Free Unknown by Mari Jungstedt Page B

seated for a moment, listening hard, but once again quiet had settled in. She stood up. Maybe she was imagining things. She wasn't used to these bright, bewitching nights. Wasn't used to being alone. You nitwit, she thought. You're in safe and secure Sweden. There's nothing to be scared of here.
    She pressed down on the handle and the heavy door opened with a creak.
    More rustling, but she didn't even turn around to see where the sound was coming from.

SATURDAY, JULY 3
    Morning light seeped through the thin curtains. It was very quiet. Johan was sitting in an armchair next to the window with his newborn daughter in his arms, a little bundle in the soft cotton blanket that had been wrapped around her. Her face was tiny and flushed; her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open.
    He thought she was breathing very fast—her heart was beating in her breast like a baby bird's. He held her without moving, feeling the warmth and weight of her body. He couldn't get his fill of looking at her.
    Johan didn't know how long he'd been sitting in this position, staring at the baby. His legs had fallen asleep long ago. It was incomprehensible that this little person in his arms was his daughter, that she was going to call him Pappa.
    Emma lay in bed, sleeping on her side. Her face was smooth and peaceful. She had been through so much pain only a few hours ago. He had tried to help her as best he could. He had never imagined that a birth could be so dramatic. In the middle of everything, as he held Emma's hand and the midwife issued orders and guided her through the delivery, he was suddenly seized with the enormity of the event. Emma was producing life with her body; another human being was going to come out of it and continue the cycle. That was nature's proper order. He had never felt so close to life before—and yet it was actually a fight between life and death.
    For several terrifying moments he was afraid that Emma might die. She seemed to lose consciousness, and the midwife's worried expression didn't bode well. The problem was that vaginal swelling had formed an obstruction so that the baby couldn't come out. That was why Emma wasn't supposed to push, even though she was wide open, because then the vagina swelled up even more. It was turning out to be a difficult delivery until Knutas's wife, Lina, showed up and managed to move the obstruction aside.
    After that everything went fine, and it was all over in less than a minute. The second the baby started to cry, Emma relaxed. The first thing Johan did was kiss her. At that moment he admired her more than he had ever admired anyone else.
    Johan looked down at his daughter again. Her chin quivered, and she spread out the tiny fingers of her hand like a fan, then curled them up again. He already knew that he would love her all his life, no matter what happened.

On Saturday morning, as Knutas took the turnoff to Lickershamn, he heaved a sigh of relief. A weekend at the summer house was just what he needed after spending the whole week sweating in overcrowded Visby.
    Their summer place was no more than fifteen miles from the city, yet out there he felt as if his daily life back home were far away. On the way into Lickershamn proper was an area of erosional rock remnants called rauks where he usually stopped. There were a dozen large rauks and a number of smaller ones. Some were eighteen to twenty feet high, and a number were covered with ivy, the official plant of Gotland. An informational sign posted by the county commission explained that these rauks had been formed by the Littorine Sea seven thousand years ago. Knutas was fascinated by the rauks, which looked like some sort of clumsily shaped stone sculptures. The story of their origin was quite interesting, too.
    The Gotland bedrock was largely made up of coral reefs that were created in a tropical sea four hundred million years ago. Between the reefs were layers of limestone, and when the ice that covered Gotland during the last