she said.
“Yes, do,” he said.
As she went toward the bedroom, she noticed how unkempt the apartment was. The bathroom faucet was dripping. In the living room, the remote control had been tossed onto the floor, with the batteries alongside.
The boxes were stacked up next to the closet. Four in one stack, two in another. The first box hardly weighed anything; it was probably only light clothes. The second was heavier, and she was panting by the time she got it to the car.
She didn’t want these boxes, actually. She didn’t need what was in them and felt annoyed that neither Gunnar nor their son, Adam, offered to carry them to the car for her.
She stopped to catch her breath and rested her hand against the cold car window. Closing her eyes, she felt the chill spread through her fingers.
A voice inside her blamed herself: It was your fault! All of it was your fault!
She knew it was. If only she hadn’t given in to Anders that time.
It was still her own damn fault. She had been cheating on Gunnar, and now she had to move out of his condo. It wasn’t the first time she and Gunnar had lived apart. Actually, she couldn’t count how many times they had separated and then gotten back together again. The one thing she could be sure of was that they had been together on and off for twenty years. The other thing she could be sure of was that she had screwed up big-time.
She had thought it would be easy to find a new place to live, but the housing market had heated up. Condos were hard to come by, and rentals were in high demand. It had never been so difficult just to rent a place.
She hadn’t dreamed she would have to call her mother and ask if she could live with her, even temporarily. Sure, she’d done this before—but that was when she was twenty years old, maybe twenty-two.
Now she was fifty-four.
Her son, Adam, was waiting for her in the hallway after she stuffed the last box in the car.
His skin was broken out in acne, and his bangs were combed to the side, covering his entire right eye. A white headphone cord hung around his neck, his cell phone in his right hand.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said wearily and walked past her.
“Bye!” she called into the apartment, but all she received in response was silence.
She walked down two steps but then stopped, thinking she should go back and say something, explain to Gunnar that it wasn’t really fair, that this was her home, too. She should be able to stay.
She wanted to stay, to start over, forget her misstep and move on from it.
“Mom?” Adam’s voice echoed in the stairwell. He was standing a few steps below her and was holding one headphone out from his ear, looking at her questioningly.
“Are you coming?”
“I’m coming.”
She sighed, cast one last glance at what was no longer her front door and continued down the stairs.
* * *
Jana Berzelius crossed the street and continued on to the narrow lanes of the Knäppingsborg shopping district. The shop windows displayed a crowded jumble of hand towels, pillows and cookware decorated with branches and leaves, featuring every imaginable shade of blue and green.
Upon entering her apartment, she took her phone out of her coat pocket, hung up the coat and went into the bedroom. She noticed that Per Åström had called, but she didn’t bother listening to his message. She was sure he was wondering why she’d left the office so hastily today, and she had no desire to explain it to him. Her mother’s death was a private affair. She had all she could handle just thinking about having to make the funeral arrangements.
She tossed the phone on the bed, stripped down to her underwear and wrapped herself in her bathrobe. She had intended to heat up some tomato soup for dinner, but now she didn’t have any appetite. Instead, she took out a bottle of white Bordeaux from the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of wine.
After two sips, she held the cold glass against her forehead. She wanted to cool herself down, repress the thoughts that had again begun running through her head. She was filled with rage, a rage that usually made her feel invincible and strong, but right now was making her feel weak—because her mother’s death made her think about the death of a different woman. The woman who had actually given birth to her.
Jana took the glass from her forehead and gazed into it, at the concentric circles created on the surface by the vibration of her trembling hand. She took another sip of wine and tried to push her thoughts away, knowing that if she didn’t stop them, they would take her to the painful memory of her real mother.
Her biological mom. The one who was murdered so many years ago.
She didn’t want to think about her real mother. She hadn’t in many years. But now she couldn’t stop where her mind was racing.
She raised the glass to her lips but hardly noticed as she swallowed. She had already been dragged down into her memories and found herself back in that tight, stuffy metal shipping container as it made its way across the Atlantic. She sat huddled up next to her mother, kept asking her over and over if they would be there soon. Her dad had told her to be quiet like everyone else packed into that airless space.
They had been on their way to a new land, to Sweden, to the promise of a new and better life.
She remembered how her heart had been pounding as the shipping container was eventually opened. Three men stood outside. With weapons in hand, they selected seven children. She was one of them. She could still feel the harsh grip on her arm as she was yanked out into the light, away from the mother and father she loved and who had protected her.
That was the last time she saw her birth parents alive.
The men pointed their weapons directly into that tight, stuffy space. She would never forget the deafening sound of shots being fired. But the worst part came when everything had fallen silent and the men took a step back to admire their work.
Jana swallowed hard and rubbed the back of her neck. She drew her fingers over the welted letters that were carved there long ago, K-E-R.
Maybe it had been a mistake to start digging up her past. Maybe it would have been better to just let it be once she escaped and was adopted by Karl and Margaretha. Once she was educated and had a safe new life—even if she had no clear memory of what had come before.
But she was haunted by those carved letters K-E-R—and was determined to discover what they stood for. So she set out to collect information over the years, filling journal after journal, writing and drawing her memories from dreams and nightmares. And from all of these notes, a terrifying picture of her childhood had formed.
She had been forced to train with the other trafficked orphans as a child soldier, a mercenary whose only purpose was to kill.
Her adoptive mother, Margaretha, had never known any of this. But her adoptive father, Karl, knew everything. As it turns out, he had been a part of it. To protect himself, her father found out where she had hidden her
