After dinner Bente and her mother went out onto the balcony. Agneta pulled on her Tretorn boots and Dad’s old oilskin coat, which she always wore when she went out for a smoke back in the day; Dadused to complain that it stank of smoke when he put it on to go hunting. Mom had stopped smoking when she was released from jail, but she’d kept up the habit of going outside for a breath of fresh air—a distinct improvement over a hit of nicotine.
They gazed down at the square and the hazy glow from the streetlamps through rain-filled air.
“Things will work out,” Agneta said.
“I think so too.” Bente meant it; she wasn’t the kind of person to give up.
Agneta didn’t say any more, they simply stood there in silence. Eventually she went indoors, but Bente stayed where she was. The wrought iron railing was cold against her fingers, and a chilly breeze pinched her cheeks. She was about to go in, too, when she heard footsteps, and Hanna appeared with two steaming cups of tea. She passed one to Bente, who blew on the hot liquid.
“We care about you, Bente—we know how bad you felt because of everything that was written about you, we know the toll it took.” Hanna sipped her tea.
Bente blew on her drink again but didn’t answer.
“Why do you even want to go back into TV?”
“I’ve got an idea for a show that would be excellent entertainment, and I’ve always loved working in TV. I ... miss it.”
“What exactly is it that you miss?”
“Piquing people’s interest in wine and history, sparking their enthusiasm.”
Hanna still didn’t look convinced.
“I want to tell people that wine is about so much more than just the drink itself—it’s about culture, history, several hundred years of accumulated knowledge and refinement. I want to touch on all of that. To talk about how the wine trade during the world wars was a part of the resistance movement, but was also something that the collaborators were involved in. In many countries, viticulture and even individual vineyards have survived the plague, revolutions, war—and what if thisparticular bottle has a fantastic story to tell?” Bente lifted her chin and looked her sister in the eye. “And besides all of that, I love teaching people about wine. This is an amazing opportunity.”
“Do you want to teach people about wine, or appear on TV? Those are two completely different things,” Hanna pointed out.
Bente didn’t say anything, she just drank her tea.
“I don’t understand why you want to go back, why you want to be famous.”
“It’s not about being famous.”
Hanna’s expression betrayed her skepticism.
“It’s my life and my career and I’m thirty-five years old, so I can make my own decisions about what’s good for me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m worried about. The fact that you’re so desperately keen to get back to the world that fascinates you so much—at the expense of your well-being.”
With those words, Hanna went back inside.
Bente sank down on a chair on the balcony and finished her tea, considering everything her sister had said.
A week later, on the morning of the meeting, Bente’s phone buzzed with a message.
It was from Elnaz—was she going to postpone? Bente had sent her the sparse information she had managed to find about the bottle. Maybe Elnaz thought it wasn’t enough?
She opened the message with her heart pounding, but there’d been no need to feel anxious. Elnaz was simply wondering if they could hold the meeting at TV24. She had spoken to an executive producer there, and he was really interested.
Little flutters of joy replaced the sinking feeling in Bente’s stomach. A meeting with TV24? It was usually necessary to get the production company on board first; the point of her meeting with Elnaz had beento pitch to the production company, who would then approach the TV stations. Clearly Elnaz had already done half the job, which meant that Bente’s idea had taken a huge step forward.
On the way she cycled past Rendezvous. She had handed in her resignation the previous week, to which Tomas had replied that she had beaten him to the punch, implying that he had intended to sack her. She felt nothing but a huge sense of relief.
The low-lying sun was creating sparkling stripes across the roofs of Östermalm as she pedaled up the last hill before Karlaplan. She seemed to have endless energy this morning, and didn’t even need to stand up to manage the incline. She continued along Karlavägen, the only place in Stockholm that felt like a boulevard—this was where she got that Paris-feeling. On to the TV24 building in Gärdet. As usual the wind was whipping across the large open space where residents gathered for recreational purposes. In the distance the Kaknäs communications tower rose up into the clear blue sky.
Bente walked into reception, which had gotten a major facelift since she was last here. The walls that had been painted in a shade of purplish blue were now covered in birch paneling. The room seemed to be enveloped in light, and she was surrounded by shaggy rugs made of thick fabric and long linen curtains.
She sat down on the lead-gray sofa.
