Page 48 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
His blush has only just subsided from last time and now here it is again. But deeper this time.
“Well, firstly, a lot of my knowledge is supposition. When I saw she was pregnant and she wanted me to go, she was quite blunt about my role being over. I don’t have more detail to tell you. I’ve been angry about it, but that gets me nowhere. Lajla isn’t going to communicate with me if I’m angry, so I’ve let that go.”
Anna is confused by this concept. She’s been angry for over a year and a half and simply letting it go has never been on her option menu.
“So, I really didn’t have much to tell you. But more than that, and my aforementioned bruised ego, I suppose I didn’t want you to think badly of Lajla. Or Nikoline for that matter. Some people would be judgey of both.”
This nearly blows Anna’s mind. “So, let me get this straight. Even after Lajla did what she did and then won’t speak to you, you’re worried about putting her in a bad light?” Anna would have painted Carl as Beelzebub had she had anyone to talk to about him. Had Maiken not been involved, they would have eviscerated his reputation and thrown it all to the wolves. With delight.
He gives her a flat smile. “Pretty much. I don’t gain anything by doing otherwise.”
Well, you’re missing out on someSchadenfreudethere, Anna thinks, but keeps it to herself.
The sails of her anger are now positively drooping.
Heisa decent guy. Exactly the guy she told Lajla he was. Her arms seem to uncross themselves and drop to her lap.
“Exactly how do you see this resolving itself, Jamie?” she asks, tired. Being angry exhausts her. Facing conflict even more so.
“I don’t know, Anna. Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you. I think I justified it as being the truth, just the edited truth. I should have given you more info so you could have made an informed decision. I think the kiss had messed with my brain.”
I know, right?!Anna thinks. It isn’t just her who’s frazzled by them.
She tries to keep a plain face in response to his small smile, but it’s hard.
Sensing he’s still not forgiven, Jamie lays it all out there. “Can you imagine, Anna, what’s it’s like to find out you have a kid you didn’t know about? I’ve missed her growing in the womb, I missed her birth, and her growing to be a toddler and all the firsts. I… I didn’t even know her name until you just said it. Can you imagine being denied getting to know your child, and them you? I always wanted to know my mother better than I did, warts and all. She’s part of who I am and without her I grew up feeling there was a large part of my puzzle missing. I don’t want that for Nikoline. If she doesn’t like me when she’s older, she can choose not to see me. Fair enough. But as a little kid, she has a right to know her dad, too, don’t you think? Especially as I want to know her. One day she’ll ask about me, and it breaks my heart to think she might believe I didn’t want to know her. Because I do. Very much. But until Lajla will talk to me, I can’t plead my case. I’m stuck. And I saw a chanceto maybe loosen a knot there. You gave me a little in and I took it.” He holds his hands out, again the palms-up expression, and Anna sees this for what it is; an ideas-man who is out of good ideas and so followed a duff one.
“I get it,” she finally says. “I do.” She remembers asking Ida about her not having a dad when other children mostly did. Ida had simply said they didn’t need one, that they had Morfar, which had satisfied young Anna. She hadn’t missed something she’d never had and Morfar had definitely been enough.
“Thank you,” Jamie says quietly.
“Please don’t lie to me again,” Anna adds, “even by omission. I have some trust issues since Carl.”
“Of course.” He gives her a nod and they seem to have reached an accord. “Can I ask you what happened with Lajla?”
Anna thinks back to the end of their conversation. “Well, I’d already said you were a good guy and how we adored each other, so I chose not to backtrack on that. I don’t know what she’ll think, but I gave you a good reference. And after she told me how she’d duped you, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“Because of the ick,” he says, deadpan.
“Absolutely because of the ick.”
“Thank you,” he says again in a tone of blended gratitude and contrition. This is a side of Jamie she hasn’t seen before. The confounded and the resigned. For a man who has ideas, who shakes things up and makes things happen, who seeks to fix things, she can see the millstone around his neck that this is for him. What’s more, she feels a deep-seated desire to help him.
ChapterTwenty-Two
In spite of the city’s lights, up from the top of Rundetårnet, Jamie and Anna are gazing at the stars.
Regardless of the eggshelly way they are navigating each other around the house, he was very fast in the uptake for this. All signs now suggest Jamie is someone who constantly says yes to life, which makes more sense to her now she knows his backstory.
Having scaled the spiral walkway to the top– designed for a king who preferred not to get out of his carriage– they’ve been given a tour of the small observatory and each had a look to see the planets visible tonight.
“I’ve been here many times,” says Anna, “but never in with the actual telescope.” And she’d never known her Venus from her Mercury. Nor her Saturn or Jupiter, for that matter.
“And how did we get these tickets?”
“Work,” says Anna. “Tomorrow I get to pay with words.”
“Well, I’m grateful,” Jamie says, stepping back out of the observatory– Europe’s oldest functioning observatory, no less– and onto the observation deck.
