the times table test today and he was heartbroken. Big, fat tears rolling down his cheeks . . .’ She trailed a finger down her own cheek, her mouth downturned sadly to make her point.
Kris sighed and shook his head, looking entirely unconvinced, before suddenly stabbing the air decisively with his fork. ‘Give him a booty call.’
She frowned in disbelief. ‘Linus?’
He banged the ends of his cutlery on the table. ‘Ivan!’
‘Ha, yeah right.’ Quickly she stuffed another overloaded forkful into her mouth, trying to distract herself from his words with a taste-bud explosion.
He dipped his head and looked closely at her. ‘Listen, I know you love that family, but you need to start imposing some boundaries. Puppy-dog eyes or not, Tove’s right – you’ve got a life to live too. You need to start saying no. Except when it’s to a guy – then you need to start saying yes.’ He reached over and put a hand on hers. ‘You know what I’m saying.’
She nodded. She knew exactly what he was saying.
He winked at her kindly, heart-stoppingly. ‘Remember – it’s just a job, and you’re just the nanny, Bell.’
It was exactly 5.28 a.m. as she closed the door behind her with a shiver, holding the bike steady with one hand as she tucked her trousers into her socks with the other. She glanced up and down the arm’s-width narrow street but no one else was around: a few bottle crates were stacked in a tower, ready for pickup, and the hand-painted A-frame advertising the craft beers in the Star Bar was propped against the wall. Quickly, she stepped on the pedal and swung her leg over the bike, gliding silently past the tiny, narrow antique shop selling ceramics and glassware, past the ancient wooden door of the rare comic emporium sited thirty feet below the street in an old wine cellar.
The cobbles glistened from the overnight rain. Her tyres sluiced through shallow puddles as she darted from alley to alley, cutting across the pedestrian thoroughfares that would soon be heaving with tourists looking for wooden Dala horses and bakeries to have fika in. In these long, thin alleys she was protected from the wind that came straight off the Baltic, but she knew that as soon as she took the left onto Stora Nygatan and over the bridge it would push at her back all the way to Ostermalm, until she closed the Mogerts’ garden gate behind her.
Traffic was light, with few commuters out yet. Small clusters of electric scooters stood poised by the bridge, outside the main station, at street corners and by bike racks. There weren’t even any drivers in the embassy cars as Bell powered up the colourful street, and she had a sense of suspension, as though the city was holding its breath – just about to exhale, just about to start up again. What would today hold?
She had slept well, awaking in the starfish position on her double bed, although she’d still wished she could stay there for another four hours. But one glance at her employers’ faces as she walked in, and it was clear they had had a very different night. Both of them were pale and tense, sitting stiffly and in silence at the whitewashed kitchen table as she shut the back door quietly behind her.
‘Hey,’ she said in a low voice, partly so as not to wake the children, but also in deference to the sombre mood in the house. She pulled off her beanie and automatically twisted her hair into the topknot, seeing that they had managed only coffee; the island was spotlessly clean and tidy.
Hanna was dressed but Max was still in his pyjamas, and his eyes followed his partner as she got up to rinse her cup.
‘Bell, thank you for coming so early. I really appreciate it.’ Hanna’s poise was in stark contrast to the sucker-punched disbelief of last night, but Bell could see the effort it was taking her just to present this veneer. Her mouth was pulled down at the corners, the sinews strained in her neck.
‘It’s the very least I could do. How are you both?’
She made a point of including Max in the question, seeing that Hanna was using manners as a mask, and he answered her with a weary nod that told her more in its fragile silence than words would.
‘Did you manage to sleep at all?’
A silence followed; they seemed to be deferring to each other to answer.