Chapters (92)
- Cover
- Also by Alex Dahl
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- Part I
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- Part II
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- Part III
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- Epilogue
- Five months later
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- An Invitation from the Publisher
I just happened, for the briefest of moments, to let my eyes roam around the cabin, and perhaps it is because the room is now brilliantly lit up by the sunlight streaming through the hole Eirik made that I notice it – it would have been harder to spot last night or this morning in the meager light. On a top shelf, close to the hand-carved, exposed supporting beams, several small picture frames are lined up. From what I can see from here, a couple are photographs from nature, places I don’t recognize – a beach, a mountain, a forest-fringed lake. One is a drawing of a middle-aged woman leaning her face against the palm of her hand and staring into the distance – Leah’s mother? The last is a little oil painting, an abstract in beautiful shades of vermilion, maroon, scarlet. And it is unmistakably one of Elisabeth’s paintings, not dissimilar to the one I have at home.
I have to swallow a scream and fight the urge to launch myself from the sofa and grab the picture, but I’d have to climb onto a chest of drawers to reach it, and it’s not like I’d be able to do that, let alone move over there.
It is like finding another piece of a puzzle and realizing that it alters the whole picture in every single way. I feel like I am looking right at the answers but can’t decipher them. This casts Supernova in an even more sinister light. She stalked me. She claimed to know things about me that seem impossible for her to have found out about. She infers that she knew things about my marriage and my husband. But could it be that Leah Iverson somehow also directly contributed to Elisabeth’s death? Elisabeth was my best friend, and now she’s dead. I get a sense, in this moment of what she has done, and how.
I’m so worked up that I can no longer feel the pain in my leg or the icy cold air of the cabin. I’m running out of patience, and battery, and time. I feel a strange sensation in my left hand and realize I’ve dug my nails into my skin so hard I’ve pierced it, making dark beads of blood appear. I suck at the cut and return to Supernova.