The One Day You Were My Husband (10)

All of the Roof hosts in Stockholm are offering subsidized rates on their apartments, but they’re still pricey. I look at cheaper options further out and then, on a whim, increase my search area to include the wider archipelago surrounding the city. I once read a novel about a politician staying in a summer house by the Baltic sea, investigating a suspicious death. I love the idea of a little coastal hideaway.

I immediately fall in love with a little summer house near Trosa but, really, it’s too far out.

And then Robin, who’s been quiet for a while, sends me a booking confirmation for a very trendy-looking hotel in Stockholm, almost next door to the conference venue. He’s paid for it himself: a superking bed and a vast bathtub that I can soak in, alone, no children coming in to scream or drop crisps in my water, no laundry spilling out of the basket or skids in the toilet.

He smiles when I thank him, tells me he wants me to have the most comfortable trip possible, then goes off to load the dishwasher.

Before turning my attention to travel insurance I take one last look at the cabin that caught my eye. It’s beautiful. Stylish and peaceful, photographed by someone who knows how to make a camera sing. There’s a large red pendant light over a big scrubbed table, bunk beds with thick woolen blankets, views straight out over a flat silver sea. I scroll down to read the description, because I love this house.

That’s when I see it. A photo of the host, the name Johan. A mild sensation in my chest: he looks a bit like a Johan I once knew.

I start reading the description. “This cabin has been in my family for three generations…”

My eyes track back to the photo, because it looks so very much like him that I want a longer look. How novel, I think to myself; how funny. A Johan look-alike, hosting a cabin by the sea near Stockholm.

I reread the name Johan, allow myself to look at the thumbnail photo of a man in a green T-shirt, laughing at something off camera. He looks so much like the man I married. He has longish hair, tied up, and even though the picture is tiny you can see he has knockout blue eyes.

The similarities are actually uncanny.

Suspiciously so.

I move in closer to the computer, zooming as far as I can.

Hollowness spreads rapidly in my chest.

I look away, then back at the screen, and my hand flies up to my mouth as if to stop myself shouting out, because it’s him.

Johan Kullberg. The man I was married to for all of four hours. The man I believed to be my one great love. It’s him.



* * *



—

    I don’t sleep.

I stay up all night, staring at Johan’s name on my computer screen, zooming in on the pictures of his house, pressing a hand hard down on my sternum to stop my heart erupting through my chest wall. Disbelief, paralysis. A moth fluttering at the windowsill, bars of moonlight rolling silently across the living table. I make my hourly trips to Raffy’s bedside as if in a dream.

It really is Johan. He got away. He got out of Thailand. And after all he put me through, he never found it within himself to pick up the phone and tell me.



* * *



—

When Robin doesn’t appear at 2 a.m. for the meteor shower, I give in and google Johan’s name.

I made a promise to myself when Robin and I got together that I would never google Johan again. It was disrespectful in a very obvious way to Robin, but it was harmful to me, too. No matter how many times I looked him up, the facts didn’t change, and my despair only grew in scope. Johan had betrayed and then abandoned me. He had put my career at risk and he’d consigned me to years of grief. Google did not hold any information that could change this.

He’s a recently qualified architect, I read. He lives in Stockholm. He has a partner and son. His employer’s self-conscious website says he’d write songs and go running if he had time for hobbies, but for now he’s taking on a broad portfolio of design projects and being a dad.

In the spasm of disbelief at seeing him here, leading a normal life, a thread of anger begins to unspool. He is an architect. A dad. A decent, upstanding family man with aspirations and a network of friends and colleagues. What a great-sounding guy!

The anger spreads like a mold spore. This comfortable new life he’s built for himself, without any thought for me. No email of explanation. No apology. How could he not have told me he’d got away? How am I finding out like this? How?

Google brings up four photos of him. Two from the time before he was dragged off by armed men, reported in the Swedish press: the Johan I married, the smiling, beautiful, free young man, full of tall stories.

One photo of him—thin and ill-looking with what look like blisters, or maybe bruises, on his face—from a Swedish newspaper article in 2016, when he apparently flew back to Sweden to start his life over. I don’t spend much time looking at this one. It’s too painful.

Tears of anger, of humiliation, are gathering. Even if Johan couldn’t find it in his heart to contact me, how could his parents have failed to? Six years have passed since he flew home. Why is it that not one person in that family cared enough to reach out to me?

And how has any of this come about in the first place? We’d been told there was no possibility of him getting out of there alive. What changed?

A tear escapes and runs down my cheek. I read and reread the articles but the Swedish language skills I talked so cheerfully about a few hours ago elude me and I falter, derailed by irrelevant conjugations.