High Risk

by Simona Ahrnstedt

  And here she was, thinking no one cared. Sexoteket clearly did. She had bought something from the online sex shop once, a long time ago. It wasn’t even anything interesting, just a book she needed for an article that she couldn’t find anywhere else. But now they sent her an e-mail every year. She thought about replying to Anton and asking him to remove her from their mailing list, but instead she closed the lid of her computer, nibbled at her crisp bread, and scrolled through Instagram. People were out for dinner with their partners, showing off their cute kids, away on weekend trips. A famous author was out at a restaurant with her girl gang. An artist, who according to Jill self-medicated with psychopharmaceuticals and kept her weight down using cocaine, had uploaded some pictures of raw food.

  Ambra brushed the crumbs from her chest. She should at least have bought wine. She shuffled out to her tiny kitchen. She’d been given a bottle of liqueur at some point, hadn’t she? Jill gave it to her, though she didn’t know why. There it was, neon and unopened. Should she? Ambra found a clean egg cup and took it and the bottle back to the couch. She turned on the TV and started one of her favorite episodes of Lyxfällan, a Swedish reality TV show about people in dire financial straits who were helped back on track by two angry coaches. A young man cried when he was forced to sell his video games.

  She poured the liqueur into the egg cup, toasted herself, and then drank it in one go. Refilled it and discovered that if she held her breath while she drank, she practically couldn’t taste it.

  After the third shot, she went back to the kitchen and fetched a bigger glass. You could say what you liked about liqueur, but the more of it you drank, the better it tasted.

  Chapter 24

  Tom placed the last of his groceries into the bag. Swedish flatbread, dog food, fruit. The store was almost empty; everyone was probably at home making dinner, watching TV, hanging out with their friends, or whatever else normal people without posttraumatic stress disorder did in the days between Christmas and New Year.

  “Hey,” he heard behind him.

  He turned toward the familiar voice. “Hi, Ellinor,” he said, pausing with his bag in his hand. Ellinor was carrying a bag from the Swedish liquor store, Systembolaget, and he could make out a bottle of champagne. Right, it was New Year’s Eve tomorrow. “You on the way out too?” she asked. Tom nodded, and they left the store together.

  “Hi, Freja.” She laughed when the dog, which had been waiting outside, started wagging her tail. Somehow he still had Freja. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but he’d put off calling Ellinor and Nilas. By now, he looked forward to the regular walks and the exercise he got from having the dog.

  “How are you two doing? She looks much happier.”

  “We’re fine,” he replied as he untied the dog. Ellinor followed him to his car. If she asked to take Freja back, then of course he would hand her over without hesitation. But it made no difference to him if he kept her awhile. He opened the trunk and put the bags inside. Freja was already waiting by the passenger side door.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say hi,” said Ellinor. “You seem happier too.” She laid a gentle hand on his arm and smiled at him. “Happy New Year, Tom.” And then she left.

  He sat down in the car and started the engine, but something resembling hope suddenly filled his body. Freja, who loved sitting up front next to him, barked. He reached out and petted her head. “Did you hear that? Ellinor said I looked happier.” It was a minor victory. He would improve upon it. No more drinking from now on.

  “Come on,” he said when they pulled up at the house. Freja jumped from the car and started sniffing around in the snow. Tom carried the groceries inside and unpacked the fruit, vegetables, and juice. He was eating better now, he realized. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it had just happened. He was getting more exercise, too, thanks to Freja.

  He moved around the house, tidying up a little, and glanced at the corner of the couch where Ambra had sat. Their kiss was nice, the one at the airport; a fucking fantastic kiss, actually.

  He continued toward the sauna, made sure everything was locked up. He spotted something white in one of the booths. When he lifted the delicate object down from the hook, he realized it was a white camisole. He caught a whiff of perfume and immediately recognized the scent. Ambra. It was hers. She had gotten dressed quickly after the massage. She must have forgotten it. He stood still for a moment, the soft white top in his hand, and then he climbed the stairs, deep in thought.

  He poured a glass of juice and looked out the kitchen window. It felt good to have the house to himself. Mattias had left for Stockholm the day after the sauna, and he didn’t miss him. But he could see Ambra before him, the way she stood here, in his kitchen, sipping champagne with a glimmer in her eye. He draped the camisole over the back of a chair and went to find his cell phone. He quickly wrote: Hey. How are you? Tom.

  He hit SEND. Paused with the phone in his hand. Should he have written anything else? Would she reply?

  His phone made a faint buzzing sound. He took the juice and his cell phone into the living room, wanting to sit down on the couch and read the message in peace and quiet. He peered at the display expectantly.

  I’m fine, thanks. You?

  He quickly replied: Good, thanks.

  He hit SEND again, but suddenly worried he’d been too short. He should have said something else. He wrote: What’re you up to?

  Was she in Stockholm now? He wondered where in the capital she lived. A small apartment in the center of town? A new condo in one of the suburbs? Or did she live with someone? Another message beeped. He had turned up the volume so he didn’t miss anything. She replied: Nothing.

  He sat like that, with the phone in his hand, thinking. She wasn’t very talkative. Was she busy? Pissed? Should he have gotten in touch sooner? Why was he doing it now? He scratched his forehead. He wasn’t used to trying to work out the meaning behind a single word. But if she didn’t want him to keep messaging her, she would let him know, wouldn’t she? Yes, he decided, and so he wrote: Nothing?

  It took her a while to reply, and Tom got up from the couch. He stacked wood in the fireplace, lit it, waited impatiently, finally heard her reply arrive. The message was longer this time: I’m watching a TV show. People who’ve completely ruined their finances get help from two angry men who make them feel guilty. It’s awful really, but it’s my vice. One of them anyway.

  He wasn’t sure whether she was joking, so he asked: They show that kind of thing on TV?

  * * *

  He sat with the phone in his hand, waiting. Another message arrived: You’ve never seen Lyxfällan?

  He typed a quick reply: I don’t watch TV much.

  Her reply came immediately: Snob.

  Tom laughed. Freja raised her head and gave him a confused look. His phone beeped again: I’m drinking liqueur. I never drink.

  He could almost hear her voice when he read those words. He smiled and typed: You did at Christmas. You were drunk.

  Long pause. Maybe it was a bad idea to bring up that evening? But he liked the memory. Ambra was cute when she was drunk. She looked relaxed and happy. Like she did after the sauna. And after the kiss. She replied: Yeah, true. I drank a whole lot up there. Weird Kiruna.

  Hmm. What should he say now? He wasn’t so used to this. Making small talk. And through a phone. Should he bring up the kiss? Though maybe she’d forgotten it. Another message arrived. This time, it read: Today’s my birthday.

  Tom read her words several times. Was she out celebrating? Or did she have people over for a birthday dinner? But she’d mentioned TV, so something told him she was alone. He took a chance and wrote: Can I call you?

  He sat there with the phone in his hand, waiting. She didn’t reply.

  * * *

  Ambra looked down at the phone in her hand. Read the latest message from Tom over and over again. Can I call you? She wasn’t expecting that. But then she wasn’t planning to tell him it was her birthday, either. She glanced at the bot
tle of liqueur. The level of liquid was now considerably lower, which probably meant that technically she was drunk again and incapable of good judgment. Did she want to talk to Tom? She thought for a while before she wrote: Yeah.

  Of course she wanted to talk to him. Their text conversation was the best thing to happen to her all day.

  Her phone immediately started ringing.

  “Happy birthday,” he said when she answered. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  He had a good phone voice. Calm and deep.

  “Thanks. And no. I’m just chillin’ at home.”

  “Can I ask how old you are?”

  “Twenty-nine. One more year to thirty.”

  “Practically a baby.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be thirty-seven next birthday. Do you hate birthdays too?”

  “Not quite that bad. What are you up to?”

  “I’m at home. Sitting on the couch.”

  If she closed her eyes, she could just see Tom in front of her. Long legs outstretched, probably wearing black. She thought she could hear crackling. Did he have a fire going? Was there any more cozy sound than crackling, breaking wood in an open fire?

  “The Northern Lights are visible again tonight. Do you have snow in Stockholm?” he asked.

  “A little. Not like in Kiruna.” And in that instant, Ambra experienced something she would have never expected: a longing for Kiruna.

  “Do you have any plans for this evening?” he asked.

  Ambra glanced at her watch. It was eight. She was planning to go to bed at nine so that this lousy day could come to an end. “Not really.”

  “What have you been doing since you got back from Kiruna?”

  She put down the liqueur and lay back on the couch, curled up with the phone and Tom’s voice. “Working, mostly. Is Mattias still there?”

  “No, he left the same day as you. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  The kiss at the airport hung between them. He hadn’t mentioned it. Should she? Was it better to pretend nothing had happened or to nonchalantly say, thanks for the kiss by the way, I’ve been thinking about it pretty much nonstop these past few days. She eventually settled for, “Is Mattias your best friend?”

  “No. Maybe in the past, but our relationship is a little more complicated than that.”

  Ambra thought that Tom seemed to have a lot of complicated relationships, but who was she to judge. Her own relationships weren’t exactly light and breezy. “So who is your best friend, then?”

  If he said Ellinor, she would hang up, she decided. But he was silent up there in Kiruna.

  “Oddly enough, it’s probably my friend David. We’ve known one another a long time. He was a huge support when I got back to Sweden. He’s the kind of friend who’s there for you, one hundred percent. But we’re not in touch right now. Not after Chad.”

  It took Ambra a moment to process what Tom had just said. The journalist in her reared her head through the haze of alcohol. She sat up on the couch, felt the goose bumps on her arms. “Chad? What were you doing there?”

  Long silence.

  “You don’t have to tell me—forget I even asked,” she eventually said; she both did and didn’t want to pump him for information.

  She heard him take a deep breath. “I was there on a job last summer. I was taken prisoner.”

  That wasn’t quite what she was expecting. “Who by?”

  Long silence. “Local thugs.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “For how long?”

  “A long time. Listen, I probably shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve drunk so much liqueur that I’ll probably forget everything we talk about by tomorrow.”

  He made a low noise. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was laughing.

  “What do you like about David?” she asked as she tried to find a notepad and a pen. She wondered what was required of a man to be Tom Lexington’s best friend.

  “We’ve known each other a long time. He’s reliable, loyal. A real friend.”

  “But you lost contact?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Of course.

  “So who’s your best friend?” he asked.

  “Jill, I guess. Though it’s complicated for me too. Jill travels a lot.”

  “And you’re pretty different too?”

  Aha, so he had noticed. “Yeah, we’re pretty different. I like a lot of people at work, but I don’t spend much time with colleagues.” I should get better at it, she thought. What was she afraid of?

  “No one else?”

  “Nope. I moved around a bunch during my childhood, different foster homes all the time, so I never really managed to make friends before it was time to leave. Plus, I was ridiculously shy.” She lay down with the armrest beneath her neck. “Being a grown-up is easier. Do you still have Freja?”

  “She’s here. I should probably take her out now.”

  “Thanks for calling to say happy birthday,” she said.

  “It was good to talk to you. Hope the rest of your birthday is good.”

  “You too.” She pulled a face. “I mean, I hope you have a good evening.”

  After they hung up, Ambra lay on her side on the couch. She pushed a pillow beneath her cheek and reached for the remote to turn up the volume on the TV again. She glanced at her notebook on the coffee table. She had completely forgotten about it. She picked it up. Chad, she read, followed by two exclamation marks. The whole thing was underlined with a thick line. Beneath that, she had sloppily written, Is he a bad guy??

  She poured a little more liqueur and sipped it as yet another episode of Lyxfällan came on. But her thoughts were elsewhere. Why the hell was Tom in Chad?

  Chapter 25

  “What do we have on the fire in Kista?” Grace asked the next morning.

  Always these fires.

  “I talked to the police. They suspect arson,” Ambra replied.

  “Perfect. Could you write something on it?”

  “Already am.”

  Ambra quickly finished the piece and sent it to the online editor, who published it on the website. Aftonbladet had long since moved almost completely online. They still ran a paper edition, but the focus was on the Internet. That was where they were visible, and everyone fought to be featured at the top of “page one.” Grace was the bottleneck through which all news passed.

  Ambra started on her next piece, a train crash in Hallsberg. It was nine o’clock, and the live feed from their web TV had just started. She kept one eye on that as news from the BBC, CNN, and the rest of the world rolled in on the monitors around them.

  Whenever she had a spare minute, she dealt with her e-mails, but her in-box was constantly filling up. A piece she’d written on inequality between the sexes had been published yesterday. It was short, based on a dry scientific report, maybe 200 characters at most, but it contained a great quote from a well-known female scientist. That piece had ended up in some hidden corner of the website, but it made no difference how short it was or how low down it was posted: the hate mail had been pouring in since yesterday. She scanned through the messages and wondered how Åke, Göran, and whatever else they were called managed to get so agitated. While she did so, she dialed the number for social services in Kiruna. She read a message from Hotmail user Lord_Brutal900 as she listened to the dial tone:

  I’ll shove a chainsaw up your disgusting feminist cunt.

  He was one of her regular haters, and that message was relatively tame compared to what he usually wrote. She deleted it and wondered who he was. A middle-aged businessman who hated feminists? An acne-ridden teenager who didn’t know any better? A woman? No, female hate was different. The paper’s policy was that you should report anything out of the ordinary. But she didn’t want to seem weak, so she just deleted them. Once, on Twitter, she had—in the heat of the moment—outed a particularly craz
y idiot who sent her disgusting messages from the e-mail address connected to his job with a medical research company. Dan Persson wasn’t amused, and she was given a reprimand. She deleted a few more messages and then heard a voice on the end of the line.

  “I’m looking for Anne-Charlotte?” Ambra said.

  “Sorry, she’s on vacation.”

  Jesus, people took long vacations. Ambra left another message for the social services worker, rolled her stiff neck, and got up from the chair to stretch.

  Why had Tom called yesterday?

  Not that she wasn’t happy about it—she was—but she couldn’t make sense of their relationship. In movies and in books, everyone was always so good at reading other people’s motives. They could always see or sense what the other person was thinking, feeling. And maybe some people really could do that, but honestly she sucked at it. What she interpreted as attraction might be nothing but a way to pass the time on Tom’s part.

  She grabbed her notebook. At least she understood her work.

  So. What was Tom Lexington doing in Chad? She searched the Internet. Tom’s company, Lodestar, was active both in Sweden and abroad, according to their home page, but she couldn’t find anything about Chad specifically. The site was full of generic phrases about global this and international that, but it didn’t mention any specific countries. She thought for a moment and then typed in “Tom Lexington + David,” but she didn’t expect to find anything. She had already established that Tom was invisible online. She clicked around at random, read aimlessly, scrolled through picture after picture, and then, suddenly, a picture of Tom appeared. She studied it more closely, unsure whether she was just imagining it. There was no mention of his name anywhere: The picture was from a shareholders’ meeting the previous year. She stared at the picture. Yep, it was definitely Tom.

  Security was high when Hammar Capital called an extraordinary general meeting, she read beneath the picture. The article, which was eighteen months old, was about how Hammar Capital, a Swedish venture capitalist firm, had hijacked the huge Investum company. Ambra had zero interest in the world of finance, but the saga had dominated the headlines and front pages for a couple of days as it all played out, so much so that even she remembered it. Clearly Tom himself had provided them with security back then. She would never have thought that a man with his expertise would work on something like that; it seemed more like glorified guard duty. She read on. Hammar Capital was owned by David Hammar. She knew that much. The bad boy of the finance world. The stone-cold venture capitalist. Who then married the daughter of the owner of Investum. Natalia. Who, in turn, was the sister of the jet-setting Alexander De la Grip. Ambra brought up a few pictures of Alexander De la Grip and studied them. Jesus, he was insanely good looking.