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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

February 8, 2019

They’re almost home. Agnes can see the structure, the glint of glass, the gray concrete. But she doesn’t know if she can make it. It feels like her left leg is held together by barbed wire. She tries to keep up with the conversation—Thor’s telling her about his life in Denmark, she thinks—but she can only focus on the creaking in her joints, the grind of her skeleton.

“Do you need assistance?” he asks her, finally. He offers her his arm.

“No,” she says, her voice harsh. She tries to soften it with a “thank you,” but she’d rather crawl right now than have him drag her back to the house.

Which is why it takes them so long to reach the driveway. When they crest that hidden staircase, he pulls away from her with a sigh of exasperation. Agnes flinches, certain that he’s sick of keeping pace with her, but then he’s calling out, and it’s not to her.

There’s a group of townspeople, she assumes, spread out in the trees. Shouting for ása.

“They’ve already looked here,” Thor tells her, shaking his head. “Not very organized. They shouldn’t be wasting time. I need to talk to them. Will you be okay?”

“Fine,” she lies.

Thor takes off with an athletic jog through the snow. He gathers the group around him. Agnes doesn’t stop to watch or listen. Every step sends a lightning bolt of pain up her leg, straight to her jaw, making the last few steps to the front door a tremendous feat of pure will and blind rage.

Which is why she doesn’t hear her name until the door’s already open.

“Agnes?”

Steeling herself, Agnes stops. Turns around.

Lilja, right there. Uncertain.

“What are you doing here?” Agnes asks, leaning her weight on the doorknob.

“I’m looking for ása,” Lilja tells her.

“So was I,” Agnes says. “Up that way.” She notes the woman’s chapped skin, the strain in her eyes. Considers how much longer she can stand without her leg collapsing underneath her like a crumbling sandcastle. “Do you want to come inside?”

“In there?” Lilja asks. “You’re staying here ?”

“Technically, Nora is. But yeah. Why?”

“It’s expensive,” is all Lilja can say. But then she shrugs. “I will come inside, yes.”

Agnes nearly groans with relief. The temperature inside is offensively hot, her face and fingers almost catching flame. She sheds her many layers to the floor, only half aware of Lilja doing the same. In shirtsleeves and jeans, Agnes feels something closer to human. She notices Lilja’s eyes on her. Lilja looks away, fast.

“Do you want coffee?” Agnes asks.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Please.”

The journey to the kitchen is a long one. Agnes can’t stifle her limp, and she senses Lilja behind her, senses her eyes on her again. “Thor said they’re wasting their time looking here,” she says. “Everyone’s already searched the house.”

“That’s assuming she’s a body to be discovered. Not a person, conscious, not wanting to be found.”

“Why do you think she doesn’t want to be found?” Agnes asks, reaching the kitchen counter. She fiddles with the fancy coffee machine. She doesn’t need coffee. What she honestly needs are her pills, but she can’t exactly take them right now, in front of Lilja, so coffee and sitting on a couch will have to do. “Why would she run away like this? And wouldn’t she take her car, if she was going to run?”

Lilja comes up beside her. Her face is broad, her ceiling eyes set deep, veiled behind roughhewn cheekbones. She’s severe, and almost too beautiful to look at directly. She doesn’t have any trouble staring at Agnes, though. “Who are you?” she asks.

“What?” Agnes can’t mask her surprise. “You know, I’m—”

“The murderer’s granddaughter,” Lilja says dismissively. “That’s not what I mean. Who are you?”

The coffee bubbles away, hot, fragrant steam making curlicues in the air between them. It takes Agnes a second to catch up to this moment. She had gotten a feeling yesterday, in ása’s apartment. She’d tested it in Lilja’s car. Are you in love with her?

She’s getting the feeling again, stronger now.

“I’m a software designer from Berkeley,” Agnes says. “Or, I used to be, until I hurt myself.” She gestures to her leg. “You might have noticed. It’s been almost a year, but they had to do a lot to fix it. I’ve been in recovery mode for a long time. I… There’s…” She searches for what else she can tell this woman. Who is Agnes Glin? What has her life become? “Yeah. That’s who I am now, or who I’ve been until now. It’s a relief to be here and to be someone else. So—This. I’m this.”

In this light, Lilja’s eyes are black. “And what do you want with ása?”

“Nothing. I told you, I didn’t even know about her until I got here. Now that I have, I want to help.” She doesn’t say that she feels she understands ása, or that she’s starting to admire her. Not in a way that she could name. But ása disappeared. She made it out.

Agnes pours them both a coffee. She normally takes hers with a splash of milk, but she doesn’t have the energy to walk to the fridge and back and then make it to the couches. She falls into the cushions with a sigh. She watches Lilja follow, folding herself next to Agnes. Not close enough to touch. But close enough that they have to turn their bodies to the side to see the other in full.

“Who are you ?” Agnes counters.

This makes Lilja smile. It might be the first hint of humor Agnes has seen in her. It’s a stolen glimpse of an entirely separate person, one more lighthearted and impish. But the smile dies as fast as it comes. “I’m afraid,” she says.

Agnes falters. She’s never been good at giving comfort, not when she can hardly handle receiving it.

Lilja tries again. “When I am not afraid,” she says, “I’m studying law. ása’s working in business, like óskar. We spend so much time working, each of us needs our own outlet. óskar has his music, ása has her boys, and I have my drawings.”

“Can I see some of your drawings? Do you have a page?”

Lilja pulls out her phone, taps into her Instagram profile. She hands the phone to Agnes, their fingers grazing at the edges. Mostly she works in black ink, it seems. There are some watercolors, though, experiments with landscapes.

“This looks familiar,” Agnes says, meaning a reproduction of the river outside.

Lilja snatches the phone away from her, her expression softening only when she sees which image Agnes has pointed to. “Yes,” she says. “This place is an easy subject.”

Agnes sips at her coffee, impressed. She’s always expressed herself through movement. Surfing, running, hiking. She had spent so many days sitting still for work, losing herself in screens, but she’d balanced this with physical exertion. She misses that most of all, the burning in her lungs, pushing past the boundaries of her being.

Maybe this is why Dr. Lee had been so adamant she should take up a new hobby. Painting, knitting, something distracting. But nothing could replace that feeling.

So she’d chosen nothing.

“Are you okay?” Lilja asks her. “You look sad. You look afraid, actually. Like me. What do you have to be afraid of?”

Agnes hears herself laugh. Knows that it’s humorless, but she can’t stop it. “That’s too hard for me to answer,” she says truthfully. “I don’t know. And that might be it.”

It’s nonsense, but Lilja seems to understand the nonsense, because she’s nodding. “Okay,” she says. She stares down at her phone. Pulls up a portrait and shows it to Agnes. ása. “No one cares,” Lilja says.

“I’m sorry,” Agnes says. “I don’t know ása, but I—” She stops. She doesn’t want to say, I envy her, but that’s a horrible thing to say, and not entirely true, anyway. “I want to help you,” she says finally.

Lilja abandons her mug on the coffee table. “They act like she’s dead,” she says. “They’re planning her funeral.”

Agnes scoots forward. Slowly, haltingly, she wraps an arm around the woman’s shoulders. She feels the shudder run through Lilja’s body. Agnes hates this part of knowing someone. Letting them cry. She forces herself to weather the storm.

Lilja’s arms come around her middle, seeking support. Agnes marvels, dumbfounded, at the pleasure of being held. She’d become a clinical being, every part of her body touched for surgery, for examinations. She’d discovered, after she’d been sent home from the hospital, a leftover heart rate monitor stickered to the underside of her breast. The intimacy of this embrace shocks her. She doesn’t want it to end.

When Lilja pulls away, it’s with an apology. “I shouldn’t do this,” she says. “I don’t know you.”

“We know each other a little better now,” Agnes offers.

The black eyes find her own. They’re bloodshot, yes, but they’re still stunning. Lilja is stunning. Maybe it’s her vulnerability, the way she’s opened herself up to Agnes so readily, that appeals to her, but Agnes thinks it’s something more.

She’s so distracted, she almost springs back when Lilja thrusts a phone into her hand. It’s a different phone than before. An earlier model. Not Lilja’s iPhone. A Samsung.

“What’s this?” Agnes asks.

“It’s her phone,” Lilja tells her. “ása’s. Her secret phone.”

“What do you mean?” Agnes asks, resisting the urge to drop it. The idea of it, of holding a dead woman’s phone, sends a thrill of fear crawling up her spine. She shouldn’t have this.

“She had two phones,” Lilja says. “One normal. And one she would try to hide from us.” She comes to standing and paces away from Agnes. “The police have the normal one. And I have this one.”

Agnes stares at the phone in her hand, shock slowing her down. The screen lights up. The background picture is a selfie of Lilja and ása, with identical smiles, their faces pressed tightly together. “Why would she need a secret phone?”

Lilja doesn’t answer. She just waits for Agnes’s brain to catch up.

“Oh. The secret boyfriend.”

Lilja nods.

“But that’s—” Agnes can’t find the right word for it. Overkill ? Lilja paces to the windows. Then back to Agnes. Agnes watches the woman’s expression become more haggard with every step she takes. Like the weight of whatever she’s holding inside is killing her. “Why,” Agnes asks carefully, “do you have this?”

“She dropped it,” Lilja says, as though that explained everything. “Now I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

“Because I lied,” Lilja tells her, her voice low and strange. “óskar and I lied. About that night.”

“Okay.” Agnes wishes she could say anything else except “Okay.”

“You don’t understand,” Lilja cries. “I didn’t know it was so bad. ása was upset at the party, but she’s always upset these days. Stressed. With”—she makes an angry gesture to the secret phone, still clutched in Agnes’s hand—“whoever that was who gave her that phone. At the party, she was angry. So angry, and so drunk. She left to take a piss, she said, but she walked out so far. óskar went to get her. He found her sitting in the snow, in the trees, crying.

“He put her in his car. He came back to get me. He told me he needed help with ása. We drove back to their apartment building.

“ása wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. All she said was, ‘Everyone wants everything all the time.’ She was babbling. We got her into her room. I wanted to stay with her. But she told us to leave. She shouted at me. She’s one person, she said. She’s not the solution to all our problems. So we left her alone, to cool off. óskar went to his place downstairs. I walked home.

“I was hurt,” Lilja says, tears spilling down her cheeks again. “She hasn’t wanted to see me in weeks. So after that night, I didn’t call her. Didn’t text. Didn’t try to see her. óskar said he did the same. We all needed space. We thought she was with her boyfriend. But then…” Lilja trails off, losing steam. She slumps onto the couch beside Agnes again. Closer now. Seeking comfort.

Agnes wraps an arm around the woman’s shoulders, more out of reflex than the desire for intimacy. She can smell the fear, sharp and feral, on the woman’s skin.

“But how,” she asks again, more softly now, “do you have her phone?”

“óskar,” Lilja says. “I saw it in his room yesterday. He said ása dropped it in the snow that night, and he picked it up and forgot about it. To him, it doesn’t matter. He thinks she’s dead. He thinks she’s killed herself. I took the phone from him, but I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t give it to the police. Not with óskar… They’ll think we’ve hurt her, when all we tried to do was help her.”

Agnes starts to lean away from Lilja, but the woman tightens her hold.

“I didn’t hurt her,” Lilja insists. “I want to help her. But I don’t know what to do.”

Agnes should call the police. She knows this is what she should do. But there’s the broken note in Lilja’s voice. “Do you think óskar hurt her?”

The answer comes just a touch too quickly. “No.”

“But—”

“He loves her.”

It’s the same as yesterday. Like love can’t be destructive.

Agnes smooths a hand over Lilja’s arm and considers the phone. There are so few avenues for privacy in this world, let alone in this small town. She asks, as it finally occurs to her: “What do you want me to do with this? Why are you telling me all this?”

Now Lilja pulls away. “I can’t have it,” she cries. “I don’t know what to do with it. But I know I can’t have it. I lied to the police, because I thought I was protecting her privacy. They asked me about her phone. They found her normal one on her nightstand. They asked why she would go to a party without her phone. I’d seen her at the party with this phone. I said she wouldn’t need her phone. At the time, I didn’t think she was hurt. I thought she was with her boyfriend. I didn’t know óskar had this. By the time we knew she was actually missing, it was too late to tell the truth.” Lilja sucks in a shaky breath. “Something’s happened to her. I have to find her.”

With a visible effort, Lilja pushes herself to standing and walks to the front door.

Bones creaking, Agnes follows. “Where are you going?”

“To look for her,” Lilja says, jamming her feet into her boots.

“The phone,” Agnes insists. It’s still in her hand.

“Keep it,” Lilja says, backing away from Agnes. She’s already opening the front door. “Tell them you found it,” she says. “Tell them anything you want. Just don’t tell them I gave it to you. They won’t believe me.” When she smiles this time, it comes out crooked and pathetic. “You said you wanted to help me.”