The One Day You Were My Husband (104)

“Yes?” I say. “Or maybe no.”

Johan laughs.

I take a breath. “I came here to…I came here to clear something up.”

He nods encouragingly, waits for me to go on, but my speech has suddenly abandoned me.

After a while Johan turns back to the barbecue, transferring the meat to two plates. He adds potato, corn, onion, salad, then covers both plates with a tea towel and puts them to one side.

“Oh, please don’t let me stop you eating,” I say. “I’m—”

“Carrie. I couldn’t eat a thing right now.”

He rubs a hand over his face, and I can’t tell if he’s about to laugh or cry.

“You’ve just turned up here after eighteen months of total silence. And you’re telling me you’re living in Stockholm, and that you need to clear something up.” He laughs, but it’s a nervous sound. “I mean, do you want to eat now?”

“No. And sorry. But, you know me.”

After a moment, he smiles. “I do. This is peak Carrie Cole.”

I smile, too.

I wrap my arms around myself. I’m struggling to keep warm, even now I’m closer to the coals. Seeing this, Johan gets up again and lifts the grill off the barbecue. He puts two logs on, making a fire. He sits next to me and turns in my direction.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“OK.” Another breath. “The thing I needed to clear up was this. I’ve been back at work for more than a year. I’m knee-deep in a very tricky divorce with a pathological liar determined to prove that he’s the ultimate Nice Guy. I have a brilliant yet totally unreliable mother who suddenly wants to be in my life. I have a very unpredictable forty-year-old au pair called Maya. I’m trying to hold my children through several huge life changes and I am working long hours in a foreign language. I am very busy. But I’m also happy again. I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. Not just in my work, in everything.”

“Well done, Carrie Cole,” he says. “Although—Maya? What?!”

I smile. “I know. But—another time.”

Johan says he’s looking forward to that update.

“So, yes, I’ve had a lot going on. Which is why I’ve had to work so especially hard not to think about being in the same city as you, breathing the same air, watching the same trees turn.”

He looks up at me.

“I’ve been trying to concentrate just on my children, my job, my sister, my poor grasp of the Swedish language.”

He starts to say something but I put up a hand to silence him.

“But the problem is, you’re just there. All of the time.”

Johan is perfectly still.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’ve had to accept that I love you, Johan. Just…so much. Still. I can’t help it. It’s been fourteen years and I still don’t know anyone whose company I crave more than yours.”

I pause. “I have to be honest, that does often include my children.”

Johan doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say anything. He folds his arms across his chest, no longer looking at me, and I realize that, for all I’ve told myself about doing this in my time, at my speed, this ship may still have sailed.

I know he’s no longer with Freja. His work biography has been updated to say he lives in a cabin by the sea—no mention of anyone else—but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t started seeing someone. Or even sworn off all relationships, like I did eighteen months ago.

“So, that’s it. I’m a very poor prospect right now with two kids and a messy divorce, a still-tricky mother, no plans to live here beyond the end of my contract in September next year, and no clever suggestions for long-term relationship strategy. But I’m here, with a very open heart, and…that’s it, actually. I am here and my heart is open. To you. I just needed to do it my way. In my time.”

After a while, Johan turns to look at me again.

We stare at each other for a long time. Our faces, bodies, hands, are so close, but he’s not moving. He’s looking at me in that way he always looked at me, but something’s stopping him.

“I dreamed of this,” he says.

I swallow. His use of past tense hangs between us.

“Freja left me, of course. And I was very low for a while. I missed her. I missed Matteo so much; she wouldn’t let me see him for several months—she was too hurt. But she was right to be hurt. You were always there. Even before you came back into my life.”

“And now?”

“And now I’m…I’m thinking, Carrie! I wasn’t expecting this. I thought you were going to want to talk about Robin, or Thailand, or…I don’t know. This is a shock.”

“Of course.”

We look out into the solid black of the Baltic Sea. Johan leans forward and blows into the fire. Brave new flames creep upward, slender offerings to the deep purple bowl of sky.

I’m keenly aware that this may be a terrible misfire, that we may not be able to find our way back to each other. That I will drive back to the city with little more than his sympathy and well wishes. But if that happens, I believe I can handle it now.

Johan offers me the blanket. I tell him I’m OK and he laughs at me, because this is patently nonsense, but he doesn’t force the issue.