years old. I don't know who she is. Jeanette something.' Charlotte waved her hand. The subject had shifted; it was Niclas's betrayal that mattered.
'I can't tell you all the shit I've taken over the years. All the times I've forgiven him, hoping he would change, and said I would forget about it and then promised to continue on. And this time it was really going to be different. We would get away from all the stuff that had happened, go live in a different town, become new people, or so I assumed.' Then that ominous laugh again. But the tears kept pouring out.
'I'm terribly sorry, Charlotte.' Erica stroked her back.
'We've been together so many years. We've had two children, we've gone through more than anyone could imagine. We've lost a child, and now this.'
'Why is he telling you now?' said Erica, taking a sip of tea.
'Didn't he say?' Charlotte asked in surprise. 'You're not going to believe this. But he told me it was because the police took him in for questioning today.'
'They did?' Not that Patrik told her everything about his work, but she had no clue that they were particularly interested in Niclas. 'Why was that?'
'He said he didn't really know. But they'd found out about his affair with this girl, and that may have been why they wanted to check him out. But it's all cleared up now, he said. They know he'd never hurt his own daughter; they just wanted him to answer a few questions.'
'Are you sure that's the only reason?' Erica couldn't resist asking. She knew enough about Patrik's job to realize that it seemed like a rather thin excuse for bringing somebody in for questioning. Especially the victim's father. At the same time she began to question Niclas's motive for visiting her. After all, she was not only his wife's friend, she was also living with the detective who was in charge of the investigation.
Charlotte looked confused. 'Well, that was what he said, at any rate. But there was something…'
'Yes?'
'Oh, I don't know, except it feels like he didn't tell me everything, now that you mention it. But I was so focused on what he said about his lover that I was probably deaf and blind to everything else.'
Charlotte sounded so bitter that Erica wanted to take her in her arms and rock her like a baby. But she always felt a little uncomfortable when she got too physical with other people, so she made do with continuing to stroke Charlotte's back.
'And you have no idea what other reasons there could be?' Was she imagining things, or did a shadow suddenly cross Charlotte's face? But it vanished so quickly that she was unsure.
Charlotte's reply at least was swift and confident. 'No, I have no idea what it could be.' Then she fell silent and took a little sip of tea. She was calmer than when she arrived, and wasn't crying anymore. But the expression on her face was bleak, and if a broken heart could be visible on the outside, then that was how Charlotte's heart looked at the moment.
'How did you and Niclas actually meet?' Erica asked, more out of curiosity than for any therapeutic reason.
'Well, that's a fine mess of a story, I have to say.' For the first lime her laugh sounded almost genuine. 'He was in the class ahead of me in gymnasium. I hadn't really paid too much attention to him, because I had a crush on one of his friends. But for some reason Niclas got interested in me and started to show it, so gradually I got interested in him too. We ended up going steady for a month or two, and then I was the one who actually got bored.'
'You broke up with him?'
'Don't sound so surprised, you might offend me.' She laughed and Erica joined in.
'Unfortunately I didn't stick to my decision for more than a couple of months. Then I went over to see him one evening, and the whole merry-go-round started up again. This time we were together all summer, and then he went off on a drinking trip with his mates. When he returned he came up with some story, in case I heard from the others about how he'd disappeared on the last night. He claimed he'd drunk too much and passed out behind a bar but the truth came out pretty quickly and our relationship was finished for the second time. After that I was honestly relieved that I got away with just a few tears. Niclas started going through all the girls in Uddevalla as if every day were his last, and you wouldn't believe some of the stories I heard. I'm ashamed to admit that on a few occasions I was weaker in the flesh than in spirit, but those episodes left me with quite a bitter aftertaste. Looking back, it probably would have been better if the story had ended there, and Niclas had remained a simple teenage mistake. But even though I loathed so much of what he had done and who he had become, he stayed in the back of my mind for a long time. A couple of years later we met by accident and the rest is history, as they say. I suppose I should have known what I was getting myself into.'
'People change. The fact that he cheated on you as a teenager doesn't mean you should automatically assume he would do the same as an adult. Most people mature with time.'
'Not Niclas, apparently,' said Charlotte, letting the bitterness take over again. 'But I can't really bring myself to hate him. We've been through too much together, and sometimes I see glimpses of his true self. On some occasions I've seen him vulnerable and open, and it's because of those times that I love him. I also know about his family life, and what happened with his father when he was seventeen, so I probably saw all of that as some sort of mitigating circumstance. And yet it's hard to comprehend why he would want to hurt me so badly.'
'What are you going to do now?' Erica asked. She glanced over at Maja and couldn't believe her eyes when she saw that her daughter had fallen asleep on her own in the bouncer. That had never happened before.
'I don't know. I can't face dealing with it right now. And in a way it feels like it doesn't matter. Sara is dead, and nothing Niclas does or says can hurt anywhere near as much as that does. Niclas wants us to start over, find our own place and move out of Mamma and Stig's house as soon as we can. But I have no idea what to do right now…'
She bowed her head. Then she abruptly got to her feet.
'I have to go home. Mamma has spent enough time watching Albin today. Thanks for letting me unload all this on you.'
'You're always welcome here, you know that.'
'Thanks.' Charlotte gave Erica a quick hug and then vanished as quickly as she'd come.
Erica wandered back into the living room. In amazement she stopped in front of the bouncer and looked down at her sleeping daughter. Maybe there was hope for her life after all. Unfortunately she didn't know whether Charlotte could say the same thing.
Morgan had come to his favourite part of the computer game he was working on. The part where the first blow of the sword fell. The man's head rolled, and according to the script there should be plenty of extreme effects. His fingers raced across the keyboard, and on the screen the scene emerged at lightning speed. He admired and envied the people who could write the stories, which he then was commissioned to transform into virtual reality. If there was anything he lacked in his life, it was the imagination that others had, allowing them to burst all boundaries and let ideas flow freely. Naturally he had tried. Sometimes he'd even been forced to give it a go himself. Writing compositions in school, for instance. Those had been a nightmare. Sometimes the pupils were given a topic, or just an image, and from that they were expected to spin a whole web of events and characters. He'd never got further than the first sentence. Then his mind just seemed to shut down. It was blank. The paper lay empty before him, absolutely screaming to be filled with words, but none came. The teachers had berated him. At least until Mamma went and talked to them, after his parents had received the diagnosis. Then the teachers merely regarded his attempts with curiosity, observing him as if he were an alien life-form. They didn't know how right they were. That was how he felt as he sat at his school desk, with the blank paper in front of him and the sound of his classmates' scratching pens all around. An alien life-form.
When Morgan discovered the world of computers he'd felt at home for the first time. This was something that came easy to him, that he could master. If he was an odd piece of the puzzle then
