Page 27 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

In the meantime, she wanted them both to know she knew.

Let them sweat, let them recognise their guilt.

She lifted the dress between her thumb and forefinger.

She’d been with Maiken when she’d bought it, told her how great it looked.

Now it disgusted her. She hung it on a coat peg, so they’d know she’d been there.

Turning to look up the stairs again, her eye caught on gold lying on the second step, previously hidden by the dress.

Maiken’s locket and chain. He must have lifted it over her head, before divesting her of the rest of her things, as they stumbled up the stairs; kissing, no doubt, groping each other, fantasising on how to use the next hours while Anna collected her dead cat’s ashes.

That anger magma whooshed to her head, and reaching for the locket, the rest was a bit of a red mist…

* * *

“Anna?”

Down in the cellar, she shouts a hello from the now unlocked store room.

It is filled to the gills with all sorts; boxes, her bike, far more garden tools than the minimal back yard warrants, more boxes, skates hanging by their laces from a hook, the flattened boxes her morfar had been obsessed with keeping “just in case”, which she’d never binned, just in case.

The entire far wall is racked out with practical shelves, with yet more boxes, of Christmas decorations, which her mormor had packed by colour, allowing for a different palate range each year in a three-year rotation, although one box is marked “All Years” and contains the staples; the real candles and their holders for the tree, the Christmas-tree stand, the star, and strings of Danish flags.

Next to these are stacks of jigsaw boxes.

Anna looks at them now and wonders why she hadn’t donated them somewhere, but in the years after Morfar died there had been very little of his she’d wanted to discard (apart from the interior design, obviously), always coming up with a reason to hang onto them for now.

And rightly so, she tells herself, as now might be one of those “just in case” times, when she and Jamie need a new jigsaw.

She runs her fingertip down the stack, perusing the little images on the side.

There’s a particular one she’s looking for, one of the first she’d bought her grandfather, one she considers particularly fiendish.

It’s at the bottom of the middle stack and she whips it out before tucking it under her arm.

All of this, is to pointedly distract herself from the locket, currently swabbed in kitchen roll, next to the lit advent candle on the kitchen counter. Does it count as thieving if you don’t keep, give away or sell the thing you take? Does it? Google might have the answer.

She hears Jamie moving around upstairs, and it occurs to her to hide it. Bounding up the stairs, she’s too late.

They pause at first, getting a measure of each other and them remembering they are trying not to be awkward.

Anna holds up the box, with a “New jigsaw,” and Jamie simultaneously holds up a bag, with a “Pastries.” And then there’s a silence, neither knowing what to do next and neither of them willing to approach eye contact.

Anna’s brain, however, is playing through an alternate universe, where he’s walked in, said hello, waved his pastries at her (not a euphemism), and strode across the room to embrace her with a proper, extensive, hello kiss.

She feels her face heat as she realises what she’s doing.

“Tea?” she asks, and spins towards the kettle.

She wants to look at him, and yet she can’t because her thoughts will go rogue.

She wants him to look at her, and also not, because she doesn’t want him to be disappointed in what he sees.

Why does this have to be so hard? Why can’t things go back to how they were?

“What’s that?” he asks.

“What’s what?” But she knows.

Glancing back, she sees him pointing to the kitchen roll shroud. “Something for me? A gift?”

“’Fraid not,” she says with a sigh. “Quite the opposite. It’s something I’ve taken. Not from you,” she hastens to add.

Alerted to her dismayed tone, Jamie gives her an enquiring head tilt. “Want to talk about it?”

“No,” she says, like a teen.

“Need to talk about it?” he tries again.

“Probably.” She really doesn’t know what to do about it.

Jamie sits on the barstool. “Spill.” This sounds more like him. This is Jamie in business mode and being something he knows better how to navigate, his guard comes down.

“Remember when Carl came round?”

Jamie gives an unimpressed grunt.

“He said something just before he left about a locket?”

“Aye. Suggested you’d taken it.”

“He did. And I vehemently denied having done so?”

“You did.”

Her lips purse together, not wanting to say it, but they lose the battle. “Funny thing. This morning, I found the locket.”

“Where?” he asks, surprised. “In your room?”

“In a pot in the yard.”

“By the bench?”

“Yep.”

“Weird. Who’d put it there? Do you have magpies here? They steal shiny stuff.” She can’t work out whether he’s being kind, giving her an out.

“I’m the magpie,” Anna says glumly. “I put it there.”

“Why?”

Good question. “Because that’s how unhinged I was by him cheating.

Because I was angry. Because I was being spiteful.

Because I was in a haze of rage. And then in the tornado of throwing Carl out, packing up and my life imploding, I sort of forgot about it, blocked it out of my head, I suppose, and the locket really shows the state I was in, as I really only just remembered it and what had happened and I looked to see if it could be real, and Oh, yes, it absolutely was, and now I have officially stolen something and am a common thief.

” She puffs out then turns to raise her eyes to him.

“Do you think less of me?” For some reason it matters to her.

Jamie takes a moment to think about it. Harsh, but probably due.

“If I’m learning anything as I get older,” he finally replies, “it’s to try not to judge.

We all do mad things when we’re emotional.

Look at me; I moved to another country. That I love it here is a stroke of luck.

But your moment of madness is fixable.” He catches her eyes widening.

“I mean, if you want to. I’m assuming you can give it back?

You haven’t actually explained who it belongs to. ”

It’s probably time to share more of her story with him.

“It belongs to the woman Carl was having the affair with. Her name is Maiken. I found it here when I discovered what they were doing, I swept it up because I knew how much it meant to her. I dumped it in the pot as I left, not wanting to actually have it on me.”

“Did you know her, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Anna says with a mirthless laugh. “She was my best friend from school. We were like sisters.”

If he’s shocked, he hides it well.

“That’s a pretty shit discovery,” he says, which Anna feels is kind when he could completely have gone with “Bloody hell, your soulmate and your best mate! Double whammy! Sucks to be you.” Which is pretty much what her inner critic was telling her for the first months she’d been away.

She’d torn herself apart, both with heartbreak and scorn for not having spotted it, seen some signs, or walked in on them before, and above all else for being such a trusting idiot.

She’s better now, though. Better and never making that mistake again. Some cuts run too deep.

“I remember her calling and leaving messages, but I blocked her. I didn’t want her apologies or explanations or anything and like I said, I’d forgotten about the locket almost immediately. She could just as well have been calling about that.”

“And your ex?”

“Same. Blocked.”

“You can’t block him from his home, though?”

“The house is mine. Always was. I walked around town in a haze for some hours, then came back expecting him to have cancelled his meetings so he could grovel, but he wasn’t here.

He’d stuck with his timetable and gone to work.

I didn’t know if he was just putting his work above us or hiding from the fallout.

I saw red, redder than the already red and called a locksmith.

The locks were changed by the end of the afternoon and all his clothes were in two suitcases standing in the front yard waiting for him, along with some boxes of his things.

The rest I sent on to his office when I left.

Meanwhile I ignored his pounding on the door and his calls.

I think the neighbours might have called the police at one point, he’d got so noisy. ”

“You really didn’t talk to him?” She knows this will be important to Jamie; it is after all what he’s trying to do with Lajla. But Anna doesn’t have anything to defend herself on this, so she doesn’t even try.

“Nope. While he shouted for the next many days, I was stuffing my things into the spare room and booking a flight out of the country.”

Jamie pauses to drink some of her coffee, deliberating.

Anna follows suit, wondering whether he’ll ever answer her question of whether he thinks less of her with a straight yes or no.

“Can you imagine every time you see a friend, you keep thinking, ‘Did you know? Would you have said?’ and then every time you go anywhere in the city you think, ‘Did they come here together?’ The laughs I’d had with them in these places, with Carl romantically and with Maiken as a best friend – were they also going there and having those laughs together?

It drives you nuts. So, I packed up and left.

I could lick my wounds in private and start something new elsewhere, where nobody knew me and my life hadn’t just been trashed. ”

The energy courses through her as she tells it – it feels good to get it out.

She’s only ever given Katrine the topline of what had happened, she’d never talked about the paranoia it had brought into her head.

All of which, at the time, had neatly served to plaster over any memory of lifting a necklace and disposing of it on the way out of the door.

“But now I need to work out how to get rid of it.”

“By which you mean return it, yes?” His eyebrow is cocked. So much for not judging…

“Of course,” she reluctantly agrees. “But without her ever knowing it was me. Obviously.”

“So, no apology?”

She coughs a laugh. “She fucked my partner. Don’t be ridiculous.”