TUVA NERVOUSLY taps her fingers on the counter. She is still at work. At the café in Hornstull, even though she should have left hours ago. A customer who just settled in the corner looks at her annoyed, and she returns the gaze with a murderous look. She looks at him well so she never forgets him and thinks that next time she won’t draw a heart on his cappuccino. She will probably make him a raised middle finger instead. She gets irritated when he is late. And now he is late, really. She unconsciously tucks her blonde hair behind her ears. She should have picked up Linus from daycare half an hour ago. She is immune to the sour faces of the daycare teachers; she has seen them so many times that they no longer evoke any feeling in her. But her three-year-old son will be upset. And Tuva is not the kind of person who makes children unhappy. Especially Linus. She doesn’t even know how many times she has said she would die for him. But in reality, not everything is that easy. Only God knows how hard she tries. She tries very hard. She takes off her apron, opens the storage room door, and throws it into the overflowing laundry basket. She can’t leave before the person in charge of the next shift arrives. But where the hell is he?
Martin, Linus’s father, disappeared the day his son was born. Tuva did not blame him for that, since she herself called an ambulance to take her urgently to the hospital two weeks earlier than the scheduled delivery date. However, she found it strange that Martin did not visit her after she gave birth, during the days she stayed in the hospital. The delivery had complications. They gave her so many medications that she doesn’t remember them all; she remembers a little the doctors who cared for her and the baby and told her that everything would be fine. That’s what Martin wrote to her in the short messages he sent to her phone while she was in the hospital. He would come to see her, he wrote, but first he had to fix some things. The hospital days were blurry, but she remembers with great clarity the empty apartment that awaited her when she returned home with Linus. While she was in labor and giving life to their child, Martin had packed his things from the apartment and disappeared.