第5章

Winter came early in Helsinki.

During my first week at the new job, the first snow fell by the harbor.

The company set me up with a temporary flat for two months, not far from the Design Archive. It was small but south-facing, and on clear days, sunlight would stretch from the window all the way to the center of the wooden floor.

There were no books of Niklas's here, no pill organizers for Helena, and no one to wake me before dawn asking why I hadn't done something for them.

I worked late every day.

The new archival projects were piling up. My Finnish colleagues spoke plainly and kept clear boundaries. When the workday ended, no one treated their personal responsibilities as someone else's obligation.

The work made me realize, for the first time, that I was perfectly capable of doing the job. I wasn't the person Niklas had made me out to be, the woman who "just sat around at home."

I had simply spent the best six years of my life holding his life together.

Sophia's video call came through while I was putting together a new bookshelf.

Sophia Bennett had been my closest friend since university and was still in London, working as an intellectual property lawyer. The moment her face appeared, she peered at the snowy view behind me and let out an exaggerated sigh. "Not bad. Settling into the new job? Are the Nordic men as good-looking as they say?"

I tightened the last screw. "No time to look at men. I'm run off my feet with projects."

"Good. Stay busy and you won't think about the ones who don't deserve it."

She paused, her tone turning careful. "There's something I have to tell you. Niklas showed up at my office a couple of days ago."

I put my tools back in the box and said nothing.

"He was frantic, asking where you'd gone. I told him I didn't know, and he stood downstairs for three hours. He said your old number was disconnected. When he went back to the flat, he found you'd cleared out almost everything. All that was left was the key and the ring."

Sophia let out a cold laugh. "I asked him, who throws a tantrum and cancels a phone number they've had for six years? Who throws a tantrum and takes every last shard of their dead mother's work with them?"

"The second I said 'her mother's final work,' his whole face changed."

I leaned against the bookshelf and listened quietly.

Sophia went on. "At first he was convinced you were just trying to make him cave. He said you always waited for him to make up after every fight. Then he went back to the flat looking for something and found hospital-prescribed medication in the bathroom cabinet. And the examination folder you'd left at the bottom of the bin."

"He sent me message after message, asking if something was wrong with you."

She went quiet for a moment. "Irene, I didn't tell him about the miscarriage. I don't think it should come from me. And honestly, he doesn't deserve to hear the truth that easily, secondhand."

"Mm."

"Don't go soft on him." She fixed her eyes on me. "Just because he's panicking doesn't mean he actually understands what he did wrong. He might just not be able to accept that you really left."

Outside the window, the snow fell slowly.

The things that had once cut me so easily seemed to have finally lost their sharpness, dulled by two thousand kilometers of distance.

"What about Aila?" I asked.

Sophia's expression grew complicated. "Three days after you left, Niklas tried to send her back to Finland."

"He bought her a ticket and wrote her a check, saying it covered her project fee and compensation. Aila slapped the check down on the table. She didn't take a penny."

"Did she cry?"

"She did, but not because she was some clueless girl," Sophia said. "She asked Niklas why, if it had only been a research collaboration, he had accepted her family's silver brooch in front of her father, her relatives, and the sponsors. Why had he said on camera that he would stay in the north for her? The brooch wasn't some universal Sámi engagement custom. It was an heirloom passed down in her family, and giving it to someone was her personal choice. Niklas knew all of that, yet he deliberately staged the moment for the cameras as a declaration of love. Everyone at the exhibition thought they were together. Her family believed he was ready to commit to her. Now that the project had gotten the attention he wanted, he planned to put her on a plane with a check and be done with it."

I said nothing.

Outright lying had never been Niklas's greatest talent.

What he was good at was telling selective truths and leaving other people to bear the consequences.

To me, he said Aila was just a research subject, a young artisan who needed looking after.

With Aila, he encouraged her feelings through every intimate gesture, letting her believe he would stay.

"What happened then?"

"Aila left without taking anything," Sophia said. "After she got back to Finland, she posted a statement on her personal page. She didn't attack anyone or play the victim. She just laid out, clearly and precisely, how Niklas had directed the filming and used their apparent relationship to generate publicity. The university and the foundation both demanded an explanation about research ethics. The grant was suspended. The promotional film that was supposed to air got pulled."

I set a Finnish dictionary on the shelf.

The heavy spine landed with a quiet thud.

The silver brooch, the traditions, the promises, the academic ideals. In the end, they were all just material Niklas could edit and delete from his reports.

But Aila and I, two living, breathing people, had become the price he cared least about paying as he crafted his image.

I didn't like Aila. I wouldn't forget the baby cradle she had handed me days after my miscarriage, and I wouldn't make excuses for her.

But in this moment, I could see clearly that the person who had set us against each other was Niklas.

Sophia switched to a lighter tone. "Enough about them. Isn't your team heading to Lapland next week for the winter archive trip? Think you'll see the northern lights?"

"Probably. We're spending two days in Rovaniemi, then heading further north."

"Then look at them a little longer for me."

I smiled. "I will."

After I hung up, I stood at the window for a long time.

Once, Niklas had promised to take me to see the northern lights.

The night we got engaged, he had been drinking. He held me and said, "When I get tenure, we'll go up north and stay in one of those glass cabins. You won't have to worry about a thing. Just lie back and watch the sky."

That promise, like so many of his others, was never mentioned again.

A week later, I stood on the snow-covered plains of Saariselk?.

The night sky was as clear as a single pane of deep blue glass, and a ribbon of green light rose slowly from behind the mountains, unfurling and rippling among the stars.

My colleagues were cheering and snapping photos.

I didn't reach for my phone. I just looked up in silence.

It turned out the northern lights didn't belong to any one promise.

And I didn't need anyone to bring me here.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

A message from an unknown British number:

"Irene, I'm in Helsinki. I know I was wrong. Come see me. Just once. Please."

It was Niklas.

I didn't know how he'd gotten my new number.

I looked at it for two seconds and deleted it.

A moment later, another message arrived from a different number:

"Ms. Lehti, I'm Professor Berg's research assistant. He skipped the university's investigation hearing to fly to Finland and find you. He has been waiting outside your building for five hours. It's very cold in Helsinki tonight. Would you be able to..."

I typed back two words.

"I'm busy."

Then I put my phone on silent and looked up at the sky again.

The green light swept across the snowfield, as though someone had finally opened a door I hadn't been able to reach for a long time.