Page 68 of The One Day You Were My Husband
Stethoscope on. Hair tidy. Phone on airplane mode. Pen in pocket, scrubs neat.
Fuck you, I said silently, even though my heart was shattered.Fuck you, Johan Kullberg.
Left foot, right foot, left, right. Back to my job. He could no longer take this from me. He could no longer take anything. I was a lone wolf now, just like I was always meant to be, and nobody would ever make me vulnerable again.
Twenty-five.
Now: Stockholm, January 2023
We stand looking at each other across the hotel bar for a year, a second, an hour. I’ve no idea. Time passes; it’s just him and me.
He puts his beer down on the bar, then his phone. He shuts his eyes momentarily, then looks toward the windows as if expecting me to disappear. Seconds later, his eyes meet mine again.
And for a lethal moment I remember the precise feeling I used to have when I looked this man in the eye, the feeling I once craved above all other things. I have not had it since I met him, even though Robin is the man I want to grow old with. This feeling is different. It always was.
Within seconds, though, it’s gone. I stare at him, he stares at me, and I’m scalded by that old grief that owned me for so many years. I see the crushed version of myself that returned to London without him, those dreadful meetings with my hospital trust’s lawyers about the extent to which I truly knew Johan. My miserable obsession with the other woman, whoever she was, and the solitude of my evenings when I wasn’t on call.
He received a royal pardon, I read that night in my kitchen beforeChristmas. He achieved the impossible. His name was cleared, all charges were removed from the record, and he was repatriated to Sweden to restart his life. Six years ago.
And it’s this that has been keeping me awake at night. The possibility that he was innocent all along.
Don’t ever give up on your gut, my father said when I returned from Thailand. Yet that’s exactly what I had done.
I walk toward him. I don’t know what I’ll do when I reach him; I know only that I’m being given, for whatever reason, a chance to ask the questions I never thought I’d get to ask.
Johan’s taller than I remembered. His hair’s now short.
Neither of us smiles as I approach him. He shakes his head again, as if trying to dislodge me, but his eyes don’t leave mine.
And then I’m standing in front of him. The miracle of him, this free man.
His laughter lines are still there, but they’re accompanied by others that won’t just be age. I stopped reading about life in Thai prisons when I came back to London. It was too awful.
“Carrie?”
I nod.
“Carrie…” His voice is laced with shock and wonder. He starts forward as if to hug me but pulls himself back. There’s a smile beginning, buried somewhere in the disbelief.
He smells of expensive scent, something subtle I don’t recognize. I used to bury my nose in his neck to inhale the smell of him, to experience him with every one of my senses.
His eyes are the same eyes I’ve held in my memory all these years. The planes of his body, too. This is him.
“Oh my God,” he says quietly.
The texture of his voice. It never left my system.
“How…how are you here?” he asks, when he’s ready to speak again.
“I’m a Roof host,” I say carefully. “I’m here for the conference. But I checked the delegate list before I booked, and you weren’t on it. I wouldn’t have come if I thought there was any chance of…of this.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” he says. “I just had a feeling I should…” He breaks off. “How did you know to even look for me on the list? How do you know I’m a Roof host? What is happening? Carrie!”
The sound of my name is thrilling and terrible.Cerrie. The slightly flattened vowel. The tentative depth of his voice. He folds his arms across his chest as if defending himself, although that old energy is still there in his eyes.
“It’s a long story,” I say. I look away, into the blurring air around us. “I—I found you just before Christmas. Completely by accident. I was looking at your summer house on Roof. It was a terrible shock. So, if it helps, I have some idea of how you’re feeling right now.”
He rubs his face with his hands. “I…um…Please can we sit down?”
