Page 49 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

Chapter Thirty-Three

The adrenaline has plummeted by the time her train comes and she gets a seat, which is when the emotion of it all gets the better of her; seeing Maiken, shouting at Carl and above any of that, the last minutes with Jamie.

Her words to him make her feel truly nauseous.

Palming away the rolling tears, she stares out of the windscreen, not that there’s anything to see, just tunnel.

She doesn’t even care whether she’ll see anyone else she knows, because she’s leaving.

She’ll be gone, they can talk about her behind her back, and she won’t have to worry about it.

The train pulls in at Kongens Nytorv. With hitching breaths, she walks the connection between the two train lines and back down with the escalator to stand behind the glass screens on the platform, waiting for the next train towards the airport.

Her head is dipped, as she hides her face, with the shame she feels.

“Anna!” She turns to see who’s called her name and spots Katrine standing with her two boys, clutching each by the hand. Briskly, she wipes her eyes, and draws a deep breath, to face her friend. Katrine reaches her to give her a hug, then spots her suitcase.

“Leaving?”

“Yeah,” Anna says, getting a grip on her voice and plastering on a bright face. “It’s time.” She shrugs, as if this is completely normal and her eyes aren’t red from tears. Katrine is far quicker on the uptake.

“Tough to say goodbye?”

“Definitely. But the right thing to do.” This is punctuated with an involuntary sniff. “Tak for sidst, by the way.” Thanks for last time, as the Danes say, although now she thinks about it, she owes Katrine a slap for the hangover she gifted her. “Where are you off to?”

“The boys are having a sleepover with Farmor in Amager,” says Katrine with delight.

“Lucky you and Rune.”

“Rune’s mother gave us babysitting tokens for Christmas, so we’re cashing one tonight for some extra sleep.” She looks blissed-out at the thought.

Anna looks at the two boys, one three, the other six. She’s met them before and they’re cute but extremely energetic.

The train arrives and the boys race for the front of the driverless carriage and its big window.

Someone has placed a sticker with fake dials beneath the screen and the boys pretend they are driving as it pulls away through the tunnel.

Katrine and Anna sit together and Anna’s suddenly comforted to have her friend with her.

While she thought she’d be pleased to be leaving the city, something she’s been envisaging for so many days, now she’s doing it her stomach is leaden.

But it is the right thing to do. She knows that.

“Want to talk about it?” asks Katrine. Anna sighs deeply. In her head she’s thinking “not really”, but actually, maybe, it would help.

“I finally found a ticket, so I bought it. I need to get back to my old life. My new life, I mean.” Katrine tucks her arm through Anna’s and pulls her closer.

“And that’s making you sad?”

“Oh, you know. Sometimes goodbyes are hard,” Anna says, trying to make light of it.

She had got hardened to them when she was younger, with all the times she and Ida would up sticks, but this feels different.

And the times she’d say goodbye to her grandparents were also sad, but she knew she’d be coming back at some point.

This, though … this she doesn’t recognise, and it leaves her aching inside.

She’s worried she’s going to start weeping again.

“So, what’s happened since I saw you?” Katrine asks.

Anna gives a small laugh. “Should have known you’re just here for the gossip.”

Katrine laughs, too. “Busted. I have so little gossip in my own life, I need yours.” She’s watching her boys with a look of love and pride.

She has a good family life, and she loves it, but Anna thinks she sometimes finds domesticity restrictive.

Fair enough. Then Anna will give her a moment of salacious gossip.

“Well, I took your advice, and I went for it with Jamie.” Given how it ended, she cannot impart this nugget with the enthusiasm it really deserves.

“How was it?” Katrine asks, as if this is the most important piece of information ever.

“Incredible,” she says sadly. Anna’s not going to lie.

Spotting the glumness, Katrine looks at her, concerned. “I take it that’s why you’re unhappy?”

Her friend’s sympathetic tone is too much. She doesn’t deserve it. “Oh, Trine, I’ve just left him and I said the most horrible thing, truly vicious. I’m an awful person and he’ll hate me, but I can’t go back because my flight is leaving.”

Katrine strokes her hair while she weeps, before pulling out a tissue from her bag, handing it to her.

“You could miss the plane, if it’s so bad. Go back and fix it?”

Anna is pretty sure this can’t be fixed.

An apology is due, but it would merely be a plaster, as this feels truly broken.

A very red line was crossed there. She shakes her head.

“I need to get back to my life in London. My new life.” She feels like she’s saying it time and again to solidify it in her head.

Another mantra. Like the last one had served her so well…

“In my experience, most things can be fixed, Anna, if you talk them out. Rune and I are constantly talking things out.” Anna is taken aback. They’ve always seemed so solid and balanced as a couple.

“I think this is one of the other things,” Anna says. “Ultimately, I don’t think we were supposed to be more than this snow-in moment.” She would just give anything for it to have ended differently.

“What is it that has you scared?” Katrine asks, flat out. Bloody Danish directness.

“Nothing! I’m not scared. I’m being practical.” Why do people keep thinking she’s scared?!

“Hmmm,” says Katrine. “I had an aunt, Elsebet, who always had a new boyfriend and was devastated with each break-up. I asked her why she kept setting herself up for it. She told me ‘A broken heart is an open heart.’”

Anna doesn’t quite see the link here. Nor the message.

“What does that mean? That my defences are down and I’m easy prey or prone to let the wrong things in?”

“Anna, no!” says Katrine. “That’s not how I read it at all.

It means that maybe it’s a heart that’s open to new opportunities, ready to be refilled by the right person.

That’s how Elsebet saw it. I think her point was, you have to put yourself out there and risk it.

You can protect your heart too much. And maybe eighteen months on, Jamie was exactly the right person for you to cross paths with, someone to risk the hurt for.

Maybe this is why you snowed-in over here. ”

Risk the hurt. Katrine says the words as if they are a logical combination, but not to Anna.

Katrine has clearly not been hurt as she has.

Anna shakes her head. She snowed-in here so she could help this handsome, kind man, who helped her out and definitely didn’t deserve what she said to him, to solve a problem he was having. That’s what she thinks.

“Talking of broken hearts,” she says, easing the subject away from Jamie because frankly, it hurts too much, “I saw Maiken.”

“Really?”

“Not willingly, but that’s another story. We talked. I told her what a rubbish friend she was.”

“Good.”

“But she seems to think Carl and I were already on the skids. That’s not how I saw it.”

Katrine sighs. “I think we all think friendships have to last forever and they don’t.

We grow in different directions, life takes us to different places.

Some relationships and friendships just die out, whether abruptly or petering out and that’s probably OK.

Maybe you and Carl were petering out, but you didn’t spot it in the daily grind, and then the explosion happened.

Add to that your relationship with Maiken blew up, too – and bigger – so you probably haven’t seen the similarity. Both were ending, just differently.”

Anna shrugs. “And I just had a run-in with Carl at ?sterport.” What a day. “He hit me with Gaslighting 101, trying to tell me it was my fault we split. That he wanted marriage, and I’d just laughed it off, which hurt him and made him look elsewhere.”

Katrine snorts. Yes, they both know he’d looked elsewhere without having the courtesy to move out first.

“But here’s the thing: that day, I was about to tell him, I’d been speaking to a lawyer.

My cat had recently died, and I suppose I’d been thinking about life and mortality etc.

, and I’d had paperwork drawn up to put him, Carl that is, not P?lse, on the deeds of the house.

I couldn’t give him marriage because it’s just not what I want, but I was going to give him half of the house to show him I was committed. And then I walked into that.”

“Oh, Anna. I had no idea.”

“So apparently, Carl wasn’t content, but if he’d told me, communicated it better to me, rather than assuming I’d pick up on his hint, then things could have been different.”

Katrine spins in her seat, alarmed. “Anna. You’ve spotted the gaslighting already, do not let him mess with your head. Do you really want things with Carl to have been different?”

“Still be with him? Fuck, no. I see who he is now, what he’s capable of.

Your Elsebet would say he wasn’t the one for me.

” At that, saying it out loud, Anna feels a lightening in her, like she’s removed a cloak, one which, rather than protecting her, has dragged her down.

That thing Jamie had said about letting things go that don’t serve him?

Anna thinks she might just have done that.

“It’s OK,” she says. “I dodged a bullet, and I still have my whole house. Good timing, some would say.”

Katrine gives her an amiable knock to her side in agreement. “Luck in bad luck,” she says, using the Danish idiom. “Just remember Carl isn’t all men, or every man,” she adds.

The train has brought them up from the underground out into the open air and Anna is observing the houses as they pass by, knowing this is her leaving the city, heading towards the airport, back into the air and away from Denmark.

It really isn’t bringing her the joy she’d thought it would.

Something feels like it’s draining out of her.

Craving comfort, she snuggles closer, knowing Katrine’s station is coming up soon.

The tannoy announces the next stop is Amager and Katrine gives her boys the one-minute warning.

“Anna, I’ll be over in March for the London Book Fair. Let’s meet up,” Katrine says, pulling her bag onto her shoulder.

“Stay at mine.”

“Thanks, but work are putting me up in a fancy hotel. Let me have the joy of a sound-proof hotel room, a bathtub and the mini bar. Dinner, though. Definitely.”

“Absolutely.” Anna gets it, not taking offence.

Katrine turns to her friend. “Anna, you’re going to be fine.

In a week or two you’ll be able to look back on this with some distance.

Maybe you’ll send him an email or a text, explain why you said whatever it was you said, make the apologies you need to, but meanwhile you know he’s looking after your house, and he’ll be a good memory.

” She stands. “We’ll text regarding the dinner.

” She bends to give Anna a hug and whispers to her, “I missed you.”

“Me, too,” whispers Anna. And then, “Godt nyt?r.” Happy new year.

Anna honestly hopes a new year will move her on.