Please come to my cabin, she said. Why would she beg me to come like that unless it really was important? Why did she lie to me about Anton? It’s the lying I feel unsettled by – did Leah not feel enough trust and support in our therapeutic bond that she would be able to divulge the truth about her past to me? And why hasn’t she answered any of my calls or emails if she really wanted to speak to me? I do recall her mentioning the exceptional remoteness of the cabin many times, and how she had no phone reception for miles. Still, she has clearly managed to get in touch with her mother.

20

Leah, two weeks before

A magnificent full moon bathes the October night in light. The curtains are open wide, letting a silvery shaft of light into the apartment. She’s cross-legged on the floor in the living room, sitting in the moonbeam, like a forest animal resting for a while on a remote stretch of road. In front of her is a box of photographs, some scattered around on the floor. She picks one up, holds it up to the light. It’s a photograph of herself as a young child, aged around four. By that age, Leah had already lost her father and was living with her mother, Linda, in a modest apartment in a non-descript suburb of Årjäng. She’d been a beautiful child, her light-brown eyes and dark hair giving her more definition than the classic Scandinavian look of white-blonde hair and ruddy cheeks of her little friends at nursery and in the neighborhood. But even back then, she’d felt different. Worth less. Unlovable.

She picks up a second photograph, this one of a slightly older child. It’s Kristina, aged seven. The photo was taken in Denmark and Kristina is standing on the rails of a wooden fence by the roadside, beaming at the camera. Leah knows this because on the back of the picture, someone has written ‘Langeland, August 1993’. Next to Kristina stood her mother and her older sister, but Leah has cut them carefully out of the photograph. Behind Kristina is a rolling field, its late-summer sun-scorched grass having bled out with the passing of time into a faded ochre. A few goats stand in it, randomly captured for all time in the photograph. Leah places the two photos side by side on the floor. To a random observer, the two girls might have passed as the same person a couple of years apart. Kristina has darker-brown eyes than her, a slightly upturned snub nose, a gap between her front teeth and sun-streaked dark-brown hair tied up in a messy ponytail. The main difference between the two girls is the uncomplicated, mischievous joy in Kristina’s smile, and the wan, careful expression on Leah’s own face. Even back then, Kristina had been like a perfect version of herself.