‘But I’m going to have to tell him now. Tell him everything,’ she sobbed, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘I have no choice. His father wants access and if I don’t grant it, he’s said he’ll take it to court. He’ll have the top family lawyers in Europe, and I won’t stand a chance. It’ll all get into the press.’
‘Surely if his family are that powerful, they’d get some super-injunction or something?’
‘On the contrary, he’ll want it out there. He’s the victim in all of this. Imagine how the narrative will read – the scion to Sweden’s Camelot wakes from a tragic accident and coma to find his wife shacked up with another man. They’ll dig up my life with Max, go through our tax returns, our bins, our social media . . . They’ll paint me as the bitch who didn’t wait.’
Bell winced. It was an intimidating prospect. She closed her eyes, thinking fast, remembering Linus’s terror at the hospital. How would he react to being told that the wild man he’d seen raging and screaming obscenities in that hospital bed was his real father? That that same stranger wanted Linus to go and live with him for half the time? ‘Okay, well then, you need to find a compromise. Clearly, as his father, he does have rights – so Linus needs to be told the truth, and they need to be reintroduced to each other. Properly.’
‘That was my plan too, and I thought he was on side with that. He knew that after the hospital visit went so badly, it was going to need to be handled better the next time he met Linus. He was the one putting off their meeting; he said he wanted to be strong for him when they met properly. He wanted to be the father Linus might remember.’
‘But Linus doesn’t remember him, does he?’
‘No. But he doesn’t believe that.’ Hanna looked straight at her. ‘But then, I don’t know – something’s changed this weekend – Midsommar got him all revved up. He texted me this morning saying he’s been deprived of his son for long enough. He’s lost over seven years already. He wants him with immediate effect.’
‘What?’
Hanna inhaled deeply, swelling herself up with disbelief and despair as she shook her head. ‘He wants Linus to go and stay with him – from tomorrow.’
Bell gasped in horror. ‘Tomorrow? But he can’t do that! No way! The man’s a stranger to him!’
‘I know. I know. That’s what I told him, but he won’t listen to me. He says he may not have rights over me, but he does over his son.’
‘But –’ Bell spluttered, the thoughts rushing too fast to form words. ‘He’s only thinking about himself, not what’s best for Linus.’
‘I know that, you know that – but he doesn’t! He thinks because he can walk and talk again, that that’s enough. I’ve told him it takes more than that to be a father to a child who doesn’t remember him – who, who doesn’t even know about him.’ She began sobbing again. ‘Oh God, how am I going to tell Linus about all of this? What can I say? I panicked that day in the hospital, and I lied.’
Bell looked down, remembering her own anger with Hanna that day. She’d handled it badly, made every mistake, and now – now she was having to it face again, telling her son a truth that couldn’t be denied any longer. Would he forgive her the lies and deliberate duplicity? Was ‘panic’ a justifiable excuse to a little boy who had just been unwittingly reintroduced to his own father? Back then, telling that truth had seemed like an impossibility, but things were very different now. They were worse. Now it wasn’t revealing the identity of his true father that was the main problem, but the reality of Linus having to stay with the stranger who had terrified him.
She stared out into the night, trying to calm her own panicky thoughts. Two swans were swimming past on the inky water, dazzling in their bright relief; but all she could see was the young boy sleeping down the hall, with no idea of the volte-face his life was about to take with the dawn. ‘Okay, look,’ she said slowly. ‘We don’t want to antagonize him. We can all totally understand how . . . desperate he must be to get his life back in some way. He knows he can’t