He dipped his head and looked closely at her. ‘Listen, I know you love that family, but you need to start imposing some boundaries. Puppy-dog eyes or not, Tove’s right – you’ve got a life to live too. You need to start saying no. Except when it’s to a guy – then you need to start saying yes.’ He reached over and put a hand on hers. ‘You know what I’m saying.’
She nodded. She knew exactly what he was saying.
He winked at her kindly, heart-stoppingly. ‘Remember – it’s just a job, and you’re just the nanny, Bell.’
It was exactly 5.28 a.m. as she closed the door behind her with a shiver, holding the bike steady with one hand as she tucked her trousers into her socks with the other. She glanced up and down the arm’s-width narrow street but no one else was around: a few bottle crates were stacked in a tower, ready for pickup, and the hand-painted A-frame advertising the craft beers in the Star Bar was propped against the wall. Quickly, she stepped on the pedal and swung her leg over the bike, gliding silently past the tiny, narrow antique shop selling ceramics and glassware, past the ancient wooden door of the rare comic emporium sited thirty feet below the street in an old wine cellar.
The cobbles glistened from the overnight rain. Her tyres sluiced through shallow puddles as she darted from alley to alley, cutting across the pedestrian thoroughfares that would soon be heaving with tourists looking for wooden Dala horses and bakeries to have fika in. In these long, thin alleys she was protected from the wind that came straight off the Baltic, but she knew that as soon as she took the left onto Stora Nygatan and over the bridge it would push at her back all the way to Ostermalm, until she closed the Mogerts’ garden gate behind her.
Traffic was light, with few commuters out yet. Small clusters of electric scooters stood poised by the bridge, outside the main station, at street corners and by bike racks. There weren’t even any drivers in the embassy cars as Bell powered up the colourful street, and she had a sense of suspension, as though the city was holding its breath – just about to exhale, just about to start up again. What would today hold?
She had slept well, awaking in the starfish position on her double bed, although she’d still wished she could stay there for another four hours. But one glance at her employers’ faces as she walked in, and it was clear they had had a very different night. Both of them were pale and tense, sitting stiffly and in silence at the whitewashed kitchen table as she shut the back door quietly behind her.
‘Hey,’ she said in a low voice, partly so as not to wake the children, but also in deference to the sombre mood in the house. She pulled off her beanie and automatically twisted her hair into the topknot, seeing that they had managed only coffee; the island was spotlessly clean and tidy.
Hanna was dressed but Max was still in his pyjamas, and his eyes followed his partner as she got up to rinse her cup.
‘Bell, thank you for coming so early. I really appreciate it.’ Hanna’s poise was in stark contrast to the sucker-punched disbelief of last night, but Bell could see the effort it was taking her just to present this veneer. Her mouth was pulled down at the corners, the sinews strained in her neck.
‘It’s the very least I could do. How are you both?’
She made a point of including Max in the question, seeing that Hanna was using manners as a mask, and he answered her with a weary nod that told her more in its fragile silence than words would.
‘Did you manage to sleep at all?’
A silence followed; they seemed to be deferring to each other to answer.
‘Not really,’ Max said finally. His voice, usually spry and infused with an untold joke, was flat and heavy.
‘No.’ She bit her lip, watching as Hanna cleaned the coffee cup vigorously before immediately drying it and returning it to the cupboard. Bell wasn’t sure any implement in this kitchen had ever been returned to its home without first spending at least four days on the draining board. She watched as Hanna stood, unseeing, at the cabinet for a moment, her shoulders pitched a good two inches above their usual setting, before turning around with possibly the most implausible smile Bell had ever seen – but one of the bravest.
‘Right. Well, we should head off then. Traffic will get sticky if we hit rush hour.’
‘Sure,’ Bell agreed, offering her most reassuring smile in return, although she felt a guilty wave of relief at the prospect of stepping clear of their suffocating gloom. ‘And I’ll take care of everything here. Don’t worry about a single thing –’
Hanna straightened her back. ‘Actually, Max and I have discussed it, and we think it would be best if you came with me.’
Bell blinked at her, confused. ‘. . . Me?’
‘To Uppsala, yes.’
She looked across at Max, who was staring into his coffee cup.
Hanna stood stiffly. ‘It could be too . . . confusing.’ Her voice was as brittle as toffee.
‘Oh, yes,’ Bell murmured. ‘I can see how that . . . But what about –?’
‘Max is going to work from home today. He’ll take the girls to nursery.’
‘. . . And Linus?’
‘He’s coming with us.’ Hanna flinched, as though hating the indecision in her voice. ‘But we don’t know yet if . . . well, whether he should actually come in. That’s why I need you there.’ Her eyes flickered towards Max and away again without resting on him, and Bell understood they were at odds on this.
Bell went still as suddenly the maths presented itself. Linus was nine. The ex had been in a coma for seven years. ‘He’s . . . Linus’s father?’ She looked between them both. Max nodded.
Bell was stunned. In the three years she’d been working here, it had never been mentioned. She supposed she could have worked it out last night if she’d stopped to consider it, but she hadn’t thought to make mathematical calculations. ‘Does he know?’
Hanna whirled back to face her sharply. ‘No. And I’d like it to stay that way until we get up there and I . . . I know what we’re dealing with.’
Bell nodded, looking from Hanna back to Max again. He looked suitably bitten back too.
‘He’s awake, but we don’t yet know how cognizant he will be of what’s happened to him. It could upset him to see Linus so changed – he was little more than a baby when the accident happened.’ Her voice was brittle and hard, shining with jagged edges that could, at any moment, draw blood. She was a mother in defence. ‘On the other hand, he could be absolutely the man he was and the first person he’ll want to see is his son.’ She gave a helpless, exaggerated shrug and stretched her mouth into a grimace, tears in her eyes. ‘I have absolutely no idea what we’re walking into.’
‘Which is why you would be better to play it on the safe side and keep Linus here until you know the score,’ Max said to her back.
‘He’s been in a coma for seven years, Max!’ Hanna snapped, whirling round, and Bell could tell by her tone they had been arguing about this for hours. ‘What if Linus is all he wants? What if he’s distressed by his not being there? It could make things worse for him.’
‘I sincerely doubt he’s going to be that lucid.’
‘Oh, because you’re the expert?’