He reaches for my hand. Even now, the feeling of his skin on mine burns through everything else. “OK. Let’s go in and find you a taxi.But, Carrie—I know you’re in shock. And that you’re trying to process more in one day than any one person should have to process in a lifetime. There’s one more thing I need to tell you, though.”
“Can it wait? I don’t…I just don’t think I have any space left.”
“You do, for this.” He lets go of my hand and turns to face me. I give in and look straight at him.
“Carrie, it was your mum who I have to thank for my royal pardon.”
I stare.
“There were many people involved—and I mean, many—but it was your mum and her circle in Thailand who kept working on it until the right people were listening. They put pressure on the right people. And those people put pressure on the justice department and other government ministers. And then the pressure ended up at Valentin Meyer’s door. Some kind of deal was made, at a very high level. But the end result was that they provided evidence that I was deliberately misled and I was stripped of all responsibility. I’ll never know what Meyer received in return, but it worked, and here I am. I don’t think your mum was ever planning to tell you that, but I think you need to know.”
I exhale slowly. After a while I look up at the stars again. A slow mesh of translucent cloud slides silently over the space above us, blocking all but the brightest stars.
“Are you serious?” I ask, but I know the answer already. I know my mother; I know that she has never given up on anything. I was foolish to assume she’d given up on Johan and me back in Thailand. She’d just needed time.
“I’m deadly serious,” Johan says, and I allow myself to look back at him again. His eyes. “I imagine it was guilt that drove her, just as it did when I got out of prison and asked if I could contact you. But, very quietly and determinedly, over many years, she’s been trying to put it right.”
“Mum,” I whisper.
Johan nods. Then he says, “But I see it. I see how many people have lied to you, kept things from you, made decisions about what you should and shouldn’t know. And it kills me that I’m one of them.”
“Dad never lied to me,” I say after a pause. “But yes. It’s a poor record. And the stuff of nightmares for someone with control issues.”
He smiles.
I look away. The smile is almost too much. “I’d actually really improved. That’s the sad thing. Living here—me, Robin, the kids—I’ve felt very stable, the past few years. It’s been wonderful.”
“But you weren’t yourself. You were being kept.”
I sigh. “I know.”
The owl hoots again, although I’ve never thoughthootto be the right word. Their calls are melodic, beautiful: soft flares from dark corners.
Johan’s looking at me. We stare at each other for so long, I lose track of time. Then he reaches out and touches me. A single stroke down the side of my neck, from my jawbone, like that very first time he touched my skin.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “For all of it.”
Now, like then, my entire body responds. For a moment I allow my head to fall sideways, my cheek in his hand. Things move deep within me. I close my eyes, as if to wish away everything but this.
After a few moments, I shift away. “Johan, I can’t.”
“I know.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to.”
“I know, Carrie. I get it. I’ll be gone in the morning.”
I sigh. “Does Freja know where you are?”
“Yes. I couldn’t lie. I think this is the final straw.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I’d want.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he says. “But she said she can’t be with a man who’sstill in love with someone else. And she’s right. She’s worth more than that.”
We look straight at each other again. The stars sigh in their blackness; to them we are nothing, this moment is nothing. For me, though, it is both an opening and a closing. Because I do love this man, who has traveled more than a thousand miles to be with me—I always did. I can’t remember how I trained myself to believe otherwise. But I only want to be free now. No man, no bind: just me and my children and the healing we will need to do. I can’t allow anyone else into that. Not one person. Even him.
After a few seconds, understanding this without me needing to say a word, Johan turns away. He’ll be gone in the morning, and I must find a way to get to Maeve and Raffy.
