Hidden in Snow (The ?re Murders, #1)(5)

Hanna loves her sister but can’t really handle being around her. Lydia is a constant reminder of everything their parents expected from their children. The kind of expectations that Hanna will never be able to live up to.

“Do you know what time it is?” Lydia goes on. She gets up early every morning in her great big house on the island of Liding?. Hanna peers at the display. Eleven o’clock. It doesn’t matter. She has no job to go to.

Christian has left her.

The shock hits her again, and her stomach contracts.

Everything hurts.

“I’m coming down with something,” she manages to say.

It’s true—she is sick, in a way. There’s a huge, aching void where her heart ought to be.

She can’t suppress a sob.

Lydia might be energetic and successful, but she is neither deaf nor insensitive. She immediately realizes that something is wrong.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing.”

Hanna hadn’t intended to tell anyone. She’s used to standing on her own two feet, and in any case her situation is nothing compared to the abused and vulnerable women she meets in the course of her work.

But she’s so upset. She feels wretched, as if she’s a complete failure. If she tells her sister the truth, it will make it real.

“What’s happened?” Lydia says again.

Hanna bursts into tears.

“Hanna?”

“Christian’s left me,” she manages eventually. “And I’ve lost my job. My boss yelled at me yesterday, told me to find something else to do.”

It all comes pouring out. Snot is dripping onto the pale-blue duvet cover. She screws up her eyes, but the tears keep falling.

“I have to move out of the apartment by Sunday.”

She tries to dry her eyes with a corner of the bedsheet, but it doesn’t help much.

Lydia inhales sharply. “Where’s Christian?”

“With his new girlfriend. Valérie.”

For once, even Lydia is lost for words.

“Wow,” she says at last. “Bastard.”

Hanna cries even harder.

“It’ll sort itself out,” Lydia reassures her after a little while. Her voice has softened; she sounds more like the big sister who read to Hanna when they were children and less like the powerful woman who is interviewed in business magazines. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. I know you will,”

she adds.

“What am I going to do?” Hanna whispers. “How am I going to earn a living?”

There is a knock on the door at the other end of the line, and a deep male voice murmurs a few words.

“Sorry, I have a meeting,” Lydia informs Hanna. The usual efficient, slightly stressed tone is back. “I’ll call you later. Let me give the matter some thought.”

“Don’t tell Mom,” Hanna begs. “Promise.”

The roles in their family were carved out long ago. Lydia is the hardworking, successful daughter that her parents boast about to their friends in Spain, while Hanna is the late arrival they prefer not to mention. She has always disappointed them. Her bohemian lifestyle and her eventual choice of career made her ultrabourgeois mother and father choke on their red wine.

The only thing her mother really approved of was Hanna’s relationship with Christian.

And now it’s over.

Hanna puts down her phone and pulls the covers over her head. Christian’s betrayal is incomprehensible. How can he do this to her? After five years together?

The knowledge that he’s staying with his new girlfriend right now makes it even worse. Yesterday Hanna and Christian woke up in the same bed. Now he’s gone for good.

Plus she has nowhere to live. Stockholm’s housing market is a jungle. There are no rental properties available, only apartments to buy that cost millions. Money she doesn’t have, and never will have.

She can’t borrow from her parents. The very thought of calling them and telling them what’s happened is unbearable.

They call her “our little mistake.” She’s never been able to do anything right.

She couldn’t hold on to Christian, and at the age of thirty-four, she can’t afford a place of her own.

What is she going to do? Where is she going to go?

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5

Lydia calls an hour later, just as she promised.

Hanna is still in bed. She’s finally stopped crying and is staring apathetically at the ceiling. She ought to have a shower, take a painkiller for her headache, try to eat something.

She is incapable of moving a muscle.

“Okay, so this is what we’re going to do,” Lydia says gently, as if she were talking to a child. “You go to our house in ?re and rest for a few weeks.”

“?re?” Hanna mumbles.

She and her sister spent every winter break there with their parents, but Hanna hasn’t been back since she left high school, even though she’s always loved skiing.

Certain memories still hurt.

Lydia continues briskly: “Meanwhile I’ll look into your legal position in relation to the apartment. Christian can’t just throw you out—I won’t allow it. There’s a government document on cohabitees and their joint homes. I’m also going to have a word with your employer.”