Page 83 of Six Days in Bombay

Filip sat up straighter. “I do believe you. You’re not at fault. I am.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I administered Mira’s extra dose.”

“Of morphine?” My hand went to my chest. My heart began hammering my ribs. All this time I’d avoided him because I was convinced he assumed I was guilty!

He nodded. “She begged me to give her more. She was in so much pain. I couldn’t bear it.”

My breathing became shallow. He was confessing to a crime. My voice was a whisper. “You caused her to die?”

He sighed. “No, not intentionally. It’s— I didn’t know—” He stood.

He started pacing with his hands clamped on top of his head. He turned to look at me. “I didn’t know she was pregnant, Miss Falstaff. I couldn’t see… Anyway, she didn’t want me to know. I didn’t know until the miscarriage. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have—let her—get pregnant.”

No one I’d met in Europe, including her best friend Petra, would dare tell Mira what to do.

“She had been with many men and women, Miss Falstaff. I hope that doesn’t come as a shock.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It’s an arrangement and it works—worked—for us. I wasvery fond of her and she of me.” He paused. “She knew I would be there for her no matter what. But there is one person whom she kept going back to. He’s an old tutor of hers in Florence. Paolo. Perhaps she talked of him. She was his pupil…in many ways. Her painting improved under his tutelage. But when she began an affair with him right under her mother’s nose, it created no end of misery. Paolo was trouble. He encouraged it. He drove a wedge between Mira and her mother. He lied to Mira over and over. He was going to take care of her forever. He loved her so much that he would move anywhere with her. He didn’t. She stopped painting altogether. She couldn’t function. Then she got pregnant. He didn’t want anything to do with it. She came to me and asked me to take care of her. I did.” He looked at me and shrugged. “I have a medical degree. But there was a complication.”

My mind was reeling. Paolo talked about the first time Mira was pregnant, but he never mentioned it was his baby. Filip was saying it was. Paolo didn’t tell me that he’d promised Mira a life with him when he’d clearly had no intention of doing do. Mira had lied. Paolo had lied. Filip had lied by omission.

“She promised she would be more careful. Earlier this year, when she went to Milan for a week and told me it was to see an exhibition, I believed her. She didn’t tell me she was going there to see Paolo. She knew I wouldn’t approve. It was when we came to the hospital and she was bleeding that she told me. I was taken aback. I wanted to shout at her, ask her what she was thinking. After what happened the first time, it was dangerous for her to get pregnant. She said she was doing it for the money they were going to give her. She would never have become pregnant otherwise. We had money issues ever since her break with Josephine, but we always managed.”

Another thing Mira never talked about with me: money. She told me stories of which painting had gone to which buyer, sometimes imitating their big bellies or their affected pince-nez.It wasn’t until Amit and I overheard her at the Singhs’ party that I realized she was struggling. Both Petra and Jo told me they had loaned her money they never expected to get back.

Filip sat, resting his elbows on his thighs, staring at the rug under his feet. “When you started taking care of her at the hospital and she miscarried, she should have started to recover quickly. She was on morphine for the pain—which helped. But gradually, her pain came back. I suspected she was underplaying the pain because she wanted to be home and get back to her painting. I told Dr. Holbrook, but he said she might be suffering from gastritis or referral pain. He put her on more morphine.

“That last day, after you left the room and I came to visit her, she was having difficulty breathing. She said she was going to die. I told her that was ridiculous. She was in a hospital and the doctors were taking care of her. For a while, her breathing returned to normal, and she relaxed. But then she had a painful spasm in her abdomen and begged for more morphine.

“At first, I resisted. But seeing her in so much pain was unbearable for me. So I took the empty syringe by her bedside and injected her with more morphine.” He looked at me helplessly. “I didn’t know you’d just given her a dose before leaving the room.” Tears clumped his lashes. He hung his head and let them spill onto the carpet.

“Did I—did I leave the morphine in plain sight?” I had to know. I’d been so sure I hadn’t.

“No.” He glanced at me, coloring. “I’d heard nurses joking about your pharmacy. The man in charge wasn’t there, so I helped myself. I’m—I’m sorry.”

I sat, stupefied. Mira had died because of an oversight and not one of my own making. I should have been relieved. Instead, I felt hollow. And I felt sorry for Filip Bartos, who would carry his guilt with him for the rest of his life. I knew that I wouldn’t tell Amit or Matron about what Filip had just told me. I knew Mira would not have wanted it. He was her savior, as Paolo hadput it. Josephine, Petra and Paolo only knew what she chose to tell them. And I only knew what she chose to tell me. With Petra, she’d made me think they had a deep friendship when Mira had rejected her at every turn. Mira made Josephine sound like her devoted art dealer when Jo had fired her years ago. She glorified Paolo when he’d disappointed her in every way possible. Filip was one person she’d never made up a story about. He was her security. She depended on him.

Somehow, even after all I’d learned about her in Europe—the betrayals, the slights, the lies, the abuses—I could only see Mira as the girl who loved art and books and music and painted things greater than herself, than all of us. She was not as sure of herself as I’d thought, as I’d wanted to think. I needed a heroine, and she became mine. In reality, she was starved for a mother to love her, for someone to say they cared about her, not just her talent. Filip filled the hole in her life she was so desperate to hide from everyone. He saw her, all of her. And he hadn’t flinched.

Across from me, Filip wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

I took a deep breath. “Did you know she sent me to Europe to deliver paintings to Paolo and Petra and to Josephine Benoit, her art dealer?”

He shook his head. “No, but I know why. You put her on a pedestal, she said. She encouraged it, that much is true. But deep down, she wished you would open your eyes. To know that everything was not how it seemed, that people weren’t who they said they were. She knew you’d lived a sheltered life, Miss Falstaff. She also knew you needed to leave that shelter. This was her way of helping you.”

I was so surprised that I couldn’t speak for a moment. “When did she tell you all this?”

“After her second day at the hospital.” He rubbed his hands together. “I know how it seemed, Miss Falstaff. I’m a man who keeps to himself. Mira needed someone to talk to, someone she could trust. You were that someone.”

What a surprise to learn that Mira had talked to him about me. I cleared my throat. “I’ve brought the painting she gave to me. I don’t feel right keeping it.” I handed himThe Acceptance.I’d had it framed.

He barely glanced at the painting before handing it back to me. “Mira wanted you to have it, Miss Falstaff. I hope it brings you happy memories of her.”

Mira had even told Filip about the painting. She trusted him with everything. All this time, I’d assumed she and he lived separate lives.

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