She nodded; she would never forgive herself but she could hear the kindness in his message, the empathy. Something his boss was incapable of. ‘He was only twenty-four. I think we both just thought he was too young and fit to be that sick.’
The pity spread across Mats’ face. ‘Where were you when he was diagnosed?’
‘Here. Sweden. We’d been sailing the Barents, intending to get over to the Caribbean for the winter months. We stopped at Malmö for a few days to stock up; there were these sweets he always liked that you couldn’t get anywhere else.’ She gave a small smile at the memory before it faded again, rubbed out by a harsher one. ‘He collapsed in the street. They took him in to hospital and he never left again.’
‘Jesus,’ Mats murmured, reaching over and squeezing her arm warmly. ‘I’m really sorry. That’s rough.’
‘Yeah.’ She realized her sandwich was sitting, untouched, in her hand. She forced herself to take a bite, but it was like chewing cardboard.
‘So that’s why you’re here, then? In Sweden?’
‘Basically. I couldn’t physically have sailed the boat alone, even if I’d wanted to, and I definitely didn’t want to sail with anyone else.’ She shrugged. ‘Besides, I was in shock for a long time; it had all happened so fast. I sold the boat and bought an apartment in Stockholm with the money and spent a year just staring at the walls. I didn’t work, didn’t go out, barely ate . . .’ She sighed. ‘Until one day, it was raining, absolutely pouring, and I decided to go for a walk. It was the first time I’d been outside in weeks.’
‘You wanted to walk – in the pouring rain?’ Emil asked.
‘Exactly! Those are the best walks!’ she said, seeing his scepticism. ‘It woke something in me, that feeling of the rain on my face.’
‘It reminded you that you were still alive,’ Mats said, getting it.
‘Yeah, exactly. So I began walking every day, even when it was sunny.’
He chuckled at her contrariness. Emil looked confused.
‘Then I advertised for a roommate and got Kris, who’s become my best friend; he’s the brother I never had.’ She glanced at Emil. Did he remember the name, the handsome face? Did he care? ‘He introduced me to his friends, and I started hanging out with them all. And one day I looked around me and realized I’d put down roots, and my life was in Sweden, and that was that.’
‘What about your family back home?’
‘There isn’t one. I was an only child and my father was much older – his marriage to my mum was his second; he died when I was thirteen and my mother died six years later.’
Emil was staring at her. ‘When you were nineteen.’
Good maths, she wanted to quip, but she bit her tongue. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s why you flunked your exams and didn’t go to uni.’
She swallowed. Tact really wasn’t his thing. ‘. . . Yes.’
‘So you went sailing round the world instead.’ It was as though he was putting together a picture in his mind, arranging her life story to a sense of order. Good luck with that . . .
‘There’s no greater escape,’ Mats said, nodding. ‘I reckon I’d have done the same.’
Bell smiled at him, grateful for the affinity, and he winked back.
‘So then, the question is – we know how you got to Sweden, but how exactly did you end up here, on a shabby boat like this with us reprobates?’ Mats joked. Still, he shot an enquiring glance in the direction of his boss in case he took umbrage at either ‘shabby’ or ‘reprobates’. Emil’s sense of humour could be unpredictable – it didn’t always show up.
‘I met Hanna in a cafe one day after my walk. The twins were babies and she was struggling to feed them and keep this chicken amused,’ she said, ruffling Linus’s hair lovingly. He had finally finished with his exertions and was sitting beside her, picking the filling out of his baguette. ‘So I offered to help and the next thing I knew, I had a job.’
She saw Emil had stopped eating, his baguette barely touched in his hands, listening to the story of how she came to be here – on his boat, in his family’s life – the conversation an echo of the one they’d had that night on the little boat about Destiny. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how you end up in places? Never in a million years would I have predicted