by Karen Swan
‘She’s nothing to do with it.’
‘I’m not saying she is directly, and neither is Anders. But it’s everything collectively, don’t you see that? We are never alone. Ever.’
‘We are in bed.’ He winked at her and she knew it was his way of trying to get her off-track.
‘This is serious, Zac. We can’t continue like this. Sometimes I think your main relationship is with Lenny, not me. I feel like the spare part.’
‘That’s just crazy.’
‘Is it though? You never listen to what I have to say on things.’
‘Yeah? Like when? When have I not listened to you?’
Bo didn’t even hesitate. ‘The other day when I tried to stop you from agreeing to pay Anders in dollars.’
‘That was different.’
‘No, it wasn’t different; it was typical. And coming here, for example – it was your idea after you read about the mountain that’s gonna fall down. Then Lenny negotiated where we’d live – in a cabin with no central heating or hot water. Excellent choice, Len. He even arranged for Anna to be out here with us, providing a very nice upside for him in the process but which is now going tits-up outside as we speak.’
Zac gave a weary sigh. ‘I am so damn freaking tired of having the same argument over and over again, Bo. How many times do we have to go over it? We cannot do this – we cannot be us – without him.’ He stared at her incomprehendingly. ‘We are two hundred thousand followers short of hitting ten million. The fans are loving this place. They’re loving what we’re doing. And we can’t do what we’re doing without Lenny.’
Bo blinked at him. He really didn’t get it. ‘You see, that’s the problem, Zac. When I talk about ‘us’, you talk about the brand. For you, they’re one and the same.’
‘Because they are!’ he cried.
She crossed her arms. ‘So if the blog folded tomorrow, if we just stopped posting: no more photos, no more Stories . . . would there still be an us?’
Zac looked at her like she was mad. ‘Wha—? Why are you even asking me that? It’s a pointless question. Why would we stop? This is the dream! Everyone wants what we have, to live like this. They want to be us.’
It wasn’t an answer to her question and her heart plummeted further with his every word. She tried again, pushing him. ‘. . . I’m speaking hypothetically Zac, would you still want to be with me, without ten million people watching us?’
He stared at her. ‘. . . Of course I would.’ But the hesitation had been there. They’d both heard it. He simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like for them to go back to being just a couple in love. He had bought into the hype. He believed the life encapsulated on the grid was the real Zac and Bo; that was where his reality lay. But hers . . . hers was on the other side of the lens – or the grid. For her, their real life lay in what they didn’t show – their whispered conversations on the pillow at night, sharing a spoon for pudding, going for a walk just for a walk’s sake . . . She felt a glaze crackle across her heart as she realized it had been weeks since they’d shared a moment like that together. Oh God. When exactly had this happened to them?
Zac blinked, watching the emotions flicker across her face. ‘Look, I know you find it hard to let people in. You went on the road for very different reasons to me. I just wanted adventure, but you . . . you needed escape.’
‘Oh. No—’ She turned away, not wanting to talk about this now. Not ever.
Zac walked over to her. ‘Yes. A terrible thing happened to you, Bo. Your brother died in your arms. You were trapped with his body for three hours before help came.’ She scrunched her eyes shut, her head turned away from him, but he clasped her with a tight grip, making her face him, face it. ‘I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for you, baby, in the cold and the dark like that. And I know how hard it is for you sometimes, to shake it off. I sleep next to you, remember? Your nightmares are my nightmares.’ His voice softened further still. ‘So I get it, I know why you ran. But being here with me because you can’t face going home, is a different thing to being here with me because you want and choose it for itself. And when you go on and on about Lenny being the root of our problems, or the blog, or the fans, I’m scared that what you’re really saying is – it’s me. Us. This. That you don’t actually want this life, it’s all just a diversion from the one you’re too scared to go back to.’
She stared at him, her mouth agape. Was he right? Was all of this just an elaborate deception from herself, a way to not have to think or feel about her past? For a moment, her words and thoughts wouldn’t come, the room disappearing as her eyes blurred with hot tears. ‘No, I . . . I do choose this. I choose y—’
But the sound of scurrying feet made them both turn as Anna and Lenny carried the bucket in between them, both of them hunched over and straining at the weight of it. Bo pulled away roughly from Zac, turning her back to the room as she quickly dried her tears. She didn’t want them to see her crying.
‘Where . . . ?’ Lenny panted.
‘Uh . . . here,’ Zac said, glancing across at Bo before taking the weight of it from Anna and helping Lenny carry it to the corner.
With a sniff and a deep breath, Bo turned back with a smile stitched on. But as her gaze met with Anna’s, she immediately saw she wasn’t the only one upset; Anna’s mascara had smudged ever so slightly beneath the lashes; she had been crying too. What had Lenny said to her out there?
A moment of unspoken solidarity flashed between them as the guys grunted, getting the heavy bucket into the perfect position.
Lenny dropped his hands to his thighs, trying to get his breath back. ‘The ground is fucking frozen, man. Frozen! I had to use a pickaxe.’
Zac slapped him on the back. ‘And you’ve done a great job. Come on, let’s get this baby up and then we can chill.’
Bo kept quiet – even if it wasn’t the time to remind him about the logging, his words were still ricocheting around her. Did he really think those things? Was the problem not with him or Lenny or the blog, but her? And if it was, what did that mean for them?
She watched in silence as, with loud grunts of effort, both men hoisted the tree off the floor and positioned it over the bucket, Lenny scrabbling furiously to dig a hole in which to place the trunk. Only, as they tried to straighten it . . .
They all looked up at the sound. The tree was wedged at a catastrophic angle, a good forty centimetres too high for the ceiling, and the bucket was tipped onto its bottom rim, unable to sit flat.
‘Ah!’ Anna said quietly into the thick silence.
‘I guess we could cut the top off,’ Lenny suggested after a minute.
‘But then it’ll be out of proportion if we just hack the top off and have these massive branches splayed against the ceiling,’ Zac frowned. ‘I don’t get it. It looked the perfect size in the forest.’
‘Yeah, because everything else was huge in comparison, man,’ Lenny drawled. ‘It’s called per-spec-tive.’
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ Zac muttered.
They all stared up at it dejectedly.
‘We could go cut another one,’ Lenny suggested.
‘Oh, could we? Well, if you’re gonna do the cutting this time instead of standing around taking pictures—’
‘Hey! I was working up there, making you look good.’
Zac muttered meanly under his breath, looking furious, and Bo knew the real reason he was angry was because Anders had been proved right. What was more, he’d known he’d been right even as he’d agreed to help fell it. He had known this would happen, that Zac would be left looking foolish.
She glanced through the still-open door. In the window she could see through to Signy’s cabin – the lights were on, and the fronds of their tree were just visible, reaching beyond the frame. It was standing proudly upright and Anders was fastening on red ribbons. Bo turned back to the comedy of errors on their side of the path.
‘I know what we’ll do,’ Zac said decisively. ‘Lenny, you take the top,
I’ll push the base.’
‘Where are we . . . taking it . . . ?’ Lenny grunted, trying to dislodge the top of the tree from its new groove in the ceiling, the whole thing coming unstuck quite suddenly and almost sending him sprawling in a spray of pine needles.
‘Just here,’ Zac said, lifting the base and – with the entire tree held at an angle just off horizontal – positioning it at the bottom of the ladder. They straightened it and the top of the tree immediately disappeared, unobstructed, straight through the hatch up to Lenny’s loft.
‘There. Perfect,’ Zac said, wiping his hands together.
‘Oh yeah,’ Lenny scowled, seeing how the branches splayed onto the rungs of the ladder and made access to his room nigh on impossible. ‘Just perfect.’
Chapter Nineteen
Lodal, early August 1936
Signy walked slowly through the wild orchard, reaching up to pull cherries from the bough, to weigh an apple in her hand. She took a bite, sliding down the smooth trunk of a damson tree, and sat in the grass, watching as light glittered off the surface of the water, the leap and splash of a fish sending wrinkles out to the shore. On the opposite side, the little blue rowing boat nudged the grassy bank, keeping secret the stories held within its timbers on the nights it glided silently under the moon. Signy stared at it, one hand carelessly caressing Stormy’s kid, Clouds, who was seeking rest in the shade, her nose nuzzling against her palm.
The summer felt endless, the days without end, the never-setting sun playing in the sky and making them all restless. Sleep was short in spite of their exhausting days and everyone was edgy. Kari had said it was because they all had their curse but Signy wasn’t so sure. Several times now she had crept from the cabin at night, the moon picking out her path as she stole up the slopes and lay on her belly to watch as the midnight swimmers rowed the little boat into the centre of this silvered lake, their laughter curling in the silence.
Did the others know about the lovers? Or sense it somehow? The very fabric of their companionship had become abrasive: Kari and Ashi kept fighting, Brit had fallen sullen and even Margit was distracted and short, disappearing on long walks for ‘time alone’. Of course, they had been up here in the valley for nearly two months now. Apart from the Midsummer festival and the weekly visit from one of the farm labourers, they had had no respite from each other in all that time, no other distraction. They had told all their stories, read their books, darned all their knitting. Tempers were bound to begin to fray.
Which was surely why it should have rung alarm bells that Sofie was so happy. In the weeks following her discovery, Signy had watched on in mute dismay as Sofie had set about her chores with an enthusiasm and grace never seen before. She smiled as she milked the cows. She told jokes as she churned the butter. She glowed from the inside as they all bathed in the stream and even Kari had begrudgingly remarked she looked even more beautiful than usual.
Signy longed to confide in Margit or Kari, to tell them what she had seen. But how could she? Her sister was set to be engaged to Rag, and Kari’s own brother was hoping to propose to Sofie. If the truth about their trysts was to come out, the matches that had been preordained by all their families would be in tatters.
Even worse than that was the friendships that would be lost. Margit loved Sofie. She saw only the good in her – the vulnerability and frailties, the unfairness of her position in being born to a cotter. If she was ever to discover that her dearest friend had been betraying her in this cruel way . . . If Kari and Ashi and Brit were to find out that their brother was being humiliated, a cuckold even before the proposal . . . It could tear the village apart. So she kept her silence – but she watched and she waited. Like the wolf circling the plateau, she stayed just out of sight.
She knew he was out there. She felt his lupine presence like the breeze on her skin, and sometimes she thought she could see him so clearly in her mind’s eye – his head low, shoulders slinking, paws padding silently on the grass, yellow eyes fixed upon them – it was as though he was the one trotting beside her and not Stormy headbutting her knees. She took the knife everywhere with her now, hiding it every evening in a crevice in the aspen tree just over the stream as she returned from her day’s herding. She knew the wolf could go almost a month without eating and it had been three weeks since she had first heard its howl. He had to be hungry, he had to be waiting for his moment to strike. And when it came, she would be ready for it.
She could feel it coming on the air, the season at its peak now. The temperatures had soared, making their physical work more laborious and their nights stickier, and yet change was already on the march. In another month, things would be entirely different again, the summer over. Their work at the seter was almost done – the lambs and kids had grown leggy and plump, the bulk of the winter hay was now gathered and stored, and their dairy yield was up on last year. And in the valley, after a wet spring and dry summer, she knew there would be an early harvest; within two weeks, the men in the village would be bringing in the crops.
Already the nights were gently stretching and darkening and the girls were beginning to anticipate their return to the village – their mothers’ embraces, their sweethearts’ smiles. Signy wondered whether Margit would look for Rag; he was due to go back for military training after the harvest. Would their engagement be announced before that? She hadn’t asked her big sister about her dreams the morning after Midsummer’s night but the posy had been found nonetheless and was now set in a small glass vial beside her bed, the flowers papery and faded in the heat.
To her surprise, Signy had taken comfort in the sight of it. She had always ridiculed her friends’ superstitions but now she saw it was a portent. For twice in the past week, she had waited for the howl and then the soft click of Sofie’s door, following her up to the lake – and twice Rag hadn’t shown. Sofie’s mood had blackened sharply, and Kari had warned her only this morning to keep well away after Sofie kicked a milk churn at her for staring at her ‘the wrong way’.
Maybe, just maybe, Destiny – if that was what it was called – was getting back on track.
* * *
‘Signy?’ Bo said in her morning voice. ‘It’s me, Bo. I’ve brought your coffee.’ She set the mug and pills down on the nightstand and walked over to the fire, poking and prodding it, before rolling on a log and replacing the guard. ‘It’s stopped snowing,’ she sighed, pulling back the curtains and looking up at the clear lilac sky as only the wispiest skeins of cloud drifted overhead.
She turned back to find Signy already watching her, looking straight down her nose like Queen Victoria lying in state. ‘Ah, you’re awake.’
‘Not dead yet,’ Signy muttered.
Bo walked over and without needing to be asked, helped her up to sitting, plumping and rearranging her pillows behind her. She waited as Signy put her teeth in and swallowed her tablets.
‘How are you feeling today?’ Bo asked.
‘Why do you care? You’re not my nurse.’
Bo sighed. Oh dear. It was like that this morning, was it? ‘No. No, I’m not. But I just want to be sure you’re okay and there’s nothing I can do for you? It’s so isolated up here.’
‘Splendid isolation, I think they call it,’ she said fiercely.
Bo suppressed a sigh. Eight o’clock was early to start an argument by anyone’s standards. Was it the only way she could wake up, perhaps? ‘Your Christmas tree looks great.’
It was the right thing to have said and a smile softened her. Finally. ‘Yes. Anders always gets it just right.’ Her eyes glimmered shrewdly. ‘He said yours is far too big.’
Bo refused to rise to the bait. ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ Lenny had had to climb the ladder last night wearing his coat to protect him from the needles – although she couldn’t imagine how he was going to get down again this morning. It was one thing pushing up against the branches, quite another coming down on them. ‘But anyway, even if it had fitted, it’s still pretty sorry-looking. We don’t have any decor
ations for it of course, so it’s just standing there, naked as a baby.’
‘That is why you are going to Alesund today?’
‘That’s right. Anna says there’s a Christmas market down by the wharves. We’re going to meet the rest of her team while we’re there too.’
‘Anna? Now she’s the hussy?’
Bo stiffened. Why couldn’t Signy just . . . play nice? ‘No, she’s the marketing rep for the company we’re endorsing out here,’ she said patiently. She would not be riled by her today. She would not.
Signy pushed her head a little further back into her pillow. ‘Hmph, I know what I saw.’
Bo took a deep breath. If what Anna and Lenny got up to was none of her business, she failed to see why Signy should make it hers. ‘Well, anyway, we’re making an early start today on account of the journey. So if you’re sure you’re okay . . .’ She went to turn away but Signy held her hand out suddenly, her eyes beseeching. Warily, Bo walked back and took it in her own. It was warm, like a heat stone. ‘What? What is it?’
‘You need to start protecting yourself, girl. I was young once too. I know what beauty can do to a man. They need to possess it. It turns them inside out and makes them crazy.’
Bo looked at her. Was the woman confused? Suffering from dementia? ‘Well, talking of crazy, I heard an interesting fact about that,’ she said smoothly. ‘Apparently more people go mad under the midnight sun than the midday moon. Have you heard that? I would have thought it was the other way around. All those hours of darkness.’ She gave an exaggerated shiver.
But Signy was not fooled. ‘Don’t change the subject. You know what I’m telling you.’
‘I really don’t.’
‘I understand you, girl. I know you!’
‘How exactly? How can you know me?’
