You’re in the woods. You’re alone. You’ve never known aloneness like this before, but now that you do, it will remain beside you like an unshakable shadow for the rest of your life. So much will be lost in the far recesses of your mind; no life can ever be retained in all of its moments, but you will remember this – the bitter, sickly taste of blood in your mouth, the thousand shades of green enveloping you, the taste, and color, of death. The deafening rumble of your heart echoing through your blood. The sharp-edged leaves knifing your arms and face as you crash through the foliage. Your fear – this vast and uncontrollable fear, as black and deep as a Norwegian forest lake. It will surge through you forever, prompted by big and small triggers entirely unrelated to these moments, and you’ll learn to live with it; you’ll have to. Sometimes it will roar at you, other times it will whisper. Every breath you take will bear its faint aftertaste. Every forest you walk through will merge with this one. Every sharp sound will take you back here in a split second. And every part of you will be reshaped, contorted into new configurations: like a city rebuilt from ruins.

To save you, your mind will invent escape routes. Your brilliant mind will take your broken heart away from these moments in the only way it knows how – by running.

You run, faster than you’ve ever run before, and even now, you know you’ll be running like this for the rest of your life. You’ll run because you don’t know that the only way you could ever be free is to stop.

Part I

SUPERNOVA

1

Kristina, October

She’s my two o’clock on Fridays, the second last before the weekend. Perhaps this makes me naturally more relaxed and good-humored, but Leah Iverson has always been a client I look forward to seeing. She’s reflective and interesting, with a natural ability to tap into my deepest empathy, and genuinely invested in the therapeutic process. In other words, she isn’t hard work. That’s not to say we haven’t done hard work together, at times very hard work. Leah first came to see me almost three years ago, in the aftermath of the publication of her first book, Nobody. The book was loosely based on her marriage in the popular Scandinavian trend of autofiction inspired by Karl-Ove Knausgaard, and it was translated into over twenty languages, and so she found herself an unlikely literary celebrity.