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Linnea’s body spasmed. “Why do you do that?” she implored. “Stop fighting with him.”

Taylor went to her, meeting at eye level. “He only shows up to care now that you’re dying?”

She shook her head, touching his dark blond facial scruff. It blended with the tan skin he inherited from Everett. “Sometimes it takes dying to wake people up. Trust me. Give him a chance. Listen, I have something I need to confess.”

He nodded to the case with the Dala horse inside. “Does it have to do with Everett’s cloak and dagger act?” He plucked a Kleenex from the metallic gold tissue box on the coffee table. Linnea accepted it, smudging her tears and nose. “In my hometown, Mora, there’s a giant statue of a Dala horse,” she rambled. “That particular horse . . . ” Her voice waffled. “Don’t get upset, you have to hear me out.” She chose her next words carefully. “Ulla Bergstrom gave me that horse, and your father sold it to a private collector thirty years ago⁠—”

“Wait. Whoa. Ulla Bergstrom? Are you talking about Ulla Berglund?” Taylor straightened to a rigid posture, and his breath hitched.

“Well, she had at least three different last names.”

“We’re talking about the same Ulla that hates me, hates us?” His face drained.

“Yes.”

He clenched his forehead with a hand.

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“Keep going,” he said in a controlled voice.

She rubbed her chest. “I told you that Ulla was unstable and made up all sorts of lies, but she wasn’t lying,” she cried. “I was the liar. She wanted you and Analise as far apart from one another because I was the horrible one, and it was my fault Ronja died.”

Taylor gaped at her, and she watched his mind hurl back to that awful December night in 2005. “Ronja . . . her mother? What Ulla said was true?”

“I’m trying to make things right for Ulla, and maybe for you, too. I have to find her and return that horse. I can’t bring Ronja back, but Ulla was always desperate to know her father. The horse might have belonged to him.”

“Her father?”

“Peter Johansson. Do you remember when we went to see him?”

“He’s her dad?”

“No, no, unless he was lying, but look, none of what your dad and I discovered matters if I don’t find Ulla.”

His drowned pain resurfaced, and his voice quailed. “You know where she is?”

She braced herself for his response when she confessed, “I think I’ve always known.”

Taylor’s restraint collapsed, and he backed away with gritted teeth as if caging a myriad of curses. “You think so? For how long! You knew how badly I needed to find her.”

Linnea couldn’t bear this. She fixated on a framed picture on the mantel. The two of them, from twelve years ago, when Taylor won the state high school soccer championship as a senior. Two months before Analise, Ulla’s daughter, was ripped from his arms. That elusive light radiating from his photographed smile, she knew it wasn’t from winning. Only moments before it was taken, she’d spied him kissing Analise and not being very discreet about it. Had he wanted her to confront him about his forbidden love, to say something? Say something . . . say something, Linnea. “I’m sorry.” Such a flimsy word—sorry—if it had no legs to move, to repair. Linnea accepted Taylor’s accusatory eyes.

“If you find Ulla,” he said, “she’ll know where Isa is.”

Isa. His name for Analise. “I hope so,” Linnea replied, “but I’m scared. There must be a reason she never contacted you.”

“You think one day goes by where I don’t ask myself that?”

Linnea looked to the ceiling, swallowing the tears.

Taylor released a tired curse. “Tell me what you did, Mom.”

Linnea shredded the Kleenex in her hand. “I’ll explain everything on the way to Mora.”

“Mora?”

“That’s where Ulla has to be.”