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“Much better. Thank you, Selma.” She pressed herself against my side ,and despite the frightful weather, I felt not in the least bit cold.

Chapter Thirteen

On the second Sunday of Advent, we had dinner at my uncle’s house. It had become a habit again. Karin didn’t mind the extra mouth, and Lilja rarely ate much. Afterward, Helena stayed behind to help Alma wrap packages for delivery. They were as busy as I was this Christmas.

Back in my own house, I went straight to the workshop after dinner. I had less than twenty days to finish all my orders, and for that, I needed to work late. Lilja joined me. She did most nights, bringing me the tools I needed or painting her beautiful leaves and swirls on whatever piece of wood I had discarded. Sometimes she would just watch me work. I liked her company better than I had liked anything in a long time.

Tonight was one of those nights where she pulled up a chair to sit close to my bench. I was working on a locomotive, the last piece of a train set for the butcher’s boy. She had put a log in the oven, and flames were dancing behind its iron door, spreading a comfortable heat in the workshop. Snow was falling heavily outside. For the last week, it hadn’t stopped for more than a few hours, and with roofs covered in snow, Norstad’s houses were as pretty as one of Mrs. Viksten’s confections.

“It seems it’s going to be a brutal winter,” I said as I spread glue along one side of the wooden cylinder that would be the locomotive’s boiler.

“It’s not usually like this?” Lilja asked.

“No. Norstad is usually mild. We get snow, but it’s rarely for days on end.”

Lilja bit her lip. I pressed the glued side of the cylinder against the locomotive’s base, then placed it in a clamp to hold it while it dried, careful not to tighten it too hard. If I did, the iron would leave indents. Next I set to carving the chimney. I had just picked up the piece of wood when Lilja spoke again.

“Selma,” she said. “I want to tell you something because you’ve been so kind to me and I don’t like to be dishonest with you.”

“What is it?” I made my tone nonchalant—or I tried to, at least—but my heart did a nervous little skip in my chest.

“What I said at the tailor about being modest… It’s not really true. Or, at least not completely so. It’s… it’s because I have an ugly scar that I don’t like people to see.”

I should pretend quiet interest, should continue my carving, because this admission wasn’t easy for her, but my head snapped up all on its own. The golden light from the lamp reflected in the tears that had filled her eyes.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A knife.”

“Someone cut you?”

She nodded. “It was a long time ago. It’s healed but… but it’s not pretty.”

“Who did it?”

Her voice was so low I hardly heard it over the howl of the wind outside. “My father.”

She was like Helena then, a fugitive running from a cruel family. Crueler even. Helena’s father had kept to kicking and starving her—and that was brutal enough. But cutting your own daughter with a knife… that was the work of some devil.

“Is he the one looking for you?” I asked.

Lilja shook her head. “No. Not anymore. He hasn’t hurt me in a long time.”

I was prying, I was, but I couldn’t keep back my next question because the anger I hadn’t felt before meeting her was like a lump of burning coal in my chest. “Who, then?” I asked.

“My foster mother.”

“Foster mother?”

The cup with brushes for the glue stood on the edge of the bench. Lilja picked up one and ran her fingers over the bristles. “I ran away and ended up at her home. I thought I had found a refuge, but she was just as cruel as my father.”

I imagined Lilja at the sinister cottage of some forest witch, but that was absurd. Those were just tales to scare children into doing their chores and not getting lost in the woods.

I had the rough shape of a chimney now, about the size of my thumb, and I picked up my file to smooth the wood. Lilja put back the paintbrush. She fiddled with the ends of her shawl, untying it, then tying it again. I could tell she was thinking, perhaps considering how to phrase something she wanted to say, and I let her order her thoughts.

“Selma,” she said, letting the end of the shawl drop, “have you ever had a sweetheart?”

Like a spark catching paper, my face was aflame in a moment. “No,” I croaked. “Never.” The closest I had ever gotten to anything with a woman were glances in the street that had probably meant nothing at all.