heavy sigh. Karin was battling to control her voice.
“Oh, thank God. Nina, thank you so much for getting him out of there.”
Another long silence. That seemed to be it. Nina cursed inwardly. Thank you for getting him out of there? How about an explanation? How about a bit of help? Something, anything, that would tell her what to do with her three-year-old burden.
“I have to know something about him,” she said. “I have no idea what to do with him. Do you want me to take him to the police? Do you know where he comes from?”
Nina heard the rising shrillness in her own voice, and for a moment she was afraid Karin had gotten spooked and hung up. Then she heard a faint, wet snuffling, as if from a cornered and wounded animal.
“I really don’t know, Nina. I thought you had contacts … that your network would be able to help him.”
Nina sighed.
“I have no one,” she said, and felt the truth of it for the first time, at the very pit of her stomach. “Look, we need to talk properly. Where can I find you?”
Karin hesitated, and Nina could practically hear the doubts and fears ripping away at her.
“I’m in a summer cottage.”
“Where?”
Nina waited tensely, while Karin fumbled with her phone.
“I don’t want to be involved in this. I can’t. It wasn’t supposed to be a child.”
The last word was nearly a wail, a high-pitched hysterical whimper, and Karin could no longer control the violent sobbing that Nina guessed had been coming even before she answered the phone.
“Where is the cottage?” she repeated, striving for a note of calm authority. “Tell me where you are, Karin, and I will come to you. It will be all right.”
Karin’s breath came in harsh bursts, and her silence this time was so long that Nina might have ended the call, had she not been so desperate herself.
“Tisvildeleje.”
Karin’s voice was so faint that Nina could barely make it out.
“I’ve borrowed the cottage from my cousin, and it’s… .” There was a crackling sound as Karin fumbled for something, possibly a piece of paper. “Twelve Skovbakken. It’s at the very end, the last house before the woods.”
There was a click, and this time, she really was gone.
Nina turned to the sleeping child with the first real smile she had been able to manage during the six hours that had passed since she opened a suitcase and found a boy.
“I’ve got it covered,” she said, feeling her hands unclench on their own. “Now we will go find out what has happened, and then I will see to it that you get back home where you belong.”
SIGITA WAS DESPERATE enough to ask him to come.
Darius’s mobile phone voice became ill at ease.
“Sigita… . You know I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My job.”
He worked for a construction company in Germany. Not as an engineer, as he sometimes told people, but as a plumber.
“This is Mikas, Darius.”
“Yes. But….”
She ought to have known. When had she ever been able to count on him? But Mikas … she hadn’t imagined that Mikas meant so little. Darius liked the boy and often played with him for anything up to an hour at a time. And Mikas worshiped his father, who would always appear at the oddest times, carrying armfuls of cellophanewrapped toys.
“Are other people’s toilets really more important to you than your son?” she choked.
“Sigita… .”
She hung up. She knew it wasn’t his job that was stopping him. If it had been something he really wanted to do, like a football match or something, then he called in sick without worrying about it. He was not a career chaser. His job didn’t mean all that much to him.
It wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was because he wouldn’t. He wanted to stay in his new life, probably with a new girlfriend, too, and had no wish to be drawn back to Vilnius and Tauragė , to Sigita and her tiresome demands.
Pling-pliiing. The mobile gave off its tinny “Message received” signal. The text message was from Darius.
Call me when Mikas comes home, it said.
As though Mikas were a runaway dog who would appear on her doorstep when it became sufficiently hungry.
“Are you all right, madam?”
She looked up. An elderly gentleman in a gray suit stood watching her from a few yards away, supported by a black cane.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s … it was just … it’s over now.”
He helped her to her feet and began to collect her scattered belongings.
“It’s important to drink enough when