Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-five.
We stand looking at each other across the hotel bar for a year, a second, an hour. I’ve no idea. Time passes; it’s just him and me.
He puts his beer down on the bar, then his phone. He shuts his eyes momentarily, then looks toward the windows as if expecting me to disappear. Seconds later, his eyes meet mine again.
And for a lethal moment I remember the precise feeling I used to have when I looked this man in the eye, the feeling I once craved above all other things. I have not had it since I met him, even though Robin is the man I want to grow old with. This feeling is different. It always was.
Within seconds, though, it’s gone. I stare at him, he stares at me, and I’m scalded by that old grief that owned me for so many years.
I see the crushed version of myself that returned to London without him, those dreadful meetings with my hospital trust’s lawyers about the extent to which I truly knew Johan.
My miserable obsession with the other woman, whoever she was, and the solitude of my evenings when I wasn’t on call.
He received a royal pardon, I read that night in my kitchen before Christmas. He achieved the impossible. His name was cleared, all charges were removed from the record, and he was repatriated to Sweden to restart his life. Six years ago.
And it’s this that has been keeping me awake at night. The possibility that he was innocent all along.
Don’t ever give up on your gut, my father said when I returned from Thailand. Yet that’s exactly what I had done.
I walk toward him. I don’t know what I’ll do when I reach him; I know only that I’m being given, for whatever reason, a chance to ask the questions I never thought I’d get to ask.
Johan’s taller than I remembered. His hair’s now short.
Neither of us smiles as I approach him. He shakes his head again, as if trying to dislodge me, but his eyes don’t leave mine.
And then I’m standing in front of him. The miracle of him, this free man.
His laughter lines are still there, but they’re accompanied by others that won’t just be age. I stopped reading about life in Thai prisons when I came back to London. It was too awful.
“Carrie?”
I nod.
“Carrie…” His voice is laced with shock and wonder. He starts forward as if to hug me but pulls himself back. There’s a smile beginning, buried somewhere in the disbelief.
He smells of expensive scent, something subtle I don’t recognize. I used to bury my nose in his neck to inhale the smell of him, to experience him with every one of my senses.
His eyes are the same eyes I’ve held in my memory all these years. The planes of his body, too. This is him.
“Oh my God,” he says quietly.
The texture of his voice. It never left my system.
“How…how are you here?” he asks, when he’s ready to speak again.
“I’m a Roof host,” I say carefully. “I’m here for the conference. But I checked the delegate list before I booked, and you weren’t on it. I wouldn’t have come if I thought there was any chance of…of this.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” he says. “I just had a feeling I should…” He breaks off. “How did you know to even look for me on the list? How do you know I’m a Roof host? What is happening? Carrie!”
The sound of my name is thrilling and terrible. Cerrie. The slightly flattened vowel. The tentative depth of his voice. He folds his arms across his chest as if defending himself, although that old energy is still there in his eyes.
“It’s a long story,” I say. I look away, into the blurring air around us. “I—I found you just before Christmas. Completely by accident. I was looking at your summer house on Roof. It was a terrible shock. So, if it helps, I have some idea of how you’re feeling right now.”
He rubs his face with his hands. “I…um…Please can we sit down?”
After a pause I nod, and we turn to look at a room of mostly empty tables. Neither of us wants to commit to the romantic view of the snowy street and the vast silver river beyond; nor to be too close to the bar, where people might hear us.
I point to a table in the middle, facing away from the window.
I seat myself with a view of reception, where a coachload of tourists are waiting in line to check in.
Johan sits opposite me. His thighs are as long and lean as they always were, and for a moment I permit myself the physical memory of resting my feet on them.
He used to pick them up and put them between his legs to warm them.
After a second, as if he’s having this memory, too, he gets back up again. “I’m getting a drink,” he says. “Do you want one?”
I nod, but he walks away before I have time to tell him what I want.
He knows. He hasn’t forgotten.
This angers me somewhat. All these years he’s remembered what I like to drink, yet he hasn’t found it in himself to write me an email?
Hey, Carrie. Remember how we were going to spend the rest of our lives together?
I thought you’d want to know that I received a royal pardon! I’m free! I hope you’ve been OK!
I don’t look at him while he’s at the bar but I can see him out of the corner of my eye, turning around to check I’m still there every few seconds.
Minutes later, he’s back with a gin and tonic for me and a pint of something pale and wheaty for himself. He sits down slowly and, for the first time, looks at all of me. I wonder if he’s taking in the image of a slightly frumpy mother, now a few months off forty, or scanning a body he once loved.
Or at least he pretended to love. I still don’t know the extent of his double life. How he came to be arrested, if he wasn’t guilty. Who this girlfriend was; why he broke it off with me. I have no idea if anything that passed between us was genuine.
“So you’re here for the conference?” he asks eventually.
“That’s right.” My voice is matter-of-fact. “I have a little Roof property in England. I haven’t done a conference since COVID, so I decided to come. Then I met up with my old clinical supervisor from the Royal London. She works out here.”
“Yanika Hatziz?”
“Yes! Well remembered.”
“Still terrifying?”
“Worse than ever.”
I look away, angry with myself, angrier still with him. I don’t want to sit down and have a cozy catch-up.
I get up and order a glass of red wine. I’ve barely drunk spirits since that one day he was my husband.
“What the actual fuck, Carrie?!” he says when I return. He’s smiling now, properly, and I don’t like it. “I can’t believe this is happening. Are you OK?”
I shrug helplessly. “Are you?”
“My physical health is mostly all right,” he says after a moment’s thought.
“I have a lot of digestive problems. I also lost a finger.” He holds up his left hand, and there it is: a proximal amputation, fourth ray.
It’s a decent enough job, although his fifth hasn’t been translocated.
I suppose that’s to be expected in a prison.
I look at the empty space. That was the finger on which he wore a wedding ring for those few hours before they took him away.
I wonder what became of the ring. What he would think if he knew I’d kept mine.
“Mental health is mostly OK, too,” he adds after a moment. “Although it’s taken a lot of work.”
I nod, twisting my drink around and around. Adrenaline has formed a corset around my chest. I try to breathe deeply but not enough is coming in, not enough is going out. His eyes haven’t left mine.
“And you?” he asks after a moment. “Did you…Were you…Oh my God,” he says, blowing out slowly through his mouth. “I can’t…I’m in shock. This is…” He trails off, making a gesture with his hands that may or may not be a volcano exploding. Or perhaps his head.
“I know,” I say, and for a brief moment I allow myself to smile.
He smiles back, right at me. “I just wanted to learn how to use the algorithm pricing,” he says, scratching his head. “I booked at the last minute—I very nearly didn’t come. The seminar I went to was good, actually, they—”
“Johan.” My smile has gone. “I can’t do small talk. I know you’ve been caught completely unawares, but I can’t and won’t sit here talking about Roof.”
He thinks about this for a moment, then nods. “That’s fair enough. Tell me how you are.”
“Essentially fine. But the past few weeks, since I found you, have been challenging.”
He waits. I think he knows what’s coming.
“You left me devastated, Johan. You cut me off without any real explanation. You robbed me of years of happiness and very nearly my job. You seemed not to care that I’d spend the rest of my life driven mad wondering what had happened.
Then you got a pardon and restarted your life, and you didn’t even tell me.
You didn’t send me so much as an email.” My voice drops.
“I just…just like before, it’s hard to believe that the Johan I knew could behave in such a way. ”
I push the wine away. I don’t want that either.
Johan looks like he’s trying to understand what I’ve just said. “But Carrie. You know what happened.”
“I don’t know a fucking thing! Beyond that you were guilty, that you really did smuggle drugs into Thailand, and that you were fucking someone else the whole time.
That’s all I knew, Johan. That’s all I have ever known.
Until six weeks ago, when I read on a Swedish website that you actually weren’t guilty. What the hell?”
“Oh, God,” he says, his face pale.
I don’t say anything. I just wait, steeping in my unspent rage.
“Do you mean nobody told you? Your—I mean, nobody talked to you about it?”
“Who?! Who was going to tell me, if you didn’t?”
Johan puts his head in his hands. “That is awful,” he says. “I can’t believe you didn’t…Oh, God. All these years.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
Johan stretches, then yawns. He’s not just nervous; he’s terrified. I look away as his jumper rides up and reveals a slice of belly.
He shifts some more in his chair, then pulls it into the table so he’s closer to me. “I was not a drug dealer. Was I guilty of carrying some pills? Yes. But I was not a drug dealer. Of course I wasn’t.”