Her eyes opened but did not see, a vestige of her troubled dreams hovering, then landing on her again. He had been lying on his back, on a bed, and she had been staring down at him, as if she were a spider on the ceiling. His arms had been folded behind his head, and he was stretched out in just his favourite jeans, tanned, relaxed, a soft smile on his lips as though listening to music, light brown hair splayed on the pillow. She watched his foot tap, his eyes closing for long moments but then opening again and fastening directly upon her, as though watching her back, knowing she was there. He looked so quiet, so happy. It had been . . . soothing, seeing him like that, how he had really been before the cancer achieved critical mass, a new image to overlay her last memories of him and the usual dreams, where he was whittled back to sinew and bone, green-tinged, hairless . . .
She had allowed herself to believe, in the dream, that there was a happy ending, but no matter how much she tried to keep her gaze on his face – the curve of his lips, the first bloom of stubble – she saw the water seeping across the floor, making it shine. Slippery. She refused to look, to acknowledge it, but then it began inching up the walls, getting deeper and deeper, and soon it was trickling over the mattress where he lay. She tried to speak, to tell him he was getting wet, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t get him to hear her, and he made no sign of having noticed the creeping danger as the water gradually traced around his shape, then over it, closing over his legs, his chest, his arms, his face . . . submerging him.
It was the sight of him, underwater, staring back at her, refusing to move or do anything to save himself, that had made her wake up, she realized now, and she pressed a hand to her throat; it was still tingling from her shout. Too late to help.
Heart pounding, she curled back under the sheets, the unfamiliar sounds of the melancholic house coming to her ear – footsteps on the terrace outside her window, the swoosh of a window opening, a whistle in the pipes . . . From the blade of light escaping past the solid shutters and drawing a line across the floor, she could tell it was another beautiful day. But her spirits still sank at the prospect of spending it here.
Dreams about Jack always tokened a bad day, she knew that. Experience was a hard master, and she breathed deeply for a few moments, trying to articulate her affirmations for why she should get out of bed: it was it was a beautiful day. A beautiful summer’s day on a stunning private island in the Swedish archipelago. She was in one of the most beautiful places on earth. She was alive. She had so much to be thankful for –
A sudden sound, something smashing, made her gasp and look at the far wall.
And Linus. She had Linus to look after.
She threw the sheets back and leapt out of bed, darting out of her door and peering in through his. ‘Okay, buddy?’ she asked, trying not to look wild-eyed, but the sight that greeted her was alarming – he was sitting fully dressed on the bed, the bed so expertly made with hospital corners that either Måns had already been in and made it, or Linus hadn’t slept in it. But she had tucked him in herself last night.
Linus was staring at the floor. She cast an apprehensive gaze around the room and, in the pristine simplicity, easily caught sight of the remains of the Lego truck he had been working on after arriving here yesterday, now smashed into hundreds of pieces against their dividing wall.
She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. She ruffled his hair as she sat on the bed beside him. ‘What’s up, dude? Bad night?’
He shook his head. His eyes weren’t puffy, and he didn’t look pale.
‘How come you’re dressed already? I was just about to come and wake you. Are you that hungry for breakfast already?’
‘I’ve already had breakfast.’
‘Oh.’ Bell was taken aback. ‘Oh. Well, you should have woken me, then. We could have gone down toge—’
‘He told me not to tell you.’
She frowned, puzzled. ‘Who did?’
‘Emil. He woke me up early and said it was our secret.’
‘. . . What?’
‘We went out on his boat for breakfast and—’
‘You went on a boat with him? Just him? My God, are you okay?’ Now she was on her knees, kneeling in front of him and looking him over as though scanning for signs of injury.
He nodded, but he was visibly upset.
‘What did he do? What did he say?’ Her voice was frantic, heart clattering and making the blood roar through her ears so that she could barely hear his responses anyway. ‘Linus, tell me. What happened?’
‘He said . . .’ A sob escaped him, one bitter tear squeezing itself out and wending a defiant trail down his cheek. ‘He said Pappa and Elise and Tilde aren’t my real family.’
Bell rocked back on her heels, scarcely able to believe this was happening. She’d been awake all of five minutes, emerging from one nightmare straight into another. ‘He said that to you?’ she whispered, feeling the adrenaline pump.
Linus nodded.
She was up again. ‘Wait here,’ she said grimly.
‘Where are you going?’ he cried as she ran to the door.
‘Stay right here, Linus, and don’t leave this room. I’ll come straight back.’
‘But –’
She tore down the hall, past the closed bedroom doors and watchful eyes of dark portraits, her bare feet almost silent on the worn boards as her hair streamed behind her. The polished, ebonized banister glided seamlessly beneath her hand as she took the stairs two at a time, and began charging from one room to the next.
Where was he? Where the hell was he?
She ran to the snug first, but he wasn’t there. She looked into the kitchen too, startling the cook, who nearly dropped a dish at the sight of her. She darted out again, lightning fast, cheeks flushed.
‘Miss Bell?’
She whipped round to see Måns walking towards her, coming from the direction of the drawing room and looking alarmed by her fluster.
‘Where is he?’ she demanded, her head still flashing left and right as she passed by open doorways. One to her right led onto the terrace, the round table and chairs at the top of the steps conspicuously empty.
‘Where is who?’
She had no time for mannered games and procrastination right now. ‘You know who.’
‘The boy is in his room, Miss Bell.’
‘Not –’ She ran straight past him, towards the drawing room. The double doors were open and it was like running into a daydream: the hemp and silk cushions on the settle plumped, fresh white ranunculus roses arranged in a heaped dome on the low coffee table; sunlight pouring through the tall windows like it was painting the room a fresh new colour, and everything smelling of cut grass.
The doors leading off to the left, to the dining room as she recalled, were closed and she was about to turn away – why would he be in there, alone in a room to seat thirty? – when the low timbre of a male voice made her stop in her tracks.
‘Miss Bell –’ Måns said, reaching the threshold of the drawing room.
But she wouldn’t be stopped. She flew across the space like she was on strings and flung the door open with a burst of indignation and rage, so hard it banged against the walls. ‘How dare you!’
Emil stared back at her with a look of utter astonishment. ‘Bell—’
‘You woke a sleeping child and made him get up in the dark and go out on a boat with you? With you?’
He put down the sheet of paper in his hand and placed it very carefully on the table. ‘Not just any child,’ he said slowly. Carefully. ‘My child. My son.’
‘You’re a stranger to him! He doesn’t know you!’ She felt herself quiver with fury and realized her hands were bunched into tight fists, her head pushed forwards like an aggressive gander.
Emil stared at her for another moment, then looked to the men sitting at the table with him. Bell felt her anger dissipate as she noticed them suddenly too, remembering she was dressed in just an AC/DC t-shirt and knickers. Her fingers found the hem and pulled it downwards as Emil cleared his throat. ‘I think we had better pick this up another day, gentlemen.’
Bell watched in horror as the one-two-three-oh-God-four men in suits shuffled and put away the paperwork on the oval table before them. An awkward silence settled over the group as they scraped their chairs back and murmured their farewells to him, looking at her critically as they passed by.
Bell had never felt more humiliated and she bit her lip hard, staring at the floor as the last one left, the leather on his shoes so highly polished that she could almost see up her own t-shirt in their surface. She waited for the sound of his footsteps to fade before she looked up again. Emil was leaning against the vast oval table, watching her, his arms folded across his chest. Unlike his lackeys, he wasn’t suited, but was wearing a pair of faded grey cargo shorts, a raspberry t-shirt and those boat shoes that were on the point of collapse. His seemingly beloved baseball cap sat on the table beside a water glass.
They stared at one another in silence for a moment and she felt her heat was matched by his freeze. He was angry too. She’d embarrassed him in front of his . . . team, or whoever they were.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ she said again, quietly, through clenched teeth, trying to retain some dignity.
His eyebrow arched fractionally, barely perceptible across the room. ‘That was the point of the exercise. I’m trying to get to know him. How else can I do that, if not by spending time with him?’
‘You can do it by showing a little patience,’ she said. ‘He’s a ten-year-old boy who had never heard of you before breakfast yesterday morning.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Yes. It is.’
He shook his head. ‘Actually, he’s known about me for months. He came to see me in the hospital after I woke up. His mother brought him.’
‘I know,’ she scoffed. ‘I was there, and I saw the look on his face as you screamed obscenities after him. He was terrified of you.’
Emil’s expression changed at her words, his froideur faltering, and he looked away quickly, a ripple of pain passing over his features. ‘That’s not fair. I wasn’t myself back then.’
‘I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that you frightened him. And he didn’t know who you were – Hanna had told him you were just an old friend. His godfather.’ She shook her head bitterly. ‘You should have seen his face when she told him the truth yesterday morning, and said you were making him come here to spend the summer with you. All the way over here, I expected him to just leap from the boat.’
Emil paled visibly and turned away, raking his hands through his hair. She could see the muscles in his back beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, but also the bones too. Despite herself, she felt another pang of guilt as she remembered Christer’s words. ‘Look, I appreciate you’ve been through a lot –’
‘Oh, you don’t know the first thing about what I’ve been through,’ he snapped.
She recoiled from the fury in his voice. ‘What I was going to say was that no matter what you have been through – awful though it was – this is not about you now. Not this bit. It’s about Linus.’ She saw the surprise in his eyes at her words, and she suddenly understood that every single thing that had been said to him since he had emerged from the coma had been about him. His accident, his trauma, his loss, his coma, his recovery, his family . . . He had no concept of what it meant to put someone else first. His entire existence since waking up had revolved solely around himself.
‘Yes, he’s your son – but only biologically, at the moment, and you need to recognize and respect that distinction. He doesn’t know you yet. You frighten him. You’ve taken him away from his mother after you threatened her, you’ve told him the only family he’s ever known isn’t his proper family – and then you just expect him to see you as the Great I Am?’ She threw her arms up in the air. ‘It doesn’t work like that. You need to show the understanding and compassion and emotional intelligence, because you are the adult and he is the child. That’s what being a parent is – putting the child’s needs before your own. And let me tell you something: right now, you are failing at that. You’re failing big time. My God, you couldn’t even bother to be here when he arrived yesterday.’
His eyes flashed, pain and anger a constant swirling torrent. ‘You don’t understand. I felt . . . overwhelmed.’
‘You did? Try being ten and going through this.’ She shook her head, staring at him coldly. ‘You hurt your little boy over and over yesterday. And now you’ve started today on the same footing.’
‘I was doing something nice!’
‘That wasn’t nice! You keep stepping over his boundaries and pushing too hard.’ She stepped forward herself. ‘But I won’t let you, do you understand? You will not go anywhere with him without me, not unless Linus himself explicitly tells me he is happy with it.’
‘You don’t get to speak to me like that! I’m his –!’ Emil stopped himself, Bell’s words of what he was and what he wasn’t still hanging in the air. He stared at her with a frustration that was beginning to feel palpable. ‘You’re not his mother.’
‘No, I’m not. But I’m the next best thing, and I’m her representative here. Every decision you make has to be in his best interests, and if it’s not, then it’s not happening. I’m not here as decoration! There’s a point to me being here – where he goes, I go. And if you try to sneak off without me again, or ask him to keep secrets, I’ll take him straight back to his mother.’ She heard the courage waver in her own voice – she knew she didn’t have the right to make that call and worsen things for Hanna.
He picked up on her hesitation. He had an instinct for weakness, it seemed. ‘You want me to take it to the courts? That wouldn’t be in Hanna’s best interests.’
The threat was cold, like a trickle of ice down her spine and she knew he must make a formidable enemy. Hot, angry tears pressed at her throat as they squared off against one another, but she refused to look away. She would not be bullied by this man. His wealth, power and contacts couldn’t affect her. Unlike Hanna, she didn’t need anything from him. Bell drew herself up to her full, unimpressive height. ‘I only care about Linus’s best interests, and if you were any father at all, so would you—’
A sudden sound made them both start, a rumbling roll of thunder that made the antique white tureens on a demi-lune table begin to vibrate.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered.
‘Oh great,’ Emil said, turning away, his hands on his hips as the roar grew. He looked back at her, then past her. ‘Did she even bother to call this time?’
‘No, sir,’ replied Måns, who Bell now saw was standing in the doorway.
‘Did who call? What’s going on?’ Bell said, almost having to shout. For that was no thunder, she realized now.
Emil didn’t bother to reply. He just walked over to the long, tall windows and stood staring into the garden. The tops of the trees were being flattened by the considerable downdraft of a large blue helicopter, petals scattering across the lawn, the gardener who had met them down by the jetty yesterday standing with one foot resting on a spade, all the thunder now on his face as his months of hard work were undone in mere moments.
They all watched as the helicopter hovered slowly downwards, landing in a clear spot of lawn, free of trees and beds.
‘Who is that?’ she asked Måns, stepping towards him.
‘That will be Mrs Stenbock,’ Måns said, just as the door slid back and the lithe, dark-haired woman she’d seen before jumped out, wearing white trousers and a coral linen knit camisole. She was promptly followed by two very tall, lanky teenagers in jeans and headphones. ‘. . . And Master Frederik and Miss Sophia.’
‘Your sister?’ she asked, feeling a burst of panic as she went to the window too and watched them begin to walk slowly up the grass.
‘I shall go to greet them, sir,’ Måns said sombrely, slipping from the room.
‘You never mentioned anyone was coming.’
He glanced across. ‘I didn’t know. I guess she thought it would be nice for Linus to meet his cousins.’
‘Shit,’ she hissed, remembering again her just-out-of-bed look as the unexpected visitors began ascending the terrace steps; a few seconds more and they’d be through the garden doors and standing in the hall . . . Without another word, she ran down the corridor as fast as she could, knowing that whatever righteous indignation she had struck at Emil’s presumptions was now wholly undermined by the flashing of her butt cheeks. She took the stairs two at a time again, and was almost halfway up when she heard the woman’s strident tones.
‘Emil, are my eyes deceiving me, or did I just see a half-naked woman streaking down your hall?’