This time Nina did laugh properly. ‘Oh, please don’t! Life’s far more interesting if you never complain, never explain. Let them wonder.’

Bell looked at Hanna and Max with wide eyes, feeling curiously silenced. To deliver a comprehensive explanation somehow felt more damning.

‘Mmm,’ Nina smiled with relish, seeing how they had collectively paused, all of them on the back foot, as though held in abeyance. ‘This is going to be fun.’

‘Where is he, Nina?’ Hanna wasn’t smiling now.

‘Linus? He’s gone to his b—’

‘Emil.’

‘I’m here.’

They all looked over. He was leaning just inside the frame of the French doors. He looked pale but still punch-in-the-stomach handsome, his eyes burning as he took in the group gathered on his terrace. Beside her, Bell felt Max tense, the air around him somehow changing, becoming paler, thinner, less substantial.

Slowly, Emil walked over to them. Bell thought he looked like he was in pain; there was a hesitancy to his movements, a tightness across his face. She lowered her gaze, wishing she could disappear, become spectral. But he wasn’t looking at her, or Hanna.

The two men stared at one another – similar in height, but where Max had the pale skin and soft muscles of the office worker, Emil was spry and tanned, looking older than his thirty-one years. It seemed somehow innately understood that Emil would be the one to break the silence and lead the conversation. This was his birthday, his home, his island, his family, after all. It seemed an age before he held out a hand. ‘Hello, Max.’

Max shook it. ‘Emil.’

‘You look older.’

‘You look well.’

A tiny smile half-cocked Emil’s mouth. ‘I caught up on my beauty sleep.’

The same half-smile tipped Max’s mouth, but the humour hadn’t risen to their eyes, not yet, and the atmosphere remained tense in spite of the civility.

‘It’s good of you to have gone to this effort for the girls,’ Max said, waving a hand in the general direction of the lawn amusements.

‘Shame the weather isn’t quite playing ball,’ Emil nodded. ‘But I wanted to make them feel at home.’

His words were light, courteous even, but the threat glinted just below the surface like a vein of steel. Home. Here. Bell realized she was holding her breath as the men kept their gazes steady.

‘Come, let’s have a drink while the girls play,’ he said suddenly, breaking into the gracious smile of ‘mein hoste’ and leading them towards the large round table on the terrace. It had been set with a dark-grey linen tablecloth and a low bowl arranged with pale-pink dahlias, a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket to the side. ‘It’s my birthday, after all. We should be celebrating. I slept through the last seven.’

Måns, who had been standing unseen by them all, stepped forward as though into physical being and elegantly unpopped the cork as they walked over.

‘Hanna, why don’t you sit here, next to me,’ Emil said, motioning to the chair beside him. All eyes swivelled in his direction. ‘That way, the girls will see their mother chatting and laughing beside me and know I’m not a big scary monster.’