Chapter 20
I blink myself awake, harsh sunlight streaming in through the window.
My eyes feel filled with sand, dry and painful, and my spine seems to have rearranged itself at some point during the night.
Thirty-something backs don’t like sleeping upright against a wooden door, no matter how much the brain in charge wants to make sure no one can get in and catch it unaware.
I groan, rubbing my eyes until little sparks of light seem to set off behind my eyelids. For a few seconds, exhaustion lets me stay blissfully ignorant of what happened last night, but then, when I try to get up from the floor, the soles of my feet remind me, and it all comes flooding back.
My phone. My one connection to the outside world.
For a second, it feels as though I’m about to puke.
I rush into the bathroom, spitting into the sink, and then I rest my forehead against the cool mirror, drawing a deep breath.
I try to trick myself into being calm and collected; maybe, if I tell myself that I’m not freaking out, that I haven’t gotten myself into something I’m not sure I can handle, I’ll believe it.
Well, what did you think was going to happen?
Not this.
Armin’s worried face from the last night before I left comes back to me. Softly lit by the hundred-year-old lamps of the pub where I work Mondays through Thursdays, his fingers worrying away at a coaster, tearing it into tiny little pieces.
I’m just scared that you’re treating this like it’s some kind of game. It’s not a game. It’s serious.
God, I thought he was being so condescending. I thought I had it all figured out. It was in my blood, after all.
When I was a kid, and my dad would tell his stories, I found them exciting, never frightening.
He always came back no worse for the wear.
When he told me about being held at gunpoint, or having to hide from bombs, it never seemed scary; he was my dad, invincible through the sheer forces of charm and destiny.
Nothing could touch him, and therefore, he was never in any real danger.
Later, when he was in prison, after the judge gave him the harshest sentence ever doled out in a libel case in Swedish history, I found out along with the rest of the world that some of those stories had never happened.
He’d never even been to some of the places he had written about, and if he had, he’d been holed up in a hotel, working off nuggets of information given to him by real journalists, the ones who had actually put themselves in harm’s way.
Some of whom had never come home to their families the way he always came home to ours.
And I told myself that I would be different. I would not be like my father. I would be like the other journalists, the real journalists, the ones who put the truth above themselves.
But for the first time—and it is vaguely nauseating to realize this—I understand why my father did what he did.
Not all of it.
But being here, cut off from those who might try to help me, knowing now that something is going on, that it’s not all in my mind, I understand why he might have stayed in those hotel rooms rather than going out and facing the dangers of the world.
Because I’m frightened. Because I want to go home. Because I’m not sure I’m up for it. Not now that it’s all real.
But if I do … I’m just like him.
I straighten up and look in the mirror. My short dark hair is tangled in the back, flattened where I have leaned my head against the door. My lips are dry and cracked.
The rose pendant hangs heavy against my chest.
This is what makes us different, Dad, I think as my features seem to morph in the mirror until I’m looking at my father.
We always did look so very alike.
I don’t run away when things get hard.