Chapter 59 #2
“You’re—” She swallows hard. “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” I say.
She makes a broken sound and then she’s hugging me so tight I can barely breathe. It’s not polite. It’s not careful. It’s pure. She smells like coffee and stress and something floral; her shampoo, maybe, or the perfume she keeps in her drawer for days she wants to feel like herself.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispers, and her voice cracks on the word dead like it’s a knife.
“I know,” I say, and my throat tightens. “I’m sorry.”
She pulls back and wipes her face with the sleeve of her cardigan like she’s furious at herself for crying. “Don’t you dare,” she snaps. “Don’t you dare apologize for surviving.”
Then she starts crying again, because rage and grief live in the same room.
“I sat with your mother,” she says, voice shaking.
“I sat with her and we watched the news and they showed your picture and the police said they had no leads and—” She laughs once, hysterical.
“I even printed out those stupid missing posters because I didn’t know what else to do.
Like paper was going to bring you back.”
My chest aches.
Sigrún is my closest colleague. My friend. The one who believed in my obsession even when it made me insufferable. The one who used to roll her eyes and say, Elara, one day your curiosity is going to get you killed.
She was half right.
“I’m not dead,” I say quietly.
“No,” she says, gripping my arms like she’s making sure. “You’re not.”
The newsroom gathers around slowly after that. People are gentle in ways that make me want to crawl out of my skin. They ask questions. I answer with rehearsed lines. I smile when I’m supposed to. I keep my posture steady. I perform recovery like it’s a job.
Because it is.
And hovering over everything like a shadow is Halldórsson’s absence.
He died for me, in a way.
And I have to pretend I don’t know the full shape of that sentence.
We mourn him officially.
There’s a memorial in the conference room. A speech from our editor. A moment of silence that feels like choking. People talk about his dedication, his bravery, his loyalty. Someone calls him “a pillar of Icelandic justice we could always turn to.”
I stare at the coffee cup in my hands and think about the blood.
I think about the lab.
I think about the way Halldórsson looked in those last moments; tired, determined, already halfway gone.
My stomach turns.
I swallow it down.
Because the truth is a weapon and I am not ready to aim it.
After the memorial, my boss, Magnus, pulls me into his office and closes the door like we’re about to discuss something classified.
“Elara,” he says, voice careful, “the police need your full statement. Officially. Your report. Your account.”
My mouth goes dry.
“I gave them one,” I say.
“A preliminary one,” he corrects. “They want details. And… honestly, we need it too. The public is obsessed. Your name is everywhere. People are calling you the girl who survived Vapor.”
Vapor.
Even hearing the codename makes my skin tighten.
I nod slowly. “Okay.”
He watches my face. “Are you up to writing again?”
I almost laugh. The sound sticks in my throat.
Writing is what got me taken.
Writing is what made him look at me.
Writing is the only thing I have ever known how to do when the world becomes unbearable.
“Yes,” I say. “I can write.”
So I do.
I write my own survival like it’s someone else’s.
I sit at my desk with a blank document open and I try building a version of reality that is clean enough to be believed and simple enough to keep me from being institutionalized.
My writing is true, it’s just not complete.
I stare at the screen for a long time after working on it for hours.
My reflection is faint in the glass of the monitor. A woman with pale skin and blue eyes and dark circles that don’t belong to sleeplessness alone. A woman whose mouth looks too firm, like it’s holding back words that could ruin lives.
My father’s name rises like bile.
Henrik Vance.
I swallow it down.
I close the file, tomorrow’s another day.
When I get home that night, my mother is waiting with food again.
“You have to eat,” she says, stern.
“I know,” I sigh.
She narrows her eyes. “Don’t sigh at me. I birthed you. I’m allowed to be annoying forever.”
I stare at her, deadpan. “That’s not in the contract.”
She snorts, and for a second the sound feels like the world hasn’t fully broken.
I sit at the table. I eat because she watches. I chew because she counts. I swallow because if I don’t she’ll cry again and I don’t have enough pieces of myself left to handle her grief on top of mine.
After dinner, she sits across from me with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea.
“Do you remember anything,” she asks softly. “About where you were. About who did it. About… why.”
My heart kicks.
My father’s name presses against my teeth.
Lucan’s face flashes behind my eyes.
I keep my expression neutral.
She has been prying for answers, answers that are more personal than in the reports. Answers that’ll tell her what truly has happened to her babygirl.
“He was careful,” I say, choosing the safest truth. “He didn’t want to be seen.”
My mother’s fingers tighten around the mug. “And you—” Her voice trembles. “He didn’t… hurt you?”
My throat tightens.
He did.
Not the way she means. Not the way the world assumes.
He hurt me by making me feel things I can’t explain.
“He didn’t—” I stop, inhale slowly, force the sentence into a shape that will not destroy my mother. “He hurt me in ways I can survive.”
My mother nods like she understands. She doesn’t. But her belief is kindness, and I cling to it.
Later, alone in bed, I stare at the ceiling again.
The weeks behind me feels like two separate lives that don’t fit together.
Therapy twice a week.
Work, cautious and strange.
A mother who feeds me like she’s trying to love me back into existence. A newsroom mourning Halldórsson like he was a saint, even though he corrupted some cases. A report full of half-truths sitting in police files now, becoming my official history.
And underneath all of it—
A monster-shaped absence.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.
But sleep is not mercy.
Sleep is where the bunker lives.
Sleep is where I’m blindfolded again, and his voice is in my ear, calm and patient, telling me the rules, telling me the shape of my world.
And sometimes, sometimes, when I wake up sweating and shaking and my heart is trying to crawl out of my ribs—
the worst part is not that I dream of him.
It’s that my body still remembers the warmth.
It’s that part of me still wants to write him into a story that doesn’t end.