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Ronja kissed him on the mouth, exiling the reality of what awaited her in Stockholm. She held the Dalahäst fiercely, tightened her grip on Fredrik, and drank him in. “Let’s never leave this place,” she begged. “We can stay here the rest of our lives.”

Fredrik’s embrace was solid and strong. “I’ll plant a garden.”

“I can add a bedroom to this cabin,” she said.

“For Ulla.”

She chuckled into his skin. He knew. Somehow, he knew. “Yes. For Ulla.”

They drove back to Stockholm, the sun chasing them. With the windows of the 1964 green-gold Porsche rolled down, swaths of Ronja’s tresses escaped and whipped across her face. Fredrik dozed in the passenger seat with a lazy smile.

She focused on the road, having taken the longer route, the one that hugged the lakes and forests, allowing her the thrill of speeding around the turns while thwarting time. Ronja slid a hand across her stomach that held an uncertain future. She thought of her long-lost parents and siblings. Her father, a German who’d been wounded in the Second World War, met her mother during his permittent-tåg, when Sweden allowed passage of wounded German soldiers, and he had stayed. But his wounds extended to his head. Charming and handsome, he had a nasty temper and debilitating headaches, preventing him from working and leaving her mother with long factory hours that never brought enough money.

Ronja stole food in the market, and when her father discovered this, he beat her. But unable to care for the children, he sent them to live with relatives. Her brothers were shipped west to the North Sea with maternal relatives, and Ronja went to Germany with her father’s youngest sister, Amelia. Ronja’s baby sister, Analise, was the only one who stayed, and years later when Ronja returned at eighteen, she searched for them only to find her former home a pile of ashes.

“Tell me about your godparents,” Fredrik had once asked Ronja, as they lay spent and naked inside the Porsche on a March evening.

Ronja rested her cheek on his bare chest, his heartbeat pulsed into her when she said, “I called her Melia, and my uncle Arthur went by the name Shorty.”

“Why is that?”

“He had an accident in the factory. His pointer finger was smashed when the lift for the chassis malfunctioned. They had to amputate it.”

“Why not return to Germany?” he’d asked her when she told him of her missing family.

Because of Peter. But Ronja had only shrugged, not willing to confess the details to Fredrik then. The truth about Peter would come later.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Stockholm, Sweden

Ronja

It was drizzling when Ronja and Fredrik arrived in Stockholm from Mora. The wipers on the Porsche squelched lazily. The weather matched Ronja’s insides, as if the rain was disintegrating her heart.

She left the car running on the busy, narrow street. Saabs, Beetles, and VW buses splashed by. Fredrik took her knapsack and slung it on his shoulder. They hurried to the awning under her apartment of the Södermalm borough. He tugged her into him and kissed her. She tasted the rainwater on his mouth, savoring it, but time was running out. Ronja jerked free and cried, “I can’t.” She took the knapsack, rooted inside for the Dalahäst, and clutched his wrist. “Take it.”

Fredrik refused, keeping his hand clenched, and with the other, he cupped her chin calmly, as if he’d been prepared for this moment. “Look at me⁠—”

“I’ve been conning you this entire time. I wanted you to give this to me so that I could turn around and sell it for a fortune. Because that’s what I do, that is who I am!”

“No.” His face, normally serene and youthful, looked hurt, but not by her words. She knew he didn’t believe her any more than she did. He framed her cheeks with his hands as she pleaded, “You think catching me trying to steal from you was a coincidence? That I wasn’t baiting you?”

“Does it matter? Even if that were true, you think I wasn’t a willing victim?”

She shook her head. “I’d ruin the reputation of an entire country. And Peter⁠—”

“I can protect you from Peter.”

“No, you can’t.”

He buried her face into his body. She memorized the scent of his cologne, the way he held her. “I’m not taking the horse,” he said, his voice shaking.

She smudged her face into his sweater and mumbled, “Because then you can finally arrest me for stealing when the authorities come looking for it?” Ronja felt the vibrations of his sad chuckle against her cheek. “That’s one way to hold onto you,” he said. Fredrik released her and captured her eyes, causing fresh tears to sprout, releasing all the images she couldn’t bear to see eventually come to pass: his picture in the periodicals, the television, watching his royal wedding someday, a perfect bride at his side with her untainted soul. Fredrik stroked her hair. “Meet me at the steps on the eastern façade of det Kungliga slottet at midnight. Leave it all behind. We’ll start new. The three of us.”

She wiped her face.

“I’ll wait till dawn,” he promised.