On hindsight, I could understand why—the story was pretty gross. I scrolled through and found another story about a woman called Grete and her elk, but Gaia seemed preoccupied with the nøkk story.
“Do you know how the daughter in the story was scared because the nøkk’s eyes looked like holes?” Gaia said then.
“Yes?”
She pushed her glasses up her nose. “That sounds like the Sad Lady, doesn’t it?”
I thought back to that terrifying encounter in the kitchen with the floating woman with weird teeth. My skin crawled at the thought of it. I avoided the kitchen at nighttime now, and in the day it was so busy and light that you could almost forget that such a terrifying thing had happened. But Gaia had a point.
“Maybe if we said the Sad Lady’s name, she’d go away,” Gaia said. I tried to move on to a lighter, less terrifying subject, but she wasn’t having it. “What would her name be?”
“Well, in the story,” I said, emphasizing that it was, after all, fiction, “the nøkk was named Egil, after the lake. So if the fjord had a nøkk, it would be called Hjørund, as that’s the name of the fjord.” That was what Clive had told me, when he first drove me here from the airport.
Gaia considered this. “So the Sad Lady’s called Hjørund?”
“If she was real, she’d be called Hjørund . . .”
“We both know the Sad Lady’s real,” Gaia said firmly.
I reached out and took her hand. “Well, now you know what to do to make her go away.”
At this, Gaia stared at me for a long time, then took off her glasses and snuggled down into her bed without a single complaint.
* * *
—
Once the girls were both asleep, I headed downstairs to return the iPad to wherever Gaia had filched it from in the living room.
“Knock knock.”
I looked up to see Clive standing in the doorway. I figured one of the girls had climbed out of bed and I was needed to put her back.
“You busy?” Clive asked.
“Not really,” I said, swallowing hard. Something was wrong. Clive was usually a jokey kind of guy, by which I mean he was withering and snarky, but right now he just looked kind of constipated. Had he somehow found out who I was?
He asked me to sit down. I did, and he sat next to me. I could see he’d been sweating profusely. Two damp circles at his armpits, his brow moist. His eyes were kind of bloodshot.
“You might have . . . questions,” he said in a voice that sounded as though he was speaking to a six-year-old.
“Questions?”
“About what happened on Tuesday. And I’m here to answer those questions.”
I looked at him, owl-eyed. I had absolutely no clue what he was talking about.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.”
He narrowed his eyes, as though studying me very closely. “Is it money you’re after?”
“What?”
He leaned back, rubbed his face as though he hadn’t slept in days. Come to think of it, I had seen him pacing one night when I was up with Coco. She was still teething. I found that ice helped, but going to the kitchen for it in the dead of night—and potentially encountering floating women—wasn’t worth it.
“Money?” I repeated. “Money for what?”
He looked at me as if I was hiding something. “So you didn’t see the . . .” He folded his lips into his mouth, as if whatever I’d seen couldn’t be uttered aloud.
“See the what?”
He glanced outside, then back at me. I followed his gaze. It was pitch-black out there, but the expression on his face indicated that he was seeing something. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, perhaps, or a portal into the multiverse.
“Look, if the police come,” he said, suddenly flustered, “stick to that story. OK? And I’ll see that you’re rewarded.”
I was sure he was on heroin or something. He laid a hand on top of mine and left it there for a few seconds. Probably best just to let his train run out of steam.
But he was suddenly too close, and I wondered if I perhaps had something in my eye, or if my eyeliner was running again. I still hadn’t quite mastered the art of makeup application, despite religiously attempting it every day.
“Are you sure you didn’t see anything?” he asked again. Softer, this time, and closer to my face.
“See what?” I said, shifting slightly away from him and leaning back