and made him get up in the dark and go out on a boat with you? With you?’
He put down the sheet of paper in his hand and placed it very carefully on the table. ‘Not just any child,’ he said slowly. Carefully. ‘My child. My son.’
‘You’re a stranger to him! He doesn’t know you!’ She felt herself quiver with fury and realized her hands were bunched into tight fists, her head pushed forwards like an aggressive gander.
Emil stared at her for another moment, then looked to the men sitting at the table with him. Bell felt her anger dissipate as she noticed them suddenly too, remembering she was dressed in just an AC/DC t-shirt and knickers. Her fingers found the hem and pulled it downwards as Emil cleared his throat. ‘I think we had better pick this up another day, gentlemen.’
Bell watched in horror as the one-two-three-oh-God-four men in suits shuffled and put away the paperwork on the oval table before them. An awkward silence settled over the group as they scraped their chairs back and murmured their farewells to him, looking at her critically as they passed by.
Bell had never felt more humiliated and she bit her lip hard, staring at the floor as the last one left, the leather on his shoes so highly polished that she could almost see up her own t-shirt in their surface. She waited for the sound of his footsteps to fade before she looked up again. Emil was leaning against the vast oval table, watching her, his arms folded across his chest. Unlike his lackeys, he wasn’t suited, but was wearing a pair of faded grey cargo shorts, a raspberry t-shirt and those boat shoes that were on the point of collapse. His seemingly beloved baseball cap sat on the table beside a water glass.
They stared at one another in silence for a moment and she felt her heat was matched by his freeze. He was angry too. She’d embarrassed him in front of his . . . team, or whoever they were.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ she said again, quietly, through clenched teeth, trying to retain some dignity.
His eyebrow arched fractionally, barely perceptible across the room. ‘That was the point of the exercise. I’m trying to get to know him. How else can I do that, if not by spending time with him?’
‘You can do it by showing a little patience,’ she said. ‘He’s a ten-year-old boy who had never heard of you before breakfast yesterday morning.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Yes. It is.’
He shook his head. ‘Actually, he’s known about me for months. He came to see me in the hospital after I woke up. His mother brought him.’
‘I know,’ she scoffed. ‘I was there, and I saw the look on his face as you screamed obscenities after him. He was terrified of you.’
Emil’s expression changed at her words, his froideur faltering, and he looked away quickly, a ripple of pain passing over his features. ‘That’s not fair. I wasn’t myself back then.’
‘I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that you frightened him. And he didn’t know who you were – Hanna had told him you were just an old friend. His godfather.’ She shook her head bitterly. ‘You should have seen his face when she told him the truth yesterday morning, and said you were making him come here to spend the summer with you. All the way over here, I expected him to just leap from the boat.’
Emil paled visibly and turned away, raking his hands through his hair. She could see the muscles in his back beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, but also the bones too. Despite herself, she felt another pang of guilt as she remembered Christer’s words. ‘Look, I appreciate you’ve been through a lot –’
‘Oh, you don’t know the first thing about what I’ve been through,’ he snapped.
She recoiled from the fury in his voice. ‘What I was going to say was that no matter what you have been through – awful though it was – this is not about you now. Not this bit. It’s about Linus.’ She saw the surprise in his eyes at her words, and she suddenly understood that every single thing that had been said to him since he had emerged from the coma had been about him. His accident, his trauma, his loss, his coma, his recovery, his family . . . He had no concept of what it meant to put someone else first. His entire existence