, fainter than she wanted to.

Vaslav cleared his throat noisily, an attempt to gain her attention, but Vera could no longer look away from the paper—a fax, apparently, in her hands. “That last fight of ours—”

“You fought over this?”

Vaslav shook his head. “I found that after. She already knew; why else would she have gone in for the bloodwork, hmm?”

Vera shook her head. “I don’t understand. You said the fight—”

“At that time, to me, it was only a possibility.”

Oh.

Her stare lifted from the paper, then, realizing how it must have felt for him to have fought with his wife about a possible pregnancy days before her death only to learn after it wasn’t a possibility at all. And after she was gone, well, it would never be a possibility again.

To have something, and then lose it—only to get it back but still be giving it away; grief like that could tear a soul apart.

Vera saw how it left Vaslav’s soul tired and tattered.

“You blew up a doctor’s office because they faxed a positive pregnancy result to your wife two days before she died?” Vera asked quietly.

She needed to ask it under her breath—like she was trying to give him the option to pretend he didn’t hear it—because she was scared of the answer. All the information Vera had managed to gather about Vaslav’s past was never far from her mind, even if the two didn’t talk about it. That was by his choice; her only option was to deal with it.