Accusation Read Online Free

can’t be a libertine with hope, it’s too dangerous.
    On the last scan all was well. Hold on to that. Hope. Better to hope. I’ll be thinking of you and holding out all my hope from here.
    What a peculiar angle of interest hers was: and yet impossible not to offer hope and mean it. What kind of monster would she be if she could not do this? Of course she wanted Greta to be well, to make a full recovery from the cancer and the attendant neurological symptoms, the fatigue, the memory loss, the slips in speech that David had described to her and which Greta had been in rehabilitation to overcome.
    Thursday was Sara’s birthday. David seemed to have forgotten, and how could she blame him. She would be a poor sport to remind him of it, at least right now. Anyway, neither of them had ever been the sort to set much store by birthdays and their attendant celebration, although Sara did remember the date of David’s, February 22. Nor did they have the sort of relationship in which they spent their birthdays together. That was fine. This triangulation, entanglement, whatever you wanted to call it. She had chosen it. She was turning thirty-six; it was not an exceptional year, just one more on the road to forty.
    David said, We won’t have results for a while, so there’ll be that agony of waiting.
    Let me know how it goes, Sara said. Call at any point if you need to.
    After she hung up the phone, she rose to her feet and paced back and forth on the patch of carpet behind her desk, as if walking along a humming wire, Nellie Wuetherick craning over her own phone on one side of her, Paul Rosenberg deep in the embrace of his keyboard on the other. She banged up against an internal wall with David, but this was exactly what she wanted because it stopped her from getting too close and if she kept this distance then he could not hurt her.
    Months before, there’d been an evening when David had poured dollops of single malt into a pair of her mother’s old crystal tumblers from the bottle that he kept in her kitchen, and they’d made their way, tumblers in hand, down the hall toward Sara’s living room, and David had turned to her and asked, Did you know that Karadzic, the Serb leader, wrote poetry? Sara said she did, someone at work had told her, and someone she knew in England, another journalist, had even sent her a translation into English of one of his poems. The shocking thing, or one of the shocking things, being that, while it was bilious with anger, it wasn’t as awful a poem as you might expect.
    David, she’d said, I love that you’d know I’d want to know something like this.
    His shirt collar was loosened, he was barefoot, showered, and when he touched his cool glass to her back, between her shoulder blades, the gesture moved through her body, her blood vessels pulsing in a thick, languid tock after sex. Beneath his surface formality lay a physical fluency, a fluency they shared. Then there was his care, their unusual intersection of interests, and the other ways in which he continued to surprise her. One night, they’d gone out for dinner, as they sometimes did in her neighbourhood, and he’d told the two men at the table next to theirs that she and he were Canadian journalists living in Russia home for a visit. The men, chatty, had begun by asking them what they did, and then wanted to know about Russia, and on the spot they’d had to fabricate this other life out loud. Sara had no idea what had possessed David to say such a thing, other than that he knew she’d spent a few years of her childhood in Moscow and could trot out a few Russian phrases, endearments: zaika moya, solnyshko moyo, my little rabbit, my little sunshine. Also, her parents lived in Moscow, her father having returned to work at the embassy there, after the years spent in Ottawa and in other overseas postings: Berlin, Brussels, Kiev.
    When Sara asked David, later, why he’d done it, he said because it was no one else’s business what they