HANNA

10.30 P.M.

Stoffe and the kids were sitting on the couch watching TV when she came in the door after having been at yet another long interview with the police. Without taking off her shoes, she went up to them, picked up the remote control from the table, and turned off the TV.

‘What are you doing?’ Karl hollered.

Stoffe stared at her with hollow eyes. ‘Weren’t you going to call so I could pick you up? How did it go?’

He hadn’t shaved for several days, and it looked like he’d lost weight. For some strange reason, she felt sorry for him.

‘Go to bed now, kids. Dad and I need to talk, and there’s school tomorrow.’

‘Urgh!’

‘Now!’ She really didn’t have the energy for yet another fight with her son. Their relationship was fragile enough as it was, and it made her whole body hurt when she thought about how he’d betrayed her. But there would be a change; she tried to look ahead.

Alice looked terrified and did as she was told. Karl followed reluctantly.

Hanna went into the kitchen and took out the only bottle of wine she had, uncorked it, and searched for the pack of cigarettes she’d hidden in the broom closet a few months earlier, when things were starting to get strange at home.

She took two wine glasses and went to the patio door. ‘Come on, let’s go outside,’ she said to Stoffe. She sat down on one of the plastic chairs on the patio. He came out after a while. ‘Sit down,’ she said firmly.

He did as she said, and she filled the glasses to the brim.

It was totally still, and the garden smelt wonderful. It was almost as hot as a sauna, and she didn’t have the energy to care about the mosquitoes and insects crawling on her. Hanna took out a cigarette and lit it.

‘You smoke?’

She didn’t reply and took a deep drag instead. When she exhaled, she shaped her mouth to blow smoke rings. The technique was still there from when she was a teenager, and she was fascinated by how perfectly she managed to form them.

‘I read, once, that if you’re in love with two people, you should choose the second one. Because if you were sufficiently in love with the first one, you would never have fallen in love with the second.’ She stole a glance at Stoffe and sipped the slightly sour wine. ‘But I dismissed that, and actually, I still think that you can be in love with more than one person at the same time, but what is all that worth if I can’t feel friendship and trust. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that relationships should be like this. I want them to grow up with love, honesty, and openness.’ She put out the cigarette on the patio and left a mark, but she didn’t care. Stoffe had sense enough not to comment. ‘I’m not like Alexandra, I would rather lie on the couch making out than polish silver. I think there should be burn marks and scratches on the floor, so you can see someone really lives there. There’s so much I don’t understand about Alexandra. Liv, I didn’t know, of course, although she didn’t make an especially good impression. Regardless, I neither can nor want to identify with them.’

‘What are you trying to say, Hanna?’

He sounded impatient and condescending, but she didn’t care. Not any more.

She took a big gulp of wine, and her throat burnt. ‘I told everything to the police, every little detail. I’m going to say the same thing to you now, and then I want you to leave here.’ She looked at him to check that he understood the seriousness.

Stoffe nodded nervously and took a sip from his glass.

‘I told them about how absent you’ve been recently, since you met Liv. I don’t know what kind of relationship you two had, but you don’t think I missed all your bruises and scratch marks, do you?’ She didn’t let him answer, because she didn’t want to know. ‘And I know you weren’t at work the night that Liv was murdered.’

Stoffe ran his hand through his hair, sat with his legs wide apart, and leant his elbows on his legs dejectedly.

‘And, to be quite honest, I don’t want to know where you were.’

‘Hanna, I was with Liv. It was the two of you who made me lie about it. I said I was at work because both you and Alexandra would have been angry if I’d said that I wanted to be with Liv.’

‘Exactly, there’s the trust problem again.’ Hanna was surprised at how indifferent she felt about what he said. ‘When you introduced Liv, I felt like I’d been deceived. You’d gone behind both our backs. It wasn’t about jealousy, it was about a trust that you broke.’

She took a few deep breaths. ‘Johan said that your car was driving around here the night of the murder, he saw it on the cameras. Was that why you were so afraid I had seen the video?’

‘What?’

‘You know what, I don’t want to know.’ Instead, she told him about the teachers’ meeting she’d been to the evening that Liv was murdered. She tried to explain how they’d had wine, that she’d become a little too drunk, and how in pure desperation and misery, she’d had a one-night stand with Johan. He had always been fond of her, and in the heat and despair of the moment, she’d gotten the idea to cry on his shoulder, which led to her being unfaithful as well.

‘What the hell are you saying to me?’ The anger in his voice cut through the warm air.

‘I know, I’m not any better.’

Hanna described how she had staggered home that night and how angry the neighbour had been because she was late. In the gravel by the gate, she found a phone, which she picked up in the belief that it might be one of the children’s — she hadn’t checked it that carefully. The baby things that Liv was supposed to pick up were still outside the front door, but she’d been too drunk to even consider that something might have happened.

Then she passed out. When she woke up the following morning and looked at the phone, she realised it was Liv’s. She talked to the children about it and asked if they knew where it came from and why it had been by their gate. But they didn’t know anything, and a short time later, the doorbell rang, and two policemen came in and informed her of what had happened.

‘I had time to turn off the phone and managed to hide it. After that, the lies just kept coming.’

Hanna told him about Karl and the power games. About Bea, who controlled the group and made them do hideous things. Among other things, how they had broken into her house to search for the phone, presumably to get Hanna arrested, and how Alice had managed to protect her mother by hiding with the phone.

‘You told this to the police?’

She nodded.

Stoffe got up and started walking back and forth on the patio. It looked like he was preparing himself for a disaster.

Hanna went on to the apology note that Alice had written and placed on the memorial heap. ‘Before I went to the police, I asked Alice to explain what it was she’d been apologising for. Alice cried. Do you know why she was sorry? Because when she saw how sad I got after you brought Liv into our family, she wished that Liv would disappear and, poof, she died. Do you see? She was asking for forgiveness because she thought her wish had been fulfilled.’ Hanna laughed. ‘You know, whatever has happened between us, I’m glad that we managed to have a daughter who believes she has those kinds of superpowers.’ She wiped away a tear from her cheek and glanced at Patrik. It wasn’t possible to interpret his expression in the dark, but his neck was bent. ‘The police asked about the ring, too.’

The ring each one of them had received. Plus one. Where Liv’s ring had gone, she had no idea, but that was no longer her problem. She pulled off her own, even though it was stuck on tightly because her fingers were so swollen from the heat, and placed it on the table. ‘I don’t want to be plus one any longer.’

She leant back and closed her eyes. Felt several kilos lighter.

Tomorrow she would take the children and leave town. They would start afresh. They’d move home to her parents’ and take one day at a time. No one would be able to stop them from leaving this time. She would resign and apply for a new job in Gävle. The children would start at a new school. They would break the vicious circle they had ended up in. Everything would be fine.