Emil’s expression changed at her words, his froideur faltering, and he looked away quickly, a ripple of pain passing over his features. ‘That’s not fair. I wasn’t myself back then.’

‘I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that you frightened him. And he didn’t know who you were – Hanna had told him you were just an old friend. His godfather.’ She shook her head bitterly. ‘You should have seen his face when she told him the truth yesterday morning, and said you were making him come here to spend the summer with you. All the way over here, I expected him to just leap from the boat.’

Emil paled visibly and turned away, raking his hands through his hair. She could see the muscles in his back beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, but also the bones too. Despite herself, she felt another pang of guilt as she remembered Christer’s words. ‘Look, I appreciate you’ve been through a lot –’

‘Oh, you don’t know the first thing about what I’ve been through,’ he snapped.

She recoiled from the fury in his voice. ‘What I was going to say was that no matter what you have been through – awful though it was – this is not about you now. Not this bit. It’s about Linus.’ She saw the surprise in his eyes at her words, and she suddenly understood that every single thing that had been said to him since he had emerged from the coma had been about him. His accident, his trauma, his loss, his coma, his recovery, his family . . . He had no concept of what it meant to put someone else first. His entire existence since waking up had revolved solely around himself.

‘Yes, he’s your son – but only biologically, at the moment, and you need to recognize and respect that distinction. He doesn’t know you yet. You frighten him. You’ve taken him away from his mother after you threatened her, you’ve told him the only family he’s ever known isn’t his proper family – and then you just expect him to see you as the Great I Am?’ She threw her arms up in the air. ‘It doesn’t work like that. You need to show the understanding and compassion and emotional intelligence, because you are the adult and he is the child. That’s what being a parent is – putting the child’s needs before your own. And let me tell you something: right now, you are failing at that. You’re failing big time. My God, you couldn’t even bother to be here when he arrived yesterday.’

His eyes flashed, pain and anger a constant swirling torrent. ‘You don’t understand. I felt . . . overwhelmed.’

‘You did? Try being ten and going through this.’ She shook her head, staring at him coldly. ‘You hurt your little boy over and over yesterday. And now you’ve started today on the same footing.’

‘I was doing something nice!’

‘That wasn’t nice! You keep stepping over his boundaries and pushing too hard.’ She stepped forward herself. ‘But I won’t let you, do you understand? You will not go anywhere with him without me, not unless Linus himself explicitly tells me he is happy with it.’