I fell asleep easily moments after settling closely against Eirik in the comfortable, deep sleigh bed in the sleeping alcove, my whole body heavy and aching. In the middle of the night I wake with a start and the sudden movement sends waves of pain up my leg and I have to bite my lip not to scream out loud. Eirik shifts slightly beside me. I push myself up against the pillows into a half-sitting position and feel about on the nightstand for the painkillers he laid out for me before we went to sleep. I take two ibuprofen and an oxycodone. I can make out a faint milky glow from the window high up on the wall, and realize it is still snowing.

This sleeping alcove seems to have been made by integrating a storage space into the cabin, and not originally intended for sleeping. I don’t understand how it could be possible to get this bed here, then I realize it must have been built in place. I lie back down and close my eyes, waiting for sleep to carry me away, but it doesn’t. My mind is racing with disjointed, strange thoughts. I keep seeing myself running through the forest, the snowflakes biting my skin, those last terrifying moments before I fell to the ground, my screams hollering down the hillsides. This image bleeds into the other image, and I’m her again, the kid running for her life in the Venezuelan jungle.

The familiar nausea rises in me, the way it always does when I can’t control my thoughts and they go to where I can’t allow them to go, not ever, if I’m going to stay alive, if I’m going to stay Kristina; success story, survivor, wife, psychotherapist.

The contours of what Leah has actually done are becoming clearer. But did her snooping around kill Elisabeth? It was as if one of the blank patches in my mind disappeared when I read her words, rebuilding the scenes in Venezuela. The dirty Mazda. The clifftop house. Xavier, with the bottomless eyes and the slashed cheek and the warm hands and the rough stubble deliciously turning the skin around my mouth raw as he kissed me. The gun glinting in the moonlight.

Of course they will find out about your past, Leah wrote, it’s a simple Google search away. Except it isn’t. It’s true that if you were to look, you’d find old media coverage of what happened in Carúpano; it was all over the newspapers for weeks. You might find some quotes from the witness statements I gave at the time, though my name was Kristina Hellerud then, not Kristina Moss, so you’d probably only make the connection if you were specifically looking. You might see the picture of me arriving at Gardermoen Airport, being met by my parents and the foreign secretary at the aircraft steps.