Caroline Eriksson - The Missing

I see her running back toward the cabin, hear her feet pounding up the steps, and then the front door opens. You must have forgotten something. I go out to the hall to meet her. She doesn’t take off her shoes, doesn’t make any move to come inside. She just stands there, staring at me.

“Greta won’t have anything more to do with your husband,” she says at last. “You have my word.”

I know she wouldn’t say that if it wasn’t true. I’ve seen with my own eyes the power she has over you. You may not see it yourself. Maybe you don’t want to admit it, but that’s how it is. I nod to show that I accept her message. I expect her to turn and leave. But she stays where she is, standing on the hall rug.

“You asked me if it was worth it. Ask me again.”

At first, I’m confused. She already answered my question. Then I understand. You’re not here listening this time. I feel my pulse quicken.

“Was it worth it?”

“I’ve finally asked Greta to forgive me for leaving her alone. It’s been weighing on me all these years. But what I did, the fact that I killed her father, that’s not something I’ve asked her to forgive. And I’m never going to insult her or myself by doing that. A genuine plea for forgiveness presupposes remorse.”

Her words swirl through the air between us. She locks her eyes on mine, boring into me.

“Is that answer clear enough for you?”

My skin tingles and aches. It feels like every blood vessel in my body is open. I nod. Her words have made something come alive. The big challenge in front of me, awaiting me. I’ve been brooding about it all afternoon, ever since she finished telling her story. Ever since I heard myself say things about Alex that I’d never said before, expressing myself in a way I never thought possible. And now I understand. It’s when I’m with him—not without him—that I’m nothing. So simple, so banal. Yet it’s been true this whole time.

I look with astonishment and gratitude at the woman standing in front of me. Finally, I understand the meaning of this seemingly chance meeting here in Marhem.

“I’m sorry about your mother. Were you close?”

I feel a stab of pain in my heart.

“I miss her so much.”

She nods briefly and is just about to open the door when she stops. She leans toward me, so close that one of her curls brushes against my temple.

“Make sure your daughter is somewhere else,” she whispers. “And make it look like an accident.”

Then she’s gone. A minute later, I hear the car start, pick up speed, and finally fade into the distance. I stand in the hall, frozen in place. Everything I thought was lost—what I thought had vanished in the chasm opened by my mother’s last breath—all of that I can rediscover. All of that I’m going to reclaim. Myself. My daughter. Our future.

A mother’s love is boundless, wild, and beautiful. I will honor my mother’s memory and continue to strive for the same goals she did. But my path will be different from the one she took. While she chose submission, I choose to fight. Where she chose gentleness, I choose determination. Slowly, I turn around and go back to the living room. I have a lot to think about before I go home. A lot to plan. I sit down on the sofa, the side where your mother was sitting. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the presence of her story. It gives me both solace and strength. I know that I can make it through this. If she could, I can.

I picture Smilla, hear her infectious laughter ringing in my ears. Sometime, many years from now, maybe we’ll sit down and talk. A mother and her grown daughter. Then I’ll tell her about my path through life, about the lessons I’ve learned. I don’t yet know exactly what I’ll say. But I do know where I’ll begin. I know what the first sentence of my story will be:

A good mother is not shaped by circumstances. She is the one who decides how to shape them.

My thanks to my diligent publisher, my insightful first readers, my wonderful friends, and my whole supportive and loving family.

Last but not least, I thank you for reading my book.

Caroline Eriksson holds a master’s degree in social psychology and worked for more than ten years in human-resource management before deciding to pursue writing, her childhood dream. Her first two novels are based on historical Swedish murder cases, and her debut, The Devil Helped Me , was nominated for Stora Ljudbokspriset (the Big Audiobook Prize) in 2014.

Caroline has lived all over the world. She attended high school in Quantico, Virginia; studied at the University of Adelaide in Australia; and now lives in Stockholm. She denies being a daredevil but admits that she once threw herself off a mountain in New Zealand in a hang-gliding experiment.

Her greatest adventure today is raising her two children, and she satisfies any residual wanderlust by exploring the most terrifying parts of life—its dark psychological elements—in her writing. The Missing is Caroline’s first psychological suspense thriller and her first book translated into English. She’s already hard at work on her next novel.

Tiina Nunnally has translated over sixty works of fiction from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Swedish Academy has honored her for her contributions to “the introduction of Swedish culture abroad.” And she was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature in the United States. Nunnally makes her living as a full-time literary translator.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2015 Caroline Eriksson

Translation copyright © 2017 Tiina Nunnally

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Previously published as De försvunna by Bonnier in 2015 in Sweden. Translated from Swedish by Tiina Nunnally. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

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ISBN-13: 9781503940659

ISBN-10: 1503940659

Cover design by David Drummond