Page 252 of These Tears

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If there is one thing the Nielsens and Halvorsens excel at, it’s leaving a person alone with her churning thoughts.

Inga remains close enough that I can see her shadow moving across the lávvu whenever the fire shifts. The next time she peeks out to check on me, satisfied that I’m sufficiently thawed, the pain in my fingers has settled into a tolerable throb. I take advantage of that and slip away from the fire, nestling instead beside a boulder at the edge of the tree line where the firelight can still reach me.

The rock keeps me out of sight. Cold seeps steadily through my coat and blanket.

I lift my gaze. Only a few hard stars overhead seem willing to listen to my lament tonight.

My eyes close as I savour the quiet. For the first time since Inga found me half-frozen, no one is explaining, apologising, dressing me or calling me a bride.

A bride.

False is too simple a word for something that has never been asked and already feels dangerously close to a wish.

It should be simple when stripped down to facts. But it isn’t.

Elias Crane took me from a life already cracked beyond anything I knew how to repair. As Jakob Halvorsen, he brought me to the soil that cradles his mother. He lied, restrained me, terrified and controlled me… but also trained me. Fed me. Watched me. Even handed me back every practical means of leaving.

One truth does not cancel the other. That is what makes him so difficult to hold inside a single judgement.

My palm finds the tattoo on my hip through the blanket, Inga’s coat, and the fabric of her jeans – the bear paw print that had obliterated Ron’s name.

The absurdity of my predicament almost makes me laugh.

Somewhere between the chains, the wolves, the shelter of my camera and Ron’s ring lying in the ashes, the shape of us changed. I am no longer only the woman he had taken. I have become the one who stayed long enough to see him clearly. Captivity ended then. It did not change what came before. But it changed everything that came after, when I stayed once leaving became possible.

And now this.

I press my fingers beneath my ribs, where my heart keeps hammering as if it still expects masked men to burst through the trees. I force myself to breathe like Elias taught me when lungs can’t seem to hold the air.

The tip of my other finger runs circles in the dirt, drawing lines around separate pieces of my past as though isolating the uglier parts could somehow make the rest of it less true.

But the lines keep touching. Overlapping.

Because real things do not become less true simply for being monstrous in places.

The old, ugly voice starts crawling through the cracks of me. It tells me to stop making shapes out of mist.

It knows Elias wouldn’t marry me. Not once the danger passes. Not once the lies finish destroying everything. Why would he? We’re not even together in the natural way of things.

I rub my palms over my thighs, trying to bring warmth back into them, and remind myself to stop seeing things that are not there simply because I want them badly enough.

Just like he told me a few months ago.

We are still here. Still in Norway. Still without a real plan to ever return to England.

To Anna, my house, to all the ordinary responsibilities I have let drift out of reach while I learnt how to survive in someone else’s world.

Across the fire, Sunna emerges from the lávvu and draws the blanket tight around herself. The bark of Anders’ sledge dogs arrives before they do. When he stops, the dogs spill into the clearing and settle into familiar places, while he makes his way to the fire and adds another armful of wood to the stack. Then he catches Sunna’s smile, answers it with his own and draws her slowly into his arms. The sight is as warming as it is foreign. My parents never had that.

I never had that.

Closing my eyes, I wait until the sting brings me back to the moment. And I reopen them on a sigh.

I could ask him to drive me into town tomorrow. I could call my sister, book a flight and return to the life I had once planned to leave behind. In a matter of hours, I could be right where I often found myself: square one.

What I can’t do is make a plan that includes Elias leaving with me – or have any certainty that the man called Jakob Halvorsen can even cross back into England without Elias Crane being swallowed by what awaits there.