Page 128 of All I Want for Christmas

Max frowned. ‘Done what?’

She angled her knees towards him, her brain shifting gears, facts and theories beginning to move into new positions. ‘Max, you know how she died, don’t you?’

His jaw pulsed at the sudden, unwelcome turn in conversation. ‘Of course. She drowned.’

‘Yes – but do you also know it wasn’t accidental?’

He glanced at her with a guarded look. She took it as confirmation. ‘Where are you going with this?’

‘Viggo told me she walked into the sea and killed herself – but it doesn’t make sense that she would do that.’

‘Doesn’t it? She had been living in Hornbaek for years by then. She was depressed, Darcy.’

‘That’s just it – she wasn’t. She had been completely broken by her son’s death but she’d gradually recovered. She’d just had another baby. Emme, her daughter. A daughter that she never got to know. Why would she have killed herself when she’d finally got the one thing that could heal her? It makes no sense that she would have done this.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked, his voice suddenly cold. ‘You don’t think depression is insidious? You think it just miraculously disappears when one good thing happens?...Having the baby could well have made thingsworsefor her. Postnatal depression?’

Darcy pulled back. He was right, of course. That also made sense. She looked across at him, realizing she shouldn’t have articulated her theory out loud. Not to him. Lilja’s great-grandson. ‘Max, I’m sorry, I was just hypothesizing. I didn’t mean to—’

But it was too late. She had crossed a line. She could seehis knuckles were white around the steering wheel as he drove. ‘What exactly is it you want to find, Darcy? Do youwantsensation? Do you want terrible things to have happened to my family so that you can launch some kind of exposé when the painting’s revealed?...Is this about trashing my family’s reputation so that you can make yours?’

‘Of course not!’ She was appalled. How could he think such a thing?

‘No?’

‘No!’

He shook his head as the temperature between them dropped to freezing. ‘Well, it sure as hell looks like you’ve got an agenda from where I’m sitting.’

‘You’re back!’ Freja exclaimed, coming outside in her Ugg slippers and heatless curling ribbons, the bin bag in one hand as Darcy stood on the pavement, watching Max’s tail-lights disappear up the street. ‘A whole day later than planned. Iwonderwhat could have happened?’ she asked in a wry voice.

Darcy heard the bin lid slam down and the slap of Freja’s slippers on the path as she came and stood by her. Someone had already cleared the snow to the sides.

‘...That’s him, is it?’ Freja asked, when Darcy didn’t reply.

‘Yeah,’ Darcy breathed, watching the indicator come on. A right turn, and he was gone.

‘Darce?’ Her flatmate put a hand on her shoulder, seeing her subdued manner. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He trusted me. He finally started opening up and I...I just threw it back in his face.’ Darcy turned to look at her, tears skimming her cheeks as a sob burst from her at last. ‘...I think I’ve just messed everything up.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘Good night, Darcy. Don’t stay too late.’

‘Night, Viggo,’ Darcy mumbled, hearing him climb the stairs. It was poker night. The man had a better social life than she did.

She checked her phone for the umpteenth time: double ticks. Grey.

He was ghosting her again. She had triple texted and left a short voice note saying she was sorry, could they please talk? But there had been no reply.

Freja had checked in hourly for updates all day, remote monitoring Darcy’s responses. She was allowed no more than three ‘aired’ messages. ‘You can show him you’re prepared to swallow your pride, you can show contrition – but there’s also a hard limit,’ she had said sternly at the bathroom mirror as they applied their make-up that morning, Darcy trying to conceal the under-eye bags that revealed another night of no sleep (this time for the wrong reasons). ‘You might lose that man, but you will at least keep your dignity.’

She stared at her screen. She had started writing her copy on Lilja’s biography, but it was a sparsely feathered nest. Strictly speaking, she could have done it at the apartment, or in the university library, or at the Academy, or at Paludan, but she was here because there was comfort to be found in themuted confines of the archive. The background murmur and hum of visitors upstairs, Viggo’s footsteps in the background, coffee on tap...the possibility that Max might come here unannounced, as he had before, against his better instincts.

He hated her for probing into his great-grandmother’s death, but she had been skating on the surface of Lilja’s life and there were glaringly obvious suppositions she couldn’t ignore. Max had been right that Emme’s birth could have triggered a profound postnatal depression in an already fragile young woman, and that might explain why she had walked into the sea. But it also might not. No matter what he said, Darcy couldn’t ignore the fact that in the photographs she had seen of Lilja in those final months, she had looked stronger and decidedly content – so different to the reports of her physical and mental condition when she’d arrived in Hornbaek in 1920.

Which posed the question: why? What had happened to make her so happy? Was it falling pregnant with her daughter, or something else? Someoneelse.

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