“Why are you so upset, anyway?” Katriina asks, confused. “They probably just took her for some tests or something. She’s in a coma, it’s not like she can just get up and walk out of the room.” It’s a cold thing to say, but a few hours ago Shawn intimated that he wanted to end their marriage. He can’t come crying to her now that he’s sad because he can’t see his mommy for five minutes.

“They didn’t, Katriina, this is what I’m trying to tell you. They think she woke up. And now she’s gone. And I need my wife to get her shit together and come here and help me look for her.”

Katriina closes her eyes, feels her pulse fluttering in her eyelids. “Well, at least you still think of me as your wife.” Silence on the other end of the phone. She opens her eyes again. “Did she really wake up?”

“They think so, yeah.”

“Okay. Okay.” Katriina props herself up on her elbows and then lowers one leg towards the floor. The pain doesn’t hit her with its full force all at once; it’s like an engine revving at the starting line, teasing her with a little taste of what’s to come. When the starter’s gun goes off it lurches forward like a jackrabbit and speeds away, the pain spiking inward towards the centre of her, so breathtaking that Katriina is unable to speak. She rolls over on her side, gasping, the phone falling to the floor.

“Katriina?” She hears Shawn’s tinny voice through the speaker. “Are you still there? Katriina, what’s going on? Where are you?”

“Shawn,” she whispers and then passes out.

—

At first everything is dark and all she can feel is pain, bone-deep and nauseating. She is immediately hit with a sense of betrayal – pain has always been her calm centre, the one thing she could count on to keep her rooted firmly to the ground. Now she feels as though she is floating in outer space, inky black and oppressive, unable to get her bearings, unable to breathe. Then, slowly, a tiny pinprick of light appears, a speck so far off in the distance that she isn’t sure if it is really there. But then the light grows brighter and she latches on to it, she clings to that light with everything she has, struggling towards it, taking long, ragged breaths of air. And then underneath the pain, something else starts to emerge, a sensation she can’t quite name yet, her brain still foggy and fragile. As the world around her starts to come back into focus she realizes that she is back on the couch at the Paulsson house and someone else is there, someone is touching her. Claudia, she thinks. You’re here.