“Sometimes, yes.” She thought about Rendezvous and Hanna’s offer. She wanted to accept. “When the opportunity to work in TV came into my life, I loved it. But the dream of a restaurant has always been there.”
“I like the sound of your dad, with his passion and his dreams, and the fact that you got those things from him. How were things before he died? What kind of person was he?”
“He was fantastic. Well, I thought so, but of course you don’t see everything as a child. My sister and I were quite protected, I think. I guess both Mom and Dad wanted to shield us from the worst, and Hanna and I didn’t realize how bad he actually felt. We lived in our little suburb in a lovely community. Everyone helped everyone else. If one person was painting their house, we all stepped in. Three parents painted while a fourth watched the kids and a fifth took a group of teenagers down to the store, and afterward we all had a barbecue. We were all welcome in one another’s houses. It was like an Astrid Lindgren children’s book.” She couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
Their house had been at the end of the street, closest to the lake in a residential neighborhood south of the city. All the properties had been built in the early 1990s and purchased by families with children. Bente’s family lived in a fairly modest wood-paneled house that was painted yellow and had a garden that was easy to look after, a fantastic lilac arbor, and a showy drive. Dad had put up two columns on either side of the front door, like a frame. He had done it just as the neighbor across from them did the same thing—part of a kind of suburban-dad competition. A competition that her father eventually lost, in every possible way.
“But then a series of things happened. Their accounting firm ... I don’t know all the details, but they were suspected of accounting violations.”
Everything had changed one windy Saturday afternoon at the beginning of November. Winter was well on its way. When Bente headed home from handball training, darkness was already falling, andshe expected to be greeted by appetizing aromas in the kitchen, homemade tomato sauce to go with the pizza she would help make, the sports roundup on TV, more sports live on the radio—the announcers’ tinny voices drowning out the TV commentary, because Dad thought the radio commentators were much better. Plus music on the little CD player in the kitchen.
Bente hurried home, but when she got there, there were no appetizing aromas, no radio or TV, only murmuring voices upstairs. Something was wrong. Mom and Dad came down and told her to go and take a shower. They were going to buy burgers instead. That was the day everything changed.
“Soon everyone knew that they were suspected of a crime, and nothing was the same again. Everyone avoided us. We were no longer invited to friends’ houses for dinner; my sister and I weren’t asked to come over to movie nights or to hang out after our handball matches. Then friends began to avoid me in school. Nobody would talk to me anymore. It all happened so fast, within a few weeks. In the end Mom and Dad were arrested. It was ... horrible. When they were taken out of the house ... all the neighbors came out onto the sidewalk and just stood there watching. No one spoke to me and Hanna. No one tried to console us. No one. They just stared as the police took our parents away, leaving us screaming and crying.”
“Were there no adults to help you?”
“Social services came over until Lydia could get there. But no one on the street came to see how we were. None of the grown-ups we’d shared dinners with, the moms and dads who’d put a dressing on our knees when we fell off our bikes, or a bag of frozen peas on a swelling or a sprain. People whose children Mom and Dad had helped with their homework. I’d thought of them as family, but when the scandal broke, when we became tainted with shame, when that fluffy-pink Astrid-Lindgren life gave way to something bad, they withdrew completely.”
“And then you moved away?”
She nodded. “They were convicted, and while they were waiting to be sentenced, Dad took his own life. The shame and everything else was too much for him. Once Mom was serving her sentence and Dad was gone, both Hanna and I felt we might as well move away. So we lived with Lydia on Gotland for a few years until Mom was released. She sold the house and bought a small apartment in the Söder district.”
She fell silent for a while. “It was hard for me to make close friends after that.”
“I’m not surprised—it’s difficult to trust after you’ve been treated so badly.” Didrik put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug.
They continued along Djurgårdskanalen and Strandvägen, before eventually reaching Skeppsbron. They then strolled along the southern shore of Lake Mälaren, with the City Hall on the far side. The red sky had faded to a peachy hue, sending swirling reflections across the waters of Riddarfjärden.
“Did he have a history of mental health issues?” Didrik asked tentatively, as if he were feeling his way in their conversation. She appreciated his tact but couldn’t help feeling sad that he seemed so uncomfortable. But maybe that was only natural? It was a difficult subject, after all.
She shook her head. “In hindsight I can see that he had his ups and downs, but there was nothing at the time to suggest he was capable of taking his own life.”
They stopped and he took her in his arms, held her tight. It was just what she needed, she realized. A hug. No more questions.
Didrik seemed to understand this, and afterward, they walked on in silence.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” Bente asked as they passed the rocky viewpoint known as Skinnarviksberget.
“Yes, please.”
“I meanmyapartment.”
“Sounds great. So you got it back?”
She nodded. “It’s all happened really fast, and I’ve brought my stuff out of storage. I haven’t had time to sort it all out yet, though, so it’s a bit of a mess.”
Didrik was thrilled that she had asked. The conversation had been heavy, and he now understood perfectly why it was so hard for her to talk about her past. He shouldn’t have judged her so harshly. She was the kind of person who brooded on things, and he liked the fact that he had discovered that side of her. It made sense that it was a side she didn’t show tojust anyone.
They bought Thai takeaway and took it up to her apartment. There were boxes piled up everywhere, but behind them he could see pale-pink walls. A dark-green velvet sofa stood in the middle of the living room on a cream-colored rug. A large square mirror in a brass frame hung above the mantelpiece over the open fireplace, and a built-in bookcase covered one wall. It was already partly filled with books from an open moving carton. A small shelving unit with sections for storing LPs already housed a record player, and there was a speaker in the corner of one windowsill. The rest of the sill was occupied by potted plants, and a couple of smaller plants hung in crocheted holders attached to hooks in the ceiling.
Bente grabbed a couple of brass candlesticks and put them on the highly polished walnut dining table. Then she found candles and lit them.
“This is lovely.” He looked around.
“Thanks. I’m guessing your place is a little ... tidier?”
He smiled. “Right now I don’t really have a place, but I’ve found a rental apartment in Gärdet. This feels as if ... as if we’re back in Paris.”
