Chapter 5
Ambra stamped her feet against the cold and peered in through a store window while she thought. Should she call Grace to say that this job was going down the drain? Grace probably had at least ten other reporters out in the field right now. Hundreds of national and international news reports to read and prioritize, hour in and hour out. One lone reporter, way north of the Arctic Circle, who couldn’t get hold of a low-priority interview subject was hardly very important.
She wanted to get back to Stockholm and the office. Wanted to be where the action was, loved the pulse and the energy of the newsroom and hated this dump of a town. Imagine if something huge happened right now, and she missed it because she was here?
There was a time, just a few years ago, when she got to report on important things, to write articles that made a difference. That was before they got the new editor-in-chief. After that, everything went downhill. She and Dan Persson didn’t click at all. Just thinking about it made her stomach ache. She wanted nothing other than to work for Aftonbladet, it was that simple. She knew a lot of people thought she was confident, but she really wasn’t. She didn’t want to lose her job. Couldn’t. Because if she couldn’t be a reporter, she genuinely didn’t know what she would do.
She started to walk as she blew hot air between her palms and her gloves, trying to warm up her hands. She passed a tourist shop. The place was crowded with people, offering snowmobile rides, trips to see the Northern Lights, dogsledding, and ice fishing. She stopped. The window was full of Sami Christmas decorations, souvenirs, and fluffy hats. Packages wrapped in red ribbon gave the place a cozy holiday feeling. Her eyes fell on a pair of earmuffs. They were the world’s lamest accessory, but when she was a kid she had wanted a pair so much she practically hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Not that she ever got any. She hadn’t gotten any Christmas presents at all.
She turned away. She’d promised herself not to care about the approaching holiday—it was just a few days she needed to get through—but she could feel her mood worsening the closer the damned day came. A young girl was coming toward her with a man, presumably the girl’s father. They were chatting, the man holding the girl’s hand tight, listening, nodding, stroking her hair. Ambra swallowed, looked away.
As she quickly crossed the road, her cell phone rang.
Praise God and Hallelujah, finally! She quickly accepted the call as she plugged in her headset. She pushed the headphones into her ears.
“Hello, this is Elsa,” she heard on the other end of the line.
“Hi! How are you?”
“Good, thanks.” And then it sounded as though Elsa giggled.
Ambra glanced at her watch. It was only five o’clock. “I’m so glad you called. Could I come over? Now? Or tomorrow?”
“No, no, not tonight, I’m expecting company. And tomorrow is Christmas Eve day.”
“I can do tomorrow,” Ambra said quickly, hoping Elsa wasn’t going away or hosting thirty-six relatives at home. People rarely had time to meet on Christmas Eve, the biggest holiday in Sweden. “Is that okay for you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Could we come over to your place? It’ll be me and a photographer.”
Silence.
“Elsa?”
Elsa giggled again, and Ambra could have sworn she sounded drunk. “Sorry. That’s fine, dear.”
“So tomorrow morning at ten?”
Elsa said they were welcome, and Ambra hung up, hugely skeptical about the entire piece. She pulled out one earbud and continued to stamp life into her feet. Her cell phone rang again. Shit, had she changed her mind? But this time, it wasn’t Elsa.
It was Jill.
“Are you at work?” Jill asked the moment Ambra answered.
“Nah, in Kiruna.” Ambra caught sight of her reflection in yet another store window, phone in hand, headphone in ear. Sometimes, it felt like all she did was talk on the phone. “You?” Jill was an artist, and she spent more time on the road than she did at home.
“I’m so tired, I can hardly remember what the town’s called. What’re you doing there? I thought you hated Kiruna.”
Ambra saw her reflection smirk. “I hate most things.”
“True. Me too. Everything fine with you? Sure you don’t want a Christmas gift?”
“Completely sure,” Ambra replied firmly.
Jill earned roughly the same in one week as Ambra earned in a year, so things quickly got strange when it came to giving gifts. Having one of Sweden’s most successful singers as a foster sister wasn’t always easy.
“I’m due onstage soon,” said Jill. “And I’ve been invited to dinner with some county governor afterward, so I just wanted to call and say hi before. I’d prefer to skip the dinner. It’ll be all canapés and champagne and five courses and a load of boring people.”
“Sounds better than my evening.”
“Nah, it gets boring in the end too. Well, I need to go warm up my voice. Don’t work your ass off. Kisses.”
That was something new Jill had started doing. Ambra remembered seeing it on Instagram too. Kisses. She hated it. Jill moved in a bizarre world of artists with strange rules of interaction that Ambra had never understood.
“Bye,” she said, ending the call.
She looked up at the sky. That was something she remembered from her childhood. How bright the stars were up here. Did astronomers ever get into conflicts like she did at the newspaper? Arguments about being the boss’s favorite, competition for interesting jobs, e-mails from anonymous haters. Of course they did. The entire academic world was like a soap opera. Early in her career, she wrote a report on professors who took bribes to raise their students’ grades at a particular Swedish college. Her first death threat arrived after that article. She still had it, in a frame, on her desk. Macabre, maybe. Though not as macabre as threatening a young, female journalist with anal rape. There hadn’t been any mention of that in the job description. Being called whore, slut, and traitor on a daily basis.
Ambra decided to keep walking. Yes, she was freezing her ass off, but she needed to clear her mind. The snow crunched beneath her feet as she crossed the road. The air was so cold that it glittered in the glow of the street lamps. The scent of ginger cookies and mulled wine hung over the streets. That familiar fragrance of companionship. But it’ll be over soon, and then it’s an entire year until next Christmas.
She was still trying to pep herself up when the façade of the hotel appeared. She hurried toward it. A man came out of the entrance and headed straight toward her along the sidewalk. Wasn’t it the same man, the one from the restaurant earlier? The one with the sexist T-shirt? He seemed to be deep in thought. Ambra was on the verge of stepping into the road, but then she decided to stubbornly continue on the sidewalk. The man was getting closer. Would he move to one side? Nothing suggested that. Maybe it was stupid of her, but Ambra kept walking straight ahead, on a collision course, her pulse rapidly picking up. He still hadn’t seen her. Was she invisible, or what? The man’s head was bare, and he wasn’t wearing gloves or a scarf. His chunky boots crunched in the snow. She had time to see that he was wearing pants with pockets on the sides. Maybe he was some kind of construction worker?
And then they crashed into each other.
Not hard, he looked up and swerved at the last moment, but since Ambra refused to move a millimeter, their upper arms and shoulders collided with a faint rustling sound. She shuddered a little, almost imagined feeling his warmth through the layers of coats separating them. She saw the surprise in his eyes, then recognition, and then he was gone. It sounded like he mumbled something, maybe a “sorry,” but by then she had already picked up the pace and was almost at the hotel. She hurried in through the entrance without turning around.
What a weird guy.
And what a crappy day this had been.