It was silent in the house.
Marit awoke with a dull pounding at the back of her head, as if someone had tapped tiny hammers against her skull all night. A stale heaviness lingered behind her eyes, winding down into her gut until it shaped itself into a faint nausea. The light seemed harsher than usual, though it only crept carefully through the narrow slats of the blinds.
She blinked. Outside, the sun was already up.
With an unsteady hand she raked her fingers through her tousled hair. She hadn’t drunk that much, had she? A glass of wine, maybe two. Yet she felt as though her sleep had not restored her but erased her, hours swallowed whole.
Slowly she pushed herself upright. The blanket slid from her shoulders, and a scent rose into her nose. She had smelled it before, years ago in Munich, at a perfume course she had taken with her daughter Emma. This was expensive, very expensive—a blend of leather, amber, woods, spices, blossoms. Not for women like her, not for women at all. It was heavy, elegant.
She ruffled her long silver-white hair, once so golden it rivaled a field of grain. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she tried to gather herself. A brief wave of dizziness forced her to close her eyes.
She hadn’t had a man here, had she? Konrad? That odd fellow had tried to flirt with her more than once. She opened her eyes. The dizziness passed. Her gaze fell on her own sturdy legs, on the belly that settled into her lap when she sat.
If she was honest, she was ashamed at the thought of letting a man near her again. Not since then. No man in her bed, only cream cakes and coffee. A healer ought to have known better.
When Emma had moved to Berlin, married, and had Lara, Marit believed she had found a new center in that bright little star. Lara was fourteen now, no longer coming as often. But when she did, the time belonged only to the two of them. And when the whole family visited, it was a holiday Marit counted down to days in advance.
Still, she hid behind her softness, invisible to desire, convinced she no longer had any place for it. Perhaps at sixty-five she was simply too old. And now there was Sina. Sina needed her. Didn’t she?
From the bed she tugged open the blinds. She loved the view: the sweep of unspoiled fields, the quiet rhythm of waves reaching the shore.
It had been thirty years now. Udo, her husband, gone to sea. Emma only six years old.
Marit pressed a hand to her damp forehead. She could not stop the thoughts she did not want. She had been young, with a striking figure, never greedy, eating less than most, and yet the weight came. Slowly, steadily, unstoppable, like a boat sinking in harbor.
If she was honest, she had felt it early. Not the weight, but the heaviness before it. The tiredness that would not lift. The constant chill, even in high summer when others ran barefoot through the grass. Her skin had dried, her hair dulled. She had eaten less than before—an apple, a soup, a crust of bread—and still the scale betrayed her.
Of course she had known. A healer recognized the signs before any lab result could confirm it: hypothyroidism. The thyroid, small as it was, commanded the body’s fire. Without thyroxine, nothing burned. Not the pulse. Not the heart. Not the mind.
At first she had tried everything she knew—Schüßler salts, kelp, herbs. Nothing worked. The illness rolled over her like a tide, leaving her no choice but to swallow, every morning on an empty stomach, a tiny white pill.
She opened the drawer of her nightstand, took one from the blister pack, and reached for the glass of water always waiting there.
Sometimes she wondered if this inner slowing-down wasn’t a kind of protection. As if her body refused to keep running in a world that no longer allowed pauses.
Her husband Udo barely looked at her anymore, and when he did, it was only in passing. Any hope of a touch had long vanished. One day he simply stopped coming home. Instead, a letter arrived, delivered by the postman, sent from a lawyer in Denmark. Udo had gone back to his homeland. He wanted a divorce. There was nothing sweeter than cake to fill the void, and with it came the weight she could not stop.
She rose and gave a small laugh at her own thoughts. “Over. All of it’s over.”
Her mind wandered back to Konrad as she slid her feet into her house shoes. Konrad, with his little goatee, those small blue-gray eyes framed by creases, and the lean figure he had somehow managed to keep.
She pushed him from her thoughts, pushed the scent of men’s cologne from her room, and gave it no further meaning. There were more important things.
Dragging herself into the morning, she felt every step as though she were moving through water. What was wrong with her? Coffee, she needed coffee.
The kitchen was a mess. Plates smeared with sauce, wineglasses half-full of flat liquid, napkins crumpled on a platter alongside bits of fat and gristle. In the sink, cutlery and breadcrumbs from yesterday’s barbecue.
She set water to boil, reached for the porcelain filter, and packed it with coffee grounds. As the hot water dripped through, she tried to steady herself.
The old battery-run kitchen clock, once her mother’s, hung over the corner bench. Her eyes went wide. “Half past nine!” she exclaimed aloud. When was the last time she had slept this late? It had to be years.
Sina.
Where was Sina?
Marit raised her voice as she set the porcelain pot aside.
“Sina! I’m making us coffee! I overslept, I’m sorry! Shall we have breakfast outside?”
No answer.
She shuffled down the hallway to the guest room. The bed was untouched, the blanket lying smooth as the day before. Had Sina slept outside on the garden lounger? Marit scolded herself. Sina was so ill, and nights could turn cold and damp. “I’m such a scatterbrain.” Please, let nothing have happened.
The patio door stood open. A warm breeze drifted through the living room, carrying the scent of coffee into the garden as though trying to wake Sina. Marit followed it outside.
“Sina? Sleepyhead?”
Nothing.
Oh God, oh God, oh God. Marit’s heart raced. Bracing for the worst, she stepped to the lounger.
It was empty. The pillow and blanket had slipped to the ground, carelessly, as if someone had left in haste.
A cold knot tightened in her stomach. Her gaze shifted to the bathroom window. Closed. Silent. The terrace tiles below gleamed clean and dry in the morning sun.
She stepped into the garden. Her throat and mouth turned dry, and swallowing became difficult.
Sina had never gone off on her own. Not without a word. Not without a jacket or a blanket. And certainly not in her condition.
An old terror rose up inside her, the moment when Emma, fifteen years old, had run away because her mother had refused to accept that vile boyfriend. Marit remembered the panic of searching, the way time had failed her, the gnawing, unhealable sense of not having done enough until they finally found Emma, sitting on a weathered tree trunk by the chalk cliffs, weeping.
She dressed quickly and rushed out of the house, across the garden, down the narrow side street, into the woods behind the cemetery. Her eyes swept across old stones, the weathered wooden cross, the grave where they had found Sina alongside the dead Faris.
Nothing.
Marit spun in circles, calling her name, peering through branches and thickets. She jumped onto her bicycle, pedaled down to the beach, and searched the shoreline.
A man playing ball with a young boy called out to her. “Can I help you? Did you lose something?”
Yes. I fear I’ve lost a life, she thought, but shook her head silently and paid him no mind.
She stopped for a moment, scanning left and right along the beach strewn with seaweed.
What if she had gone into the water? She was so unhappy in this body, in this time, in this world. She missed her husband. She missed her daughter.
What if it had all become too much? What if she had believed no one truly understood her?
And for the very first time, the full weight of it struck Marit. What had happened here. What was real. A reality she would have dismissed as madness only a week ago.
She gazed far out over the sea. In the distance, a container ship crept across the horizon. How could anyone do this to a human being? How could they, without consent, simply pull someone back from the dead? How was any of it possible? And how many “Sinas” were there?
And where was Sina now?
Fear gripped her body like a vise, a pressure on chest and throat, hot and icy all at once. Her fingers trembled as she fumbled her phone from her pocket. Her voice was pitched too high when she spoke:
“Katja? Sven? …Sina is gone!”