I pause, gauging whether I can actually handle this. I have naturally encountered a lot of people with serious mental health challenges over the years and have always been of the school that believes that even the most extreme manifestations of dissociation and emotional disturbance can be countered and healed with long-term psychotherapy. To be witnessed and tolerated in their most challenging incarnations can bring the broken pieces inside someone back together in the most miraculous ways; I’ve seen it over and over. In others, and in myself. I thought I saw it in Leah Iverson, too, but now I am forced to consider whether the healing I believed I saw was in fact just misguided preoccupation with me. I’m afraid of her now, of what she wants from me, and almost hope that she is dead – at least that way I never have to see her again.

It’s obvious that these are the words of an extremely damaged individual. To break into the home of your therapist and steal her diary and take pictures of her personal photographs, and repeatedly follow her around – you’d have to suffer highly compromised mental faculties. What else could she have done? I’m not only furious, but afraid – I can only imagine how dangerous this might get if certain elements of the past become subject to the interpretation of a disturbed person such as Leah Iverson.

I suddenly understand Anton’s rage and feelings of powerlessness. I tell myself that nothing she did or claims to know about me can hurt me, but I need to find out what she’s playing at. And then I am going to return to my life and my husband and my work and all of this will fade away into a shocking, unsavory episode. But where is she?

I return to the document. There are over eighteen thousand words, over seventy pages. I don’t want to know what more she wrote, or why; I just want to know where Leah is so I can leave all this behind. Wherever she is, she is clearly in need of psychiatric intervention, and I will make sure to get back in touch with her GP when I get back to Oslo to recommend exactly that.

I certainly won’t let her invade my life any further. I will take this experience to my own therapy and attempt to learn from it. I will move on. Eirik will win the election. We’ll get our baby. All of this will eventually feel distant and impotent. I have to believe that.

*

I look around Leah’s cabin again and this time it doesn’t feel like a comforting cocoon, but cramped and claustrophobic, rather. She’d clearly come here to write this stuff, all these weird and disturbing things about me, and fantasized about me reading her words. The space itself feels sullied, as though I’d stumbled upon the sinister lair of a twisted criminal.