Betrayal by Lilja Sigurdardottir

Author:Lilja Sigurdardottir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

57

Marita rubbed oil into the frozen leg of lamb and salted it generously. Her mother had always roasted a joint of lamb from frozen, but Jónatan had showed Marita how to let it defrost over two or three days in the fridge and a whole day at room temperature on the kitchen worktop before it went into the oven.

‘In this case, it doesn’t need to be rock hard before we slip it in,’ he had said, and they had laughed and giggled, and then he had kissed her and pinched her bottom, and she had been happy.

Now she felt slightly sick at the memory. This wretched case hanging over them wasn’t just poisoning the present, but all their memories as well; all the fun, and everything they had done together, was now veiled in pain and disappointment that she couldn’t be sure would ever be lifted. Everything had been ruined, you could say. The case had destroyed their life together – past, present and future.

Marita sprinkled paprika and curry powder over the joint and worked the red and yellow powder together with her hands until the spices had blended into an orange covering and her fingers were left numb by the frozen meat. Jónatan would just have to make do with a leg of lamb that had been roasted from frozen when he came home that night for a break between a round of shifts. She didn’t trust herself to go to the shop to buy something else for dinner. She’d just make a meal from what there was in the house.

She poured herself coffee from the flask. These days she was making a full flask of coffee in the mornings just for herself, because she was always getting herself cups and leaving them here and there around the house, and generally didn’t come across them again until the coffee was cold. She didn’t seem able to finish anything she started. She was halfway through folding the washing, so that there was a stack of folded clothes next to a pile of clothes just from the dryer, and the vacuum cleaner was in the corridor between the bedrooms because she didn’t have the energy to hoover more than one room at a time.

She sat at the computer and opened Facebook. There was a message from her mother and a couple of pictures of Klemmi. She missed him so much that her heart felt fit to burst when she saw the boy’s apple cheeks and joyful smile. She replied with a couple of lines of thanks. She knew there was no need for them, as her mother was delighted to have the lad, but somehow it assuaged her guilt at sending him away. She opened her gallery to see more pictures of Klemmi. He was changing so fast that she could practically see him grow as she looked through the last year’s worth of pictures. Her eyes locked on to a picture of Jónatan with the boys and she clicked to open it.

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