Ring of Truth (24 page)

Nicholas already knew what orphanage Veronica had been adopted from, because it was the same as his own. Baby Home Number 36, quite a lengthy metro ride from Kudrinskaya Plaza, one of the few locations in Moscow Veronica could name. She might not have borne a child, but she knew with all her heart that this was something no mother could ever forget, not even as she lay dying.

She must have swayed because Nicholas grabbed her to steady her. He said something to her, but she couldn't quite catch it. Her mother—or whoever she was—said something as well, loud as could be, but to that fraud Veronica had stopped paying attention.

Though she had a thing or two she wanted to say, she realized. She turned back around to face the impostor, who still had faithful lap dog Fedosia at her side. Probably they had a deal to share the plunder they stole from the gullible American.

“You said one thing that was true,” Veronica told her. “No mother would tell her daughter she's dying when she's not.” She stepped closer. “But now we both know you're no mother to me. So why don't you tell me one more true thing. Who the hell are you?”

A lot of time was wasted as Veronica's so-called mother loosed a river of crocodile tears and wailed to the heavens over her unhappy lot in life, having an ungrateful daughter who didn't recognize all that her mother had tried to do for her. Fedosia pitched in with harmonic flourishes of her own. Watching it impassively, Veronica thought it was exactly the sort of melodrama that operagoers love.

Finally the falsity ran its course. Against the barrage of Nicholas's shouting and Veronica's refusal to be moved, the charlatan caved. She admitted that no, she was not Veronica's birth mother. She was Veronica's aunt, the younger sister of the woman who had given Veronica life.

“Where is she then?” Veronica demanded. “Where is my birth mother?”

The conniver waved a dismissive hand, as if she barely cared enough to reply. “
MERT-vye
.”

Veronica felt a punch in her soul when she heard that word again. Dead.

Her birth mother was dead.

She didn't know how she made it to the door of the apartment, but it was there that Nicholas stopped her by grabbing hold of her arm. He spun her around and pulled her to his chest.

She let herself be held against him. She felt the steady drumbeat of his heart against her cheek and his hand in her hair. “She didn't just lie about being sick,” Veronica whispered, needlessly, because Nicholas knew the twisted tale as well as she did. “She lied about being my mother.”

“I am so sorry.”

“I would've forgiven her if she'd only been lying about being on her deathbed. I mean, that's a monstrous thing to lie about, but I would've forgiven her. I can imagine her getting that desperate. If she'd admitted that, Nicholas, I'd be asking you to drive me to the bank right now so I could give her money.”

“I know you would.”

“But to lie about being my mother—”

Nicholas hushed her and held her and caressed her hair as if they had all the time in the world. It calmed her a bit, though still she felt oddly breathless. It was as if she'd run a race. Maybe she had. She'd been chasing a dream only to have it explode right in front of her eyes.

“I wanted to know what kind of people I come from.” From the other room she could hear Fedosia and her scoundrel of an aunt shouting at each other, no doubt one blaming the other for their scheme unraveling. “And now I do. Monsters who pervert the most precious things in life to get what they want.”

“That may be what your aunt is like but—”

“You were right, Nicholas. About everything.” She pulled away from him. “I didn't see it, I guess because I didn't want to.”

He forced her to look into his eyes, black with intensity. “Veronica, she gave you all kinds of reasons to believe her. She's living in your mother's apartment, for God's sake. Then there's the family resemblance. Plus she has every letter you ever sent your mother. And she knows a lot about you.”

“Now I understand why I didn't feel connected to her.” Veronica didn't care that she was contradicting what she'd said before. Nicholas would think she was a crackpot, but he probably already did. “Not only is she not my mother, but she's a lying, scheming witch.”

“You'll get no argument from me.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“We need our coats. And you have a scarf and a purse, too.” He backed away from her. “Stay here. I'll get them.”

When he returned bearing everything they'd brought with them, yelling something back over his shoulder, Veronica saw her trickster aunt in his wake, on her feet, walking steadily, yelling back, right as rain.

She's alive. That liar is living and breathing and walking the earth and my birth mother is dead.

The dream had been right. Her birth mother did lie in a graveyard buried beneath drifts of snow.

The pretender, her features twisted with fury, opened her mouth to spew something.

“Don't you say another word to me!” Veronica shrieked. She pulled open the apartment door with such force it slammed hard against the interior wall, rattling everything in sight. She flew into the corridor to escape the rant, other doors to other apartments opening and people peeking out to witness the commotion.

Veronica didn't wait for the elevator, which she knew would take an eon to arrive on the eleventh floor. She ran down the twenty-two flights of stairs, her heart and heels pounding, the smell of urine in her nostrils, Nicholas behind her following step by step.

Icy air smacked her face when she emerged from the building. She continued to run, her boots crunching on the hard-packed snow, her eyes squinting against the glare of the winter sun, as blinding as a surgical light.

She threw herself in Nicholas's car the second he unlocked the doors. All she wanted was to flee. Get away. Begin to try to forget.

How she would manage that trick she had no idea.

Nicholas tossed their belongings in the trunk. He joined her in the Renault and they sped away. Apparently his desire to be gone was as powerful as hers.

Another thought occurred to her. “Do you think Viktor was in on this? Or Masha?”

“No way. I've known Masha for years and she's a sweetheart through and through. I can't believe it of Viktor, either.”

“I keep thinking somehow he must've known my birth mother was dead.”

“I don't see how. He's a translator. He lives in Moscow. He wouldn't have been in contact with your birth mother unless she got in touch with the orphanage to try to find you and so needed a letter translated into English.”

“It was the other way around for me. He translated my letters to her and forwarded them on. He got only one letter back from her to me.” Which, as it turned out, was crafted by her malevolent aunt.

Veronica's head throbbed. She lay her hand on Nicholas's leg. “Please pull over.”

He obliged. “Are you okay? What is it?”

“You're going to think I'm nuts. I want you to take me to the train station.”

“What? Why in the world would you want to go there?”

She looked down at the ring, all pearliness gone. It was then that she started to cry. She hadn't when she'd been up in that wretched apartment but now she feared she might never stop.
I want to put all this behind me. Everything that has to do with Russia. And that includes you.
She heard a shrieking in her aching head but forced herself to keep speaking. “I have to be by myself, Nicholas.”

“Veronica”—he handed her a handkerchief from his bottomless supply—“we don't have to talk if you don't want to but it makes zero sense for you to take the train.”

“Please try to understand.”

She had to stop speaking. Why was her head in such agony? She blamed it on the good-for-nothing ring that had sent her on this pointless journey. It was no doubt trying to make amends for this fiasco by bombarding her mind with yet another ludicrous scheme. She attempted to wrench it off her finger, but of course it wouldn't cooperate. It was wedged on as if her finger were swollen from heat when in fact it was ice-cold to the touch.

She gave up. “All I can tell you, Nicholas, is that I can clear my head better if I'm not with you, if I'm surrounded by strangers who don't know what a fool I am.”

“Listen to me.” He twisted towards her. “Don't blame yourself for trusting that woman. I certainly don't blame you. The fact that you wanted to so much only goes to show what kind of woman
you
are. And when her story got too far out there, you spoke up. That had to be hard, but you did it. You should be proud of yourself for that.”

She was. At least she'd proved she wasn't so weak that she'd believe a preposterous tale just to fuel her illusions about her birth mother.

“Something else occurred to me,” Nicholas went on. “I don't want to raise false hopes, but we don't know for sure that your birth mother is dead. We only have your aunt's word for it and that doesn't count for much.”

“She is dead, though, Nicholas, I know it.”
I had a dream that told me so. I just didn't want to believe it.
More tears flowed as Veronica recalled that lonely frozen graveyard her mind had conjured. Nicholas began to protest but she stilled him with a shake of the head. “Please.” She swiped the tears from her cheeks. “Please just leave it be.”

Clearly he didn't want to do that. “It's just that since your birth mother did live in that building, we could ask around, find out where your siblings are—”

“I can't take another disappointment, Nicholas. And I've already taken up too much of your time. The truth is I just want to get away from here. I do have a flight to catch. I just want to get back to Italy. When I'm back in Florence, everything can be normal again.”

Eventually it would be, anyway. She would get back into the rhythm of rehearsing and performing and be able to push this nightmare to the back of her mind where she could lock it away.

“And in Italy I can sing.” She grabbed his hand and choked out the words. “I want so much to sing, Nicholas. When I sing I forget everything else.”

He laid his free hand on top of hers. “Are you really, truly sure you want to take the train?”

No,
her heart said. “Yes,” she told him.

He sighed. No one could mistake the sadness on his face, not even an idiot like her. “I don't want this to be goodbye, Veronica.”

How could it be anything but? He worked in Russia. She worked in the U.S. and Europe, and before this ill-fated trip had never been in Russia in her life. And at the moment she was hardly aching to return.

“You've been amazingly good to me, Nicholas. But we have no choice but to say goodbye.” She forced a chuckle. “Besides, you've got better things to do than ferry around some delusional diva.”

He made his voice light, too. “But you're
my
delusional diva.”

She couldn't let herself imagine that. She knew Nicholas was a truly rare find. But she'd chased enough fantasies for one lifetime.

She let go of his hand. He turned on the Renault and duly pointed it toward the mint-colored train station she had admired on the drive into town. He helped her buy her ticket, but she wouldn't allow him to wait with her for the train.

They said their goodbyes in the terminal, buffeted by hordes of bundled-up travelers rolling suitcases and rushing toward platforms.

“I wish it had worked out differently,” Nicholas told her.

Veronica had the idea he wasn't referring only to her so-called birth mother. She took his hands and raised herself on her toes to kiss him on both cheeks. “
Ciao
,” she said, and then she forced herself to walk away from him, not to look back, not to run back to his side, not to imagine what might have been.

What was that verse in the Bible about putting away childish things? She stood on the platform in the piercing wind and looked it up on her phone. It was from First Corinthians, Chapter Thirteen, Verse Eleven:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

That was what she must do. Renounce all childish fantasies, whether about her birth mother or a handsome stranger. Those were dangerous. They led to heartbreak. If nothing else, surely she should understand that by now.

On the train, her headache remained agonizing despite aspirin washed down with coffee, the caffeine cure that usually worked miracles. She couldn't let herself doze off to ease the pain because she couldn't get the ring off her finger and wouldn't risk another subconscious message couched as a dream. She had no desire to find out what else the ring wanted to tell her that she didn't care to know.

And she had an idea who and what another dream would feature. Not a graveyard this time, but an embassy. A man who worked there, a man who had been an orphan like her—in the very same orphanage, in fact. A man who worked all around the world, as she did, and who might be able to understand her like no other man ever could.

Instead of wallowing in that romantic illusion, she tried to lose herself in the scenery flashing past the train windows. A carpet of snow that stretched as far as the eye could see. Endless groves of leafless birch trees, their white bark splashed with splotches of black. Then, unmistakably, more hustle and bustle, indicating that the train was cutting its way through the outskirts of the metropolis.

When Veronica reached her station and exited the train and transferred to the metro line, she, who believed everything happened for a reason, recalled the grand cosmic reason why she had met Nicholas Laver. It had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with her birth mother. Without him the mystery of her birth mother would still overhang her life. Now she knew her birth mother was gone. Whether she'd been good or bad, Veronica would never know. Over time, maybe she'd come to believe it didn't matter. Regardless, Nicholas would always be a critical part of her reaching that understanding and she would always be grateful.

In her apartment in the Kudrinskaya Building, Veronica cleared out her belongings for her departure. Then she stripped down until she was naked as the day she was born. Of course now the ring slid off her finger, mocking her for the trouble she'd had with it earlier. She showered and washed her hair under the hottest water she could bear, as if scalding herself would purge the day's miseries.

In short order Veronica was back in the metro, this time burdened by her luggage and heading for the airport. She would arrive in plenty of time. Maybe she'd even be able to kiss Mother Russia goodbye sooner than expected, if she could land a seat on an earlier flight.

It wasn't until she was a few stops shy of the airport that she realized she wasn't wearing the ring. She dove into her handbag. There was the ring box. Empty.

She got off at the next stop, ignoring the man who kept trying to tell her that the airport was still two stops away and surely the blonde with the luggage wanted to go all the way to the airport? She waved him off and dumped the contents of her handbag onto a bench. She searched it thoroughly. No ring.

Then she set her rolling suitcase on the bench and conducted a second methodical search, even though she had no memory of packing the ring in her suitcase and had no idea why she would do such a stupid thing because surely she wouldn't risk that such an exquisite, even if maddening, ring would be snatched from an unlocked bag?

Veronica soon realized she hadn't done that stupid thing. Apparently she'd done something even stupider: She'd left the ring at the Kudrinskaya Building.

She straightened and put her hands on her hips. Of course she could just continue on and forget it. She was under no obligation to retrieve the ring. A dark-haired woman had handed it to her and now it would find a new home. Someone new would claim it.

Of course that new someone would not be handpicked. Nor would they have the little paper that explained everything, which was in the ring box and so hopelessly separated from the ring. Again Veronica opened the box, half expecting to see the ring magically restored. Maybe it would even cackle at her. No such luck.