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.

My aunt’s gunshot connected me to those very first gunshots, which up until that moment I’d lived alone with every day. The nightmares of a little girl. Who became a teenager who realized those were no nightmares, they might have happened, they might be real—there might have been a mother, a father, a big brother, a big sister, and the sound of gunshots as they disappeared.

But I never went totally under. That’s how love works. Those who took care of me, Thomas and Anette, they loved me, gave me security.

Until even that wasn’t enough.

When he fell down from the balcony.

I hadn’t planned it. I was fourteen years old, and my boyfriend took it too far, and neither he nor I could understand where my rage, strength, and brutality came from. And since I didn’t know myself, I couldn’t explain it when the police asked me their questions.