I can feel Leah’s hands reaching for me through time and space, closing around my throat and squeezing tight. She’s like a determined little dwarf star that sidles up to its unsuspecting neighbor and sabotages it until they both go up in flames. I can barely breathe. Onto the next thing. The big thing. I don’t want to know what she is going to say about Eirik; I can’t bear the thought of Leah having uncovered something sordid that will destroy my marriage. Because she’s right about one thing – my life is built on unstable foundations, like most people’s lives, and I need my husband.

My head is literally spinning with an onslaught of thoughts. My mother, Elisabeth, Venezuela. And now, Eirik. I realize that the dread I felt as I got deeper into the Supernova document is precisely this – that Leah would stop at nothing, that she’d go from my mother and Elisabeth to Eirik, bringing my whole life crashing down in some misguided attempt to get close to me.

I move a little, positioning the MacBook more comfortably across my lap, taking care not to graze my left ankle against anything, and yet a terrible pain chases up and down my leg. The battery is down to nineteen percent. It’s still relatively early and I’m nearing the end of the document; I should be able to get through it before the battery runs out. The question is whether I can bear to read another word. It is profoundly disturbing how wrong I got it with Leah Iverson. I look out the window at the sky, still opaque with white clouds.

I’m still staring at the frozen, white world outside, about to return to the screen, when a peculiar blueish light sweeps across the snow outside. A comet? I push myself back up against the cushions to a more upright sitting position but the shift hurts my ankle so badly I cry out loud. The light appears again, bouncing across the dark shapes of trees at the edges of the clearing, then shining straight into the window. It remains there, held in place, its unbearably bright light projected directly onto the timber wall behind me. It is, without doubt, the beam of a very powerful flashlight.

60

Kristina