“Good. Then I’ll come down to you while your mom waits up here.”

Amelia winked at Hugo as she left the closet, and Hugo winked back. She went out into the stairwell as he told her to, but didn’t go directly to the basement. She had another errand first, which involved two cars.

In her own car—still unlocked, she’d only had seconds—a folder lay on the passenger seat. She grabbed it and headed over to a black BMW parked across the street. The car of the masked men. She opened it with the key she took from Zaravic’s jacket, while Zofia Hoffmann was still lying there unaware of what happened. Now she placed the folder on the passenger seat of his car. As she headed back toward the building and the basement where the children were, she wondered how long it would take before Ewert Grens, Mariana Hermansson, and Sven Sundkvist arrived in one of their police cars with sirens blaring and lights flashing. And which version of events she would give them—because the truth was the only story that couldn’t be told.

PART
8

Chapter 50

The truth is that I was supposed to die.

Die for real this time—I had no cupboard to hide in.

I even heard the gun fire.

We’d been driving to the airport through the densest darkness, along the most winding roads, and our car was stopped by the brightest headlights, and a dark silhouette had approached us.

Why are you calling yourself Lilaj?

Lorik pointed a gun through the car window and used a voice I didn’t recognize.

Answer me—why!

I tried to hide myself and for the first time wished I was just Hannah Ohlsson.

Because he . . .

My aunt was trembling with fear, for my sake, I saw the gun was pointed at me and knew he was going to shoot.

 . . . was my father.

And then.

Then the same thing happened that just happened here.

It wasn’t Zofia Hoffmann who was shot—it was Zaravic who fell onto the bedroom floor. It wasn’t me who was shot—it was Lorik who fell into the window and hung there with his upper body halfway inside the car, looking at me, surprised.

Aunt Vesa shook even more afterward.

She’d shot straight through the car’s metal body. My aunt, who had never killed before, didn’t even like guns, but still had one with her that night that her brother had given her, my father, and she had the presence of mind to pull it out of her left jacket pocket and angle it upward while Lorik was screaming at me.

I didn’t know it then, but that was surely when all of this really started.

Aunt Vesa’s shot was like my starting shot.

All those feelings and thoughts. Those tiny fragments of memory that would never fuse together suddenly did.