The Break-Up Retreat(91)

Anna holds the file up next to her face.

“Recognize this?” She smiles, as though posing for a picture. “It’s mine! It’s my patient file from last year! Took me a couple of weeks, but I finally found it a few days ago. At first I was just trying to do . . . well, exactly what Isobel over there was doing, actually. I was trying to find proof of what you’re doing here. How you’re harming people.”

Her smile hardens until it’s no more than a mask.

“But once I read what was in it, I realized it wouldn’t be enough,” she says, in a strange, strangled monotone.

She puts the folder down on the desk and opens it.

“Let’s read it. Shall we?”

Martina doesn’t respond.

Anna licks her finger and picks up the first paper.

“Here we go,” she says. “Patient: Susannah Wallin.”

Nina Sundin

Willmar Way 14

119 08

Stockholm

I know where you live, you fucking cunt.

You ruined my life.

I will come for you. You won’t know when.

You ruined my life and you are going to pay.

I see you through your window sometimes.

I wonder if you can feel me looking?

One day, very soon, you will turn around and I will be there.

I’ll be waiting for you.





Chapter 52


“Susannah?” I repeat.

Susannah. Anna.

I remember the pictures I found. The teenager, smiling with her mouth full of braces; the young woman with the long, expertly curled lengths of hair, the face plastered in makeup.

She looked like anyone else. Like a thousand girls walking the streets of Stockholm, or London, or New York. Young and blond and beautiful in a way that would never stick with you.

I didn’t look for her here. I didn’t see her face in Anna. I thought Susannah was long gone, her body buried somewhere deep in the woods. I never expected her to be behind the reception at Himlafall.

Waiting. Watching. Biding her time.

When I asked Anna if she had heard about Susannah, she froze, for just a second.

Not because she didn’t recognize the name, but because she did.

Because she thought, for a moment, that I might know her. Recognize her.

That wasn’t confusion I saw on her face; it was relief, when it dawned on her that I didn’t know.

And I told Belinda Susannah Wallin had recommended Himlafall; she seemed upset.

Not because Susannah Wallin had gone missing in the woods. Not because she had been told of some grand conspiracy.

It was because she thought it strange that I had named her coworker, seemingly without recognizing her.

She must have asked Anna about it. Asked Susannah. And Susannah told her it was a lie, or a mistake. And so Belinda thought to suspect me; not because Himlafall is a cult, not because there were secrets she didn’t want me to find, but because she thought it was a strange lie to tell. That I might have some unhealthy fixation on one of the caretakers.

Tendency to lie for attention. Keep away from Anna.

The taste of bile fills my mouth.

I was wrong. I got it all so wrong.

Anna—Susannah—has begun reading from her file.

“Patient presents as well-mannered and empathetic. She talks about her former fiancé”—Anna chokes up on this word, then clears her throat and continues talking—“with obvious warmth, and says her goal is to get back together with the fiancé in question. Patient needs adjusting of goals, but in general appears well-adjusted, though in obvious distress.”

Anna pauses.

“That was your bitch of an employee, by the way,” she notes to Doctor Martina. “Doctor Nina.” She breathes out hard, through her nostrils.

“Do you know what it feels like to take all your life savings, every penny you’ve got, and pay them to you, and drive five hours north to go to your stupid fucking treatment clinic, thinking that you’re going to be there—thinking the person who’s taught me so much, the person who’s kept me going through hard times, the person who responded to every DM I wrote, even late at night, when I thought about killing myself—is going to be there to help you, only to be met with Doctor fucking Nina?!”

Her voice is climbing, but she stops herself, takes a deep breath, and turns to me, in a cutesy little aside.

“I don’t know if you’ve met Doctor Nina, Isobel, but she’s a dried-up old bitch. I think she might be a psychopath, honestly. Says something about this one’s hiring policies.”

She laughs, a high, girlish sound.

“Then again, maybe I should be grateful for that.” She turns back, and the smile she gives Martina is almost warm. “If you’d been more diligent about who you hired, I never would have had this opportunity!”

She stops, and frowns.

“But, then again, if you’d been better at your goddamned job, I wouldn’t have had to do this in the first place. Catch-22, I guess. Or maybe it’s an ouroboros? I’m not sure.”

She shrugs.

“Anyway,” she says. “Let’s jump forward.”

She flips a few pages.

I see her eyelid twitching, see her biting down, hard, her jaw tensing.

“This is the good part,” she notes, to me. The audience. “You’ve got to listen to this.”