Six Months Later
I’m woken by Armin’s alarm going off. He’s not in bed; I find him in the kitchen, drinking his cup of coffee with a straw, staring out the window at the bright fall day outside.
Most mornings, I make fun of him for that straw, and he responds by quoting countless studies showing it reduces staining; today will not be one such morning.
I sit down on the chair next to him, and he turns to me and smiles.
“Morning,” he greets me. His cheeks are covered in stubble; he hasn’t had time to shave yet.
I’m tempted to reach out and touch it, but I recognize the shadows under his eyes, the tense tilt to his mouth.
“Bad night?” I ask him.
He doesn’t always like to be touched, after the nightmares. I asked him, once, what happens in those dreams; he just shook his head.
I understood. I have dreams too. In some of them, I’m back in that office, drugged and helpless; in some of them, I’m being chased through the woods.
But most of them are about him. About finding him unconscious by the pond, so still I thought he was dead, that Susannah had killed him, too.
In the nightmares, she did.
“Not the best,” he admits. “But I’ve had worse.”
I smile, and he reaches out and takes my hand, his fingers cool to the touch.
The sky outside is high and bright blue, the trees below aflame with autumn color.
When I go over to the fridge, I see that he’s already taken care of last night’s dishes, and scrubbed down the counters as well.
There’s a pod already prepped for me in the Nespresso, and a clean cup waiting to receive the coffee.
“I was going to clean the kitchen,” I tell him without turning around.
“Yeah, you always say that. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“How am I going to learn if you always do it for me?” I ask him.
He snorts in response.
Once the coffee is done, I fill the rest of the cup with milk and sit back down next to him.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask him.
“Nah.” Armin stirs his coffee with his straw. “It was the usual. It really wasn’t that bad last night.”
I know he’s lying. I don’t push it.
“When are you going into the office?” I ask him.
“Tenish,” he responds. “Do you want me to drop you by your apartment?”
“That would be great. I need to pick up something to wear. I’ve got that lunch.”
“You sure you don’t just want to grab something from my closet?” Armin asks.
“Yeah, it’d be good for me to stop by home,” I say. “Water my plant.”
“That plant is plastic,” Armin points out.
“Still,” I respond. “He gets lonely.”
“Mhm.” He nods. “Don’t want the plastic flower to feel neglected.”
“Hey.” I laugh. “Don’t talk that way about Robert Plant. He’s family.”
Then I lean over, lingering and drawing in the smell of him before I kiss him softly. He tastes like coffee, and home. His fingers touch gently at the base of my neck, and I feel a quick frisson, my breath shortening and my lower stomach tightening.
When he pulls back, he’s smiling. It’s a special smile, one I’ve only gotten to know in the last few months, and I feel the same one on my own face.
“See you after work?” he asks me.
“You’ve got therapy,” I point out.
“Fine,” he agrees. “See you after therapy?”
“Sure. I’ll cook something. What do you feel like eating?”
Armin gets up from the table, grabbing his own cup to put in the dishwasher.
“Anything, as long as you don’t burn the coating off my nice frying pans,” he says, and I yell after him:
“That was one time!”
As I put yesterday’s clothes back on, quickly brushing my teeth while he’s in the shower, I’m struck by the thought, as I am sometimes these days, out of nowhere, that we’re not the same as we were.
I don’t know if we would have gotten here had Himlafall not happened. That doesn’t mean it was worth it.
I brought it up with Leyla on the phone the other day. She’d just dropped off Clara at her parents’ house, and called me from the car on the way home.
“Do you ever feel guilty when you feel happy?” I asked her. I’d asked Katarina the same question a few days earlier over lunch.
“Why should I feel guilty?” she asked me back.
“Because you met Clara at the scene of a massacre,” I said. “Because we’re still here, and we get to be happy. At least sometimes.”
“You think too much,” Leyla responded. “That’s your problem.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I should get treatment for that. Go away to a clinic somewhere.”
We both laughed at that. A little bit too loudly.
When Armin comes out of the shower, I’m already done, sitting on the bed and taking in the sight of him as he gets dressed.
“Are you objectifying me?” He pulls a sweater-vest over his dress shirt.
“You’d think it would be impossible to objectify a man in a sweater vest,” I say. “But yes.”
“Good.” Armin grabs his briefcase. “Let’s go, before you get any ideas.”
In the car on the way to my apartment, Armin clears his throat.
“Are you feeling okay about it?” he asks.
He doesn’t need to clarify what he means.
I’m struck by the impulse to pretend, to put up a happy front, but instead I swallow it down and say:
“I don’t know. Mixed emotions.”
Armin nods as he stops for a red light.
“You said everyone really liked the piece, though. Even Pernilla’s daughters.”
Hearing her name is still difficult, but I nod.
“Yeah.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “But still. I don’t want it to seem like I’m … I don’t know. I don’t want it to seem like I’m profiting off a tragedy.”
Armin remains quiet for a while, driving down the street, the white and terra-cotta facades of Stockholm passing on both sides of the car.
“It happened to you, too,” he says finally. “And I think it’s a story worth telling. But it’s your decision.”
He parks in front of my building, and before I get out of the car, I lean over and kiss him again, letting it linger, feeling my pulse slowing, beat by beat.
“Knock ’em dead,” he calls after me when I step out onto the street. “Or don’t, if you’ve changed your mind. Either way, I’m proud of you.”
I smile. Despite the crisp October day, the sun still feels warm on my face.
My apartment smells empty after a few days away. There’s a light coating of dust on the floor, but then again, that was there when I left, too.
I shower, and I put on the nice blazer I prepared for the meeting, and then, taking a deep breath, I open my laptop.
The document with my article is still open where I left it.
I haven’t picked a title for it; nothing has felt right. I’ve tried everything from “Meditations on a Massacre,” which was somehow both too pretentious and too callous, to “Irresponsible Therapeutic Practices Lead to Murder,” which sounded too flat and impersonal.
My eyes go to the opening paragraph.
After the events that took place at the now-closed Himlafall Clinic this past spring, it is hard to fathom how something that began with such good intentions could end in such a tragedy.
The Himlafall Clinic began as one woman’s dream.
Martina Hastings, who had been a practicing psychologist and psychiatrist with a PhD and three bestselling books behind her, wanted to build a place where women could come and heal from past romantic relationships, to give them a better chance at finding love in the future.
It was a grand vision, and an attractive one, bolstered by Martina Hastings’s millions of followers, something that, along with her professional and academic credentials, secured her the funding she needed almost immediately.
The Himlafall Clinic ran, seemingly successfully, for almost two years, before it all ended in tragedy, with five people dying violently. So what happened?
When news broke, the papers called Susannah Wallin a mentally disturbed woman who went on a killing spree.
But that description is not only reductive but also untrue.
Susannah Wallin’s medical records showed no history of severe mental illness.
Telling the story of the Himlafall Clinic as one of a mentally ill woman “snapping” and committing murder is one that is easy for most people to digest, but it distorts the actual truth of what happened by leaning into harmful stereotypes.
Susannah Wallin did not commit any of her violent actions in a psychotic state.
While her murders may have been impulsive, the way she went about covering them up was not.
Susannah Wallin impersonated her murdered ex-fiancée for nearly six months; she used her credit cards to buy food, bought charcoal powder in order to prevent the neighbors from smelling the decay, and accessed her phone and email account in order to resign, as Linn, from “her” job.
These actions cannot be explained away by calling Susannah Wallin “crazy.” These actions were calculated and carried out over the course of many months. Calling Susannah Wallin crazy soothes us, because it is an easy answer to a difficult question.
The story of Susannah Wallin, Himlafall, and Martina Hastings is not one about mental illness.
It is a story about mismanagement, abuse, and the things we are willing to overlook.
It is the story about a driven woman who wanted to create a place for other women to heal but who failed to account for the people she could not help.
It is the story about a woman who could not accept culpability for the violence she had enacted on others.
It is the story of how our culture perpetuates the idea of women as harmless, thereby blinding us to the harm that all people are capable of doing.
But most of all, it is a story about the victims.
It’s the story about Linn Walsjo, Susannah Wallin’s ex-fiancée, who felt like she could tell no one in her life about the abuse she was suffering.
It’s the story about Sandra Morel, who tried to stop Susannah and ended up bleeding out in her bed.
It’s the story about Belinda Koskinen, who thought she was safe in her place of employment, and who was struck down by someone she considered a friend.
It’s the story about Pernilla Boman, who came to Himlafall as a client and died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills put in her tea by someone she thought was a trusted employee at a well-regarded psychological clinic.
And it’s about Dr. Martina Hastings, who died not for her own numerous sins but for someone else’s.
So where does it all begin?
It would be easy for me to say it began the day I, personally, walked through the gates of the Himlafall Clinic.
That way, I can claim it ended when I climbed back over the gates and drove to get help.
But the story didn’t begin when I arrived, just as it didn’t end when I left; it didn’t end when the victims were buried, or when Susannah Wallin received her verdict of life in prison.
The people who came through Himlafall, and their loved ones, are still having to live in the aftermath.
It begins, in this writer’s opinion, with a vision.
As described in Dr. Martina Hastings’s bestselling book Freud’s Ex-Girlfriend, it went something like this: “You should not have to apologize. You should not have to cower, or make yourself smaller. You should get to live unapologetically, without making excuses for who or what you are. Any person who cannot give you that is denying you the fundamental right of any woman, or any person: self-actualization.”
Susannah Wallin wanted to live unapologetically. And in the end, it cost five people their lives.
I stop reading, too consumed by the urge to edit and rewrite—it’s too late for that now, and if they hate it, I just have to live with that—and I scroll back up to the top, to where the space for a headline is still empty.
I can’t find a way to title it.
Maybe it will just have to stand as it is.
When I look at the time, the clock tells me it’s time to go. It’ll take twenty minutes to get to the Stockholm Daily offices, and my meeting is at noon.
I’m about to close my computer, but then I stop.
I hesitate, but then, at the very top, I write:
by Isobel Lindschold
I look at it. And I smile.
I always imagined that my first big article would be under the name my father ruined for us. The name I walked away from when I was sixteen years old. As a way to reclaim it, and reclaim what he took from me, and from us.
But he doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.