The Break-Up Retreat(49)

“I couldn’t leave.” Her words come out thick and unwieldy.

Clara is still crying, next to me; I reach out, trying to comfort her silently, but she turns away from me.

“Why not?” Martina asks. “You told me you didn’t love him. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.”

Pernilla remains quiet.

“You told me you used to lie awake at night, fantasizing about putting a pillow over his sleeping face and pushing down until he became quiet. You said you would lie there, your eyes dry as ash, for hours, imagining selling the house after the funeral, and buying a little place of your own with the inheritance, just so you might sleep in a bed you had picked out yourself.”

Pernilla’s lips are bone white.

“But you wouldn’t leave.” Martina makes it sound like an accusation.

“I couldn’t,” Pernilla manages to push out, her mouth stiff and dry.

“No,” Martina says, sharply. “You wouldn’t . And when he left, you hated him for it. Why?”

Pernilla shakes her head.

“Tell us, Pernilla.” Martina’s voice is climbing. “Tell us, or walk away. Go back to that life. Go back to that empty bed, and lie there, every night, for the rest of your life, clinging to the wreckage, because you’re too much of a coward to tell the truth.”

Pernilla flinches, as though struck.

“Because I was too weak,” she tries.

“No,” Martina rebuffs her. “Try again.”

“Because . . .” Pernilla swallows, over and over again, her hand climbing up to her neck, like she is physically trying to hold the words back.

“Because I . . .”

Pernilla looks over at Clara, the corners of her mouth turned down, eyes blazing with hatred, or shame, or some swirling concoction of them both.

“Because I didn’t leave,” she finally manages to say, and it sounds like the very words are choking her. “In those fantasies, I was at least . . . I did something. I earned it. But then he left, and he took that away from me, too. He took that dream away. That maybe I would leave. That maybe I would be capable of leaving. One day. But he took it away from me. Just like he has taken everything else. And I just let him. Again, and again, and again. I let him take everything away. Until there was nothing left.”

Her face twists, and she begins to cry, in great, gulping sobs. The sobs of a small child, left alone, in the dark, the harsh words still ringing in her ears, with no power to escape.

Martina looks over at Clara.

“Go to her,” she tells Clara.

“What?” Clara’s voice is harsh and cloudy from the crying.

“Go to her. Comfort her.”

Clara begins to shake her head, but Martina stares her down.

“You are the same,” she says. “You can heal yourself by healing her. Pernilla hates in you what she hates in herself. You need to forgive her.”

I see Clara straining against it, the hurt boiling under the surface of her skin; but as Pernilla’s crying continues, and Martina’s stare refuses to break, Clara rises to her feet, walks over to Pernilla, and puts her arm around the other woman.

“I forgive you,” I hear Clara saying, as Pernilla clings to her. “I forgive you.”

“See?” Martina, soft as the breeze. “Control is what is holding you back. Control, and shame, and anger.”

Her amber eyes seem to glow as she looks at me.

“Only by giving up control,” she says, “can you become a version of yourself that is free from pain.”





Chapter 27


I close the cabin door behind me.

After lunch, I asked Katarina to tell someone for me that I wasn’t feeling well, that my cramps had gotten worse and that I needed to go lie down. Katarina assured me she’d take care of it, and so I slunk away.

The room is still in disarray from last night, the clothes pulled out from the suitcase in piles on the floor. I tore the place apart looking for the missing phone, hoping, in vain, that I might find it somewhere, that I had just misplaced it, only to be left with the sinking realization that it was gone.

I sit down on the bed and pull my recorder out of my pocket. It has run out of battery, and I curse softly to myself, pull the charger out of my bag and go to plug it in next to the bathroom mirror, in the socket meant for a hairdryer.

I stare at myself in the mirror.

The hollows under my eyes look more pronounced, my lips void of color. My hair is lying flat against my skull. I look like the ghost of the person who left my shitty little secondhand rental a few days ago.

And yet, as I look at the shadow staring back at me, she smiles.

I didn’t catch it, the first time the good doctor did it, with Leyla. I was stuck in the moment, much too focused on what was happening in the room. But with Pernilla, it struck me.

You told me you used to lie awake at night.

Pernilla never said that in group therapy. Just like Leyla never told us the name of her ex-girlfriend, Alexia.

They both shared that in their individual therapy. And Martina told the rest of us. She shared those buried, hidden intimacies with us like it was nothing, in order to break Leyla and Pernilla. In order to bend them to her will.

This goes against at least two different privacy laws. Secrets shared in therapy count as medical information. And I’ve got Martina doing it on tape.