Most of her fans were sweet, but it never took long for the first haters to appear. She didn’t want to read what they wrote, but she also couldn’t stop herself.
Your lips are ugly.
Looks like you’ve put on weight.
Jesus Christ, you’re ugly.
She held up the phone to Ludvig.
“Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with people.”
“You know most of them love you,” he said.
She kept scrolling; it was like an addiction. “It never feels like that’s enough,” she said. Some of the haters were names she recognized from years back. She wondered what was going on behind their evil comments. Most online trolls had male aliases, but that didn’t necessarily mean a thing. Private accounts, of course. She blocked the worst of them, but new ones were constantly appearing. In just a few minutes, she had several hundred likes. The majority were sweet, but a feeling of unease lingered over her, like dirt that won’t scrub off. She only had herself to blame for reading them, she knew that, but still.
“Sometimes I think about just quitting social media,” she said, half joking and half serious. She needed to focus on writing new material, not allow anonymous bullies to make her feel bad. It took up so much energy.
“Don’t let the haters win. You know you have loads of fans who worship you.”
Or at least the person they think I am, Jill thought cynically.
For the most part, she was satisfied with her life. Maybe not happy, exactly, but only idiots were happy. She was in the position she had been fighting for all these years. She knew the price of fame was loneliness and, from time to time, hate, and she was generally prepared to pay that price. But sometimes a melancholy she really couldn’t understand came over her. She had everything. Who was she to feel sad? She turned off the screen and put down her cell phone. The best way to handle the problem was always to ignore it.
“Will you upload something else to Insta for me? From the show?” she asked Ludvig.
“Of course. You want to approve it first?”
She shook her head.
“Which shoes were you thinking for dinner?” Ludvig held up a pair of Manolo Blahniks.
Jill hesitated. They were nice, but her feet were so sore. And her stage clothes were so tight it felt as if they were about to burst. She would probably have to take it easy with what she ate for a while. Her metabolism wasn’t exactly getting better with age. All she wanted was to stay in her room, drink hot chocolate, and eat cheese sandwiches. God, she would kill for that. When did she last eat cheese? Cream? Chocolate? She ate nothing, worked out constantly, and she still weighed more today than she had at the same point last year. They’d had to let out her dress a half centimeter. Ugh. Was she getting old and fat? No one would love her if she was fat. They would tear her to shreds.
“I’ll wear those,” she said with a firm nod toward the Manolo Blahnik shoes. “And the pink Diane von Furstenberg dress.” If she kept on all the tight underwear, it would work. And that was just what she needed to get herself into a good mood again.
Feeling shit hot. Flirting. Mingling.
She would eat two tiny bites of every course, max. She would just push the rest of the food around the plate and talk about how good it was, about how full she already felt. That classic strategy. Small bites and no dessert. She would treat herself to a glass of wine too. A large one, white, because that contained fewer calories. She could say she didn’t like red. Good plan.
She could already feel her energy returning. Nothing got better by lying in a hotel suite, feeling sorry for yourself. You had to choose happiness, live in the now . . . she tried to remember other mantras. Love herself? Aim for the stars?
She got up from the bed, went over to the dressing table, and picked up a brush. “How far are we from Kiruna, do you know?” She began to brush the spray from her hair. She was useless at geography. And all other subjects. She had failed almost everything at school and hadn’t even bothered applying to senior high school. Singing was all she could do.
“A few hours by car, I guess,” Ludvig replied.
Should she make a stop in Kiruna? Say hello to her foster sister?
Jill turned around and waited while Ludvig unzipped her sequined dress.
She would dress up, in high heels and lipstick, and she would deliver. Because if there was one thing Jill Lopez could do, it was deliver. After that, she could think about Ambra.
“Write on Insta that I’m allergic to roses now. Especially yellow ones.”
Chapter 7
As Tom walked to his car, his thoughts were on the angry woman he’d just run into. Again.
For the second time, he’d been so lost in thought that he didn’t see her coming. Not before they almost collided on the sidewalk. He bumped against her upper arm and then caught a glimpse of a knotted brow and a stubborn mouth. She seemed angry, and he wondered whether rage was her default setting. When he turned around, she was already on her way inside, which meant she was probably staying at the hotel.
There was something about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, as though he could hear her through the bubble he was trapped inside. But he couldn’t understand why. She was overwrought and hot-tempered, clearly easily provoked; unless it was just him, in particular, she had a problem with. But there was something else, something that almost wouldn’t let go. He had never met her before, he was sure of that. Recognizing a face in a millisecond could be the difference between life and death in his line of work. Of course, most things were the difference between life and death in his line of work, but though they had never met, there was something vaguely familiar about her. It bothered him that he couldn’t work out what.
He quickly stepped to one side for an old lady who was approaching on a kicksled, then turned off onto the next street where his car was parked. He’d stayed in the restaurant for a long time, leafing through the newspaper without being able to read, staring out the window, and hadn’t realized how much time had passed. That wasn’t like him. He was usually hyperaware of time. He really wasn’t himself at the moment. But seeing Ellinor today, it felt like . . . Tom couldn’t describe it, even to himself.
Putting complicated feelings into words wasn’t something he’d ever been good at; he’d always been more of a practical problem solver. Give him a machine gun to assemble or a building to storm—those were challenges he could manage without any problem. But this whole thing with Ellinor . . . He genuinely didn’t know how to move forward now, could no longer think logically. He’d been reduced to panic attacks that he never knew when to expect.
That scared him.
He had been in a bad way before, of course. No one who’d spent the last twenty years doing the things he had could survive without a few internal scars. But it had never been so bad that a few drunken evenings with his colleagues couldn’t fix it. European debriefing, they called it. You went out, talked to people with similar experiences, drank copious amounts of beer, and everything felt better.
But not this time; things actually felt worse now than when he first got home. At first he’d felt hope, but all these weeks in Kiruna had brought him precisely nowhere.
He was used to being competent, to making things happen; he could do things few other people on earth could manage. And yet he couldn’t win Ellinor back.
Tom glanced around, temporarily disoriented, then spotted his car and unlocked it. Out of sheer habit he had disconnected the internal lights so that they wouldn’t come on and make him a sitting target in the dark. It was over the top, but these precautions were practically in his blood.
He climbed inside and placed his hands on the icy wheel. The paralyzing fear that he wouldn’t actually be able to fix this, that for the first time in his adult life he was faced with a problem that he wouldn’t be able to solve through stubbornness, cunning, or even pure force, threatened to overwhelm him. His arms felt weak. His legs feeble. He could taste blood in his mouth. Where was that from? Or was
it in his mind?
Back in Chad, he occasionally lost his grip on reality. They’d treated him so badly. Threatened him with execution, told him he was going to die, placed automatic weapons against his chest, his forehead. Forced him to his knees. There was no preparing for how that felt, the way you eventually almost hoped for death. Though you also wanted to live at any price. He’d shared some of this with the psychologist. Only a fraction of it, of course, but still more than he had told anyone else in a very long time. How his captors enjoyed his helplessness, how they hit, kicked, and interrogated him for hours on end. How the lack of control over his own body felt. How he worried about everyone back home. The psychologist listened intently, with a calm gaze, but he still hadn’t been able to share more than the most superficial parts. His habit of hunkering down and keeping quiet was too deeply ingrained. He didn’t know whether it was the psychologist or himself that he was trying to protect by not going into the details of what they’d done to him. Because that was what he did, he protected people by keeping it all to himself. Ellinor never asked, and he never told her. Was that wrong? He had always thought of himself as strong. Not invincible, of course, but almost. Was it everything he had kept to himself that was now on the verge of destroying him?
Tom’s chest suddenly felt so heavy that he had to rest his head against the wheel. He breathed in the leather smell of the new car and tried to calm himself down, but it didn’t work. His mind was spinning, and he lost control of the deep, stabilizing breaths he had been trying to take. His breathing grew quicker and quicker, until it felt like he wasn’t getting any air. His body tensed, and then his heart began to race, faster and faster, like it wanted to break free of his body.
Not now, he thought in desperation. Not again. It was as if the car seat started to vibrate beneath him, and those vibrations spread upward through his body.
He tried to remember what the psychologist had taught him. She had gone through what happened to the body during a panic attack, and it hadn’t been completely useless. He tried to concentrate.
“It’s anxiety, Tom. It’s awful. But no one goes crazy from anxiety. Nor do they die, it just feels that way. Try to cope, one second at a time.”
Tom tried.
He really tried. The sweat was pouring down his skin. His hands gripped the wheel, his tunnel vision worsened. This was one of the worst panic attacks in a long time. This was a seven on a scale of one to ten, he thought dimly, as organ after organ—lungs, heart, blood, and muscles—were struck by anxiety. Maybe an eight after all.
“Zero is no anxiety, and ten is unbearable. The majority of us can cope with a two without any trouble,” the psychologist said.
Tom started to lose control of his thought process. His entire system was battling the instinct to fight or take flight. His shoulders were tense, his body shaking. A nine now. He couldn’t see properly, gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Was he about to die? It felt that way.
“It’s a normal biological reaction, it’s just that it happens in unexpected situations, that’s what’s so terrifying about it. You need to train your body not to react to it. It’s good if you keep moving. That helps to break down some of the chemicals your body produces.”
I should move, he thought faintly. His body was full to bursting with the adrenaline and noradrenaline pumping through his veins. But he didn’t have the energy to get up. All he could do was sit in the icy car and try to make it through. One second at a time. During his training, he pushed himself way beyond the limits of what most people could handle. Every course he took aimed to break down soldiers through extreme physical and psychological pressure. Not allowing them to sleep, forcing them to dive in forty-four-degree water. Elite soldiers broke down and cried. They were taunted, degraded, mocked. Day in and day out. And he’d survived it all. But these attacks broke him in a completely different way. His muscles felt exhausted. His strength vanished and was replaced by a bitter feeling of defeat.
At last, the panic started to ebb away.
His vision returned.
The prickling sensation disappeared. He could move his fingers and almost breathe normally. A seven. Then a six.
Thank God.
A five.
A few more breaths, then I start the car.
Definitely better now. He could relax his shoulders. See properly.
He started the engine, glanced in the rearview mirror. Indicated left before he pulled out, though the street was deserted, and soon left Kiruna behind him.
The thermometer showed seven below zero, and the temperature continued to sink as he drove out into the forest. Rationally, he knew the anxiety would always pass sooner or later, but during every attack there was an underlying fear that this time might be different. That he would go crazy.
When he got home, he parked in the garage and did his usual lap of the yard, checking the locks and windows on the various buildings before he slumped onto the couch, completely exhausted.
He didn’t have the energy to light a fire. His stomach growled. Panic attacks used up a huge amount of energy, he had learned. He had gone into Kiruna to buy groceries but then had completely forgotten to do so.
From the couch, he peered out through the panoramic windows. They were huge, impractical windows to have up here, considering the winters were so cold. But this was an expensive house, built by a billionaire with delusions of grandeur, and the views out onto the forest and snow-covered expanses were magnificent, both day and night. The moon was bright, and he thought he could see a hare in its winter coat before he tipped his head back and closed his gritty eyes.
Working in special forces had taught him to never give up. He had worked in some of the worst parts of the world, led secret operations in Somalia, been a bodyguard in Iraq, and driven convoys through Afghanistan. He had lived through situations that felt helpless and still managed to turn them around, time and time again. And not once had he ever considered giving up. Always thought of himself as too stubborn, too experienced, too stupid to give up. He had seen colleagues crash and burn over the years, but never expected it of himself. Had never actually thought he had any limits, always assumed he was the one who could handle and cope with the most.
But here he was. Looking out at snow that glistened in a thousand shades of white, silver, and blue beneath the light of the stars, thinking that it might have been better for everyone if he’d died back in Africa.
Chapter 8
You never knew what an interview would be like, Ambra thought as she sat opposite Elsa Svensson with a crocheted cushion behind her back. Elsa had unruly white hair and dark brown eyes. She looked like a kind fairy godmother. But you never knew beforehand. Sweet old ladies could be psychopathic killers. It didn’t happen often. But it did happen.
Once, Ambra interviewed a middle-aged woman who collected egg cups. In her soft, gentle voice, she explained that she had gotten fed up with her constantly unfaithful husband. She tied him up on a kitchen chair; tortured him using an iron, a screwdriver, and boiling water; and eventually strangled him using a washing line. Afterward she stuffed his body into the freezer in the garage.
So. You never knew what would happen.
Ambra doodled in her notepad and waited while Tareq took pictures of an obediently posing Elsa.
Tareq studied the photos on his camera and then nodded to let Ambra know he was happy.
“I’ve gotta go,” he said apologetically.
As Tareq said his good-byes, Elsa grabbed a turquoise shawl from the couch and pulled it over her shoulders. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said, heading off into the kitchen. Ambra waited in the living room. In all likelihood, her trip up here would be pointless. That was the most common outcome, that the tips they followed up on didn’t lead anywhere. Elsa didn’t seem to have dementia, and maybe Grace was right, there could be a story here, but it still felt like a long shot. She looked around the room. Elsa’s apartment really didn’t seem particularly special. Crocheted
table cloths and yellowed pine furniture, like every other pensioner’s home Ambra had ever visited. Pink hyacinths in matching copper pots. Neat pelmets and a cozy feeling.
Elsa was born in 1923. What had a woman from that generation seen and experienced? War, peace, the struggle for women’s rights, and everything in between. And on top of that, an illegitimate child with a prime minister known for having affairs. What would that be for the paper? A quarter page?
Ambra glanced out of the window. Elsa’s apartment was high up; the sun was beneath the horizon, but she could still make out the mountains in the distance. There was smoke rising from the mine, the trucks carrying the ore moving in a steady stream. She remembered that mine. It was like an ancient beast out there. They’d visited it once, while she was at school. Going beneath ground was horrible, and her classmates had laughed at her and . . . As though from nowhere, the memories washed over Ambra.
Life in Kiruna was so unlike anything she had experienced before. She was used to moving schools and classes, used to departures, new people, and foster families. But it was so cold. And so dark. They spoke so differently, and none of her classmates had been interested in a withdrawn Stockholm kid who lived with the strictly religious Sventin family.
“Why do you talk so weird?”
“Don’t you have any parents? Didn’t they want you?”
She’d kept to herself during recess, heard her classmates whispering, wanted to get away. And then she got sick. Really sick.
“You’re going to school,” Esaias Sventin had said as Ambra sat at the breakfast table and tried to swallow the lumpy oatmeal. That was all they ever served. Apparently jelly was a sin. Like so much else at the Sventins’.
“My ear hurts so much,” she’d said. She didn’t really want to stay home—she hated the cold wooden house—but she felt so ill. And her ear was pounding and aching.
“Which?” he’d asked bluntly.
She’d pointed to the right one. Her nose had been running for days, and she was shivering. She just wanted to get back into bed. Listlessly, she stirred her porridge, and was completely unprepared for the blow. It struck her right above her tender ear, and she’d screamed at the explosion of pain. The others sat in silence. Rakel looked down at the table. Their sons glanced at once another.
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