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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

February 8, 2019

“I’m sorry,” Agnes says, as soon as they are out of earshot. She hesitates at the front door, afraid Ingvar will kick her out before she can explain herself. “She thinks I’m—and I just wanted—there’s no way to rationalize it. I’m ashamed.”

Ingvar looms over her, arms folded.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” she continues. There’s no way to ask him how long he’d listened for. What he’d heard. If his world has been rocked, as hers has. Agnes needs Nora. She needs help.

“My mother doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Ingvar tells her. “She’s not well.”

“I just—” She deflates. “Yeah.”

He nods. But there’s so much disappointment.

It’s the withdrawals. It’s this place, so beautiful but so full of ghosts. It’s Lilja asking Who are you? and only being able to talk about her goddamned leg. It’s sitting in front of someone with dementia and pretending to be her dead grandmother. It’s learning that her grandfather did, in fact, have a reason to kill his wife and daughter. Agnes isn’t shocked, not really, but she is horrified to find herself crying. Tears course down her cheeks, and she buries her face in her hands, apologizing through the sob.

She hasn’t cried like this in a year.

After a long moment, in which Agnes tries with all her will to shove the emotion back into her mouth with her fingers, she feels a pressure on the top of her head. A hand encompassing her skull.

And that is it. That is the only comfort Ingvar offers.

Still, though, she sobs. For her grandfather, a stranger. For her grandmother, the empty woman. For her aunt, just an infant, resented all her too-short life. For herself, alone and unmoored.

When the tears dry up, she lifts her head and the hand disappears. Ingvar’s expression is, as ever, unreadable. But there’s more warmth. It’s his ability to hold space for their thoughts.

“You shouldn’t be that angry with yourself,” he tells her. “My mother doesn’t get many visitors.” When he takes her in, still sniffling, something in him softens. “Did you love your grandfather very much?”

Would you still love me, if it were true?

“I—” she begins. She could say, I did. But when she speaks, what comes out is, “I don’t even know why I’m here.”