The Break-Up Retreat(37)

Better to let her think she’s convinced me. Better to let her think I’ve accepted the party line.

On the way out, Belinda once more takes her place behind the reception, and she waves cheerfully at me, a little smile on her lips, like we’ve just shared a joke.

The printer is sitting right behind her.

When I get back to the cabin, my door is still hanging slightly open. I draw a deep breath and push; it swings inward, without a sound, hinges perfectly oiled.

Everything is as I left it. The little lamp on the bedside table still casting its warm glow over the bed; the blanket half on the floor. My shoes are where I kicked them off in the corner.

Still, I go into the bathroom, pull the curtain all the way back, inspect the shower. I get down on my hands and knees and look under the bed.

Nothing.

It’s only when I turn around and survey the floor that I realize what is missing.

My illicit iPhone, the one I dropped on the rug, is nowhere to be found.





Chapter 20


I blink myself awake, harsh sunlight streaming in through the window. My eyes feel filled with sand, dry and painful, and my spine seems to have rearranged itself at some point during the night. Thirty-something backs don’t like sleeping upright against a wooden door, no matter how much the brain in charge wants to make sure no one can get in and catch it unaware.

I groan, rubbing my eyes until little sparks of light seem to set off behind my eyelids. For a few seconds, exhaustion lets me stay blissfully ignorant of what happened last night; but then, when I try to get up from the floor, the soles of my feet remind me, and it all comes flooding back.

My phone. My one connection to the outside world.

For a second, it feels as though I’m about to puke.

I rush into the bathroom, spitting into the sink, and then I rest my forehead against the cool mirror, drawing a deep breath. I try to trick myself into being calm and collected; maybe, if I tell myself that I’m not freaking out, that I haven’t gotten myself into something I’m not sure I can handle, I’ll believe it.

Well, what did you think was going to happen?

Not this.

Armin’s worried face from the last night before I left comes back to me. Softly lit by the hundred-year-old lamps of the pub where I work Mondays through Thursdays, his fingers worrying away at a coaster, tearing it into tiny little pieces.

I’m just scared that you’re treating like it some kind of game. It’s not a game. It’s serious.

God, I thought he was being so condescending. I thought I had it all figured out. It was in my blood, after all.

When I was a kid, and my dad would tell his stories, I found them exciting, never frightening. He always came back, after all, no worse for the wear. When he told me about being held at gunpoint, or having to hide from bombs, it never seemed scary; he was my dad, after all, invincible through the sheer forces of charm and destiny. Nothing could touch him, and therefore, he was never in any real danger.

Later, when he was in prison, after the judge gave him the harshest sentence ever doled out in a libel case in Swedish history, I found out along with the rest of the world that some of those stories had never happened. He’d never even been to some of the places he had written about, and if he had, he’d been holed up in a hotel, working off of nuggets of information given to him by real journalists, the ones who had actually put themselves in harm’s way. Some of whom had never come home to their families, the way he always came home to ours.

And I told myself that I would be different. I would not be like my father. I would be like the other journalists, the real journalists, the ones who put the truth above themselves.

But, for the first time—and it is vaguely nauseating to realize this—I understand why my father did what he did.

Not all of it.

But being here, cut off from those who might try to help me, knowing now that something is going on, that it’s not all in my mind, I understand why he might have stayed in those hotel rooms rather than going out and facing the dangers of the world.

Because I’m frightened. Because I want to go home. Because I’m not sure I’m up for it. Not now that it’s all real.

But if I do . . . I’m just like him.

I straighten up and look in the mirror. My short, dark hair is tangled in the back, flattened where I have leaned my head against the door. My lips are dry and cracked.

The rose pendant hangs heavy against my neck.

This is what makes us different, Dad , I think, as my features seem to morph in the mirror until I’m looking at my father.

We always did look so very alike.

I don’t run away when things get hard.





Chapter 21


The air seems to have shifted during the night; despite the high, clear skies, there is a heavy sense of anticipation, a pressure that seems to charge the air with something to come.

Before breakfast, I stop by the reception area. Belinda has been replaced by Anna, which makes me feel a little bit calmer.

Anna doesn’t seem to be in quite as deep as Belinda is. At least not yet. Though maybe I’m just fooling myself.

“Good morning,” she says, swinging her feet down from the desk; she’s been sitting with her shoes up, leaning back in the rolling chair and reading a book.

She looks so immaculate it almost hurts to look at her; a fresh white T-shirt tucked into white jeans, blond hair pulled back into a perfect, perky ponytail. It’s as though she’s advertising something. Toothpaste, maybe. Or probiotic yogurt.