“And to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you, you need to leave this place.”

“I know now that Dad was shot. Murdered. Executed. I’ve known that for the last few years. One day I just remembered. I remembered how all of them were executed. But I still don’t understand why I can’t stay here. With you. I feel more at home now than ever.”

“Because it’s all connected. Because there are people who still care. Who had no idea, just like me, that you had survived. But they do now. And unlike me, they’re not particularly pleased about it.”

She takes my hand again, places it in her own. Like in my rented room just a few hours ago. Or maybe that was an eternity ago.

“You have to get out of here. There’s a plane leaving from the Tirana airport for Sweden in four hours. I’ll drive you there. They won’t see us in the dark.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

Chapter 36

We don’t move very quickly through the pitch black. My aunt chooses roads that are off the main highways. We pass through small villages and wind through mountain slopes and scare herds of animals that have settled in for the night. The darkness is like an embrace. It holds us. Hides us.

She’s nervous. She tries to hide it, but even though we’ve only spent a short time together I can read her so well. All through the evening in her house as she showed me pictures, trying to make me understand, and when she backed the car out of the garage—worry is her language right now.

It takes an hour longer to drive this way, but my aunt tells me I’ll still have plenty of time to catch my flight. We don’t run across many other cars, they know better than to guess their way forward over these dark paths, and perhaps that’s why my aunt’s worry becomes even more tangible when we reach the base of a mountain and meet a vehicle that neither slows nor pulls to the side. On the contrary, it blocks the road, and its headlights are the brightest I’ve ever seen. They’re pointed straight at us.