Correct

Realizing that he was currently in his former bedroom on top of finding out the chess set's true nature resulted in the "to sleep" part of crying to vanish. His sobs, which he failed to keep silent, woke up Lalli. Fortunately getting to the part where the bedroom used to be his was enough for, Lalli to bring him to a nearby guest room. The change of rooms helped a little, but it still took a while to calm down. Strangely enough, Lalli didn't put any further effort into making him stop crying. He simply silently stayed in the room with him. After a while, Emil wasn't entirely sure Lalli hadn't fallen back asleep. This, strangely enough, made him feel free to process his emotional turmoil at his own pace. He ended up getting a few hours of sleep after all. By the time he woke up, the children had already left for school, Lalli had gone to the Solberg home to warn that he would be late for work and Emil wasn't allowed to go there before having some breakfast in Sigrun's company. While he was eating, Lalli came into the room and confirmed what he had come to suspect the previous night: that Helena knew he might take the implications of the chess set's fate badly and had asked Lalli to keep the secret as far as he could manage. Lalli explained that since then, he had figured out that his ability to keep that secret would depend on the extent to which Emil would be able to play with the chess set without realizing what it was. From his point of view, simply never playing chess with him or always arranging to do something else were more trouble than it was worth and ran the risk of being too conspicuous anyway. He had hence decided to just use the set the first time the opportunity would naturally show up and see what happened. Lalli knew what most chess sets looked like and sometimes whittled to stave off boredom, so he had an idea of how much work the human and troll shaped chess pieces would have taken. In addition, Lalli had grown up with little enough money and space to keep personal possessions that in his mind, an expensive present had to be either – at least potentially – useful to the recipient or something that they actually wanted. Those factors, between them, greatly reduced the number of possible reasons for which Göte could have such a nice chess set among his pawned items in the first place. Lalli had also decided that if Emil was going to discover the item's nature, he should do it himself at his own pace rather than have someone tell him about it while he wasn't expecting it.

When Emil got to work, it turned that he could rest until the beginning of the lunch preparations, so he went to ask Helena about the chess set and convey Lalli's message according to which she could tell Emil the secret she was keeping for Lalli. Lalli's logic in that request had been that if Emil was aware of the secret he was keeping for Helena, Emil should also be aware of the secret Helena was keeping for him. The secret Helena had been keeping for Lalli hardly felt like one. Lalli approaching him after having shown clear signs of assuming that he was a worse person than he actually was had happened quite fast, especially considering what Stefan had told him right after that conversation with Sigrun at the Lodge. All Helena had done was reveal the precise reason behind Lalli's change in attitude. Helena also admitted to have been testing how Lalli would manage the secret to an extent, as both the men Lalli had approached by that point were people Helena considered good friends.
-I've done plenty of talking, considering the mood in which you must be right now. Anything you want to tell me or get off your chest?
Emil thought, but anything that came to mind seemed to promptly repurpose itself towards filling logical gaps in a set of words he had been meaning to tell Lalli, but had been holding off because it had so far sounded like and random ramble even to him. Soon enough, he became sure anything he had to tell Helena would only be up for consideration by his mind only once he spoke his current thoughts to Lalli. If he left now, he could do just that and be back in time to help with lunch.

Luckily, Lalli was outside, so he didn't have to explain the reason of his presence to any other members of the household. Lalli, quite legitimately, asked him why he was back so quickly. Emil was more than glad to oblige with an answer:
-After the party, I wasn't sure how I would be able to convince you I had reasons to date you other than the fact that you live here, so Helena suggested that I find a reason specific to you. I think I just figured out what it was. It always feels like that people are either making an extra effort to be nice to me because they feel bad about what happened or meaner than necessary to make sure I understand that I'm no longer a wealthy family's only child. You… even though you seem to expect me to hurt your family somehow at some point, your reaction to the way I managed the children splitting up so Håkan could go to the river is the only one that really made sense to me.
Emil didn't expect Lalli's answer:
-Are you making an extra effort to be nice right now? I usually get yelled at for scaring the kid if I tell them a troll will eat them to convince them to not go near the river while it's raining.
-I was actually talking about the advice you gave me during the date that followed it. Though I also had a little talk with the kids to see what sort of behavior they considered to deserve scolding and Håkan mentioned what you told him after catching him. In his eyes, you and Helena were the only two who explained why he couldn't go near the river in a way he could understand. And as helpful as the other people nearby were when I was only able to find Sune and Göte insisted on lecturing me instead of letting me look for the other two, you gave me somewhat of an idea of what I was supposed to do when everyone else only told me to watch the children better next time.
-I gave you that advice because you asked me for it and I didn't see bad things that you could do with what I told you.
-I'm still happy I got it. I'll think of other stuff while I'm helping with lunch. Goodbye. Oh, I almost forgot: yes, Helena told me everything and yes, I still like you and want to try to make it work. Goodbye again.
He ran back to the house.

xxxx

By the time Stefan and Leif were ready to travel, yet another coincidence had revealed itself: Emil's uncle was also in the town to which they were going. Advantage was taken of this to ferry a few items that Emil wanted to either show or give his uncle, but hadn't yet because he had meant to send them back with the children whenever they would leave. As the items added up, Lalli couldn't help but make sure that taking them all was necessary. One of them was a fairly thick book he remembered seeing in Emil's room on the night on which he had slept in it: it turned out to be a ledger of the investments that had ended with Emil's family in too much debt to continue them. Making Emil justify each item allowed just enough of them to be left behind for the bag he had planned for them to be carriable alongside his own luggage. Isak's cart only had so much space in it and priority had been given to the luggage of those who were going to stay in their destination the longest.

Between the injuries and the preference for a relatively discrete departure, the cart was waiting for Lalli at the clinic, where both Stefan and Leif had been transferred at some point. When he got to the cart, Stefan and Leif were already inside it, while Milla and Isak were loading it with the help of a man Lalli vaguely remembered seeing around town but otherwise knew nothing about. The unknown man introduced himself by pronouncing his name a little fast for Lalli to catch it and explained that he was one of the few people in town Göte couldn't keep from reclaiming Leif's possessions. Lalli was seeing Leif wearing a pair of eyeglasses for the first time; he had no idea the young man needed them. Leif had been hiding under the covers in the brothel and silently lying in a nearby bed in the clinic, which had so far made it easy for Lalli to do some mix of not bothering him and ignoring him. This time, he had a question for him, so he had no choice:
-Why are you wearing glasses?
Leif opened his mouth, then closed it again without making a sound. Stefan spoke instead:
-He's been having trouble speaking when it's not to me. If someone else in the room, the best I can get is a whisper meant only for me. For the glasses, trouble seeing far away objects runs in his family and it was already starting to kick in back when Göte took him in. It got gradually worse and nobody noticed it had gotten bad enough to require glasses before we were taken to the clinic.
Lalli remembered something he had noticed earlier:
-His brother has eyeglasses also.
Leif briefly turned his head in Lalli's direction, but Stefan was the one who spoke:
-So he came to you also. What happened?
-I pushed him and ran away the first time. The second time, I was on the way to the house, so I ran inside and talked to him from the window. I told him I wasn't telling him where you are going and the old man told him to leave.
Stefan smiled:
-Looks like your head of household has your back. This town may have actually become even safer for those who can't last long in some of the villages than before.
Isak clapped his hands:
-Okay everyone, time to go. We have the better part of a day's drive ahead of us.
Lalli hopped into the cart and realized something as it was starting to move away from the clinic:
-We are going to the place Emil's cousins were sent away from. We found them right after story time.
Stefan was silent for a few moments before answering:
-It's not rare for people who don't know the area to start the trip much later in the day and expect to make it on time. There's an Inn that was allegedly initially built just because of how often it happened. The children probably overnighted there before getting here sometime in the morning. If that's the case, I hope their parents properly planned for it. By the way, I've been a little curious as to how Emil has been handling things. I've only seen them at story time the past few weeks and I know I tend to see most children in town in circumstances where I'm the one focusing their attention.
-I saw him realize that the children were supposed to be going to school a little after we decided to go on a break. When I sold the raffle tickets for Leif, he got some for the children. The two times he came for a date, Mikkel was watching the children. During the first one, he asked me if I had any advice for taking care of them. On the second date, I told him I didn't like it when I saw him yell at someone in the store about money and he said he needs the money to be able to do fun things with the children. I also went to bring him cake after you said we may not be able to get back together and he noticed I was sad. I ended up staying long enough to need to sleep in his room. The children were with us for breakfast and he told them why I was in the house without making anything up.
Lalli was a little bemused by the part of what he had just said on which Stefan decided to focus:
-Did anything you want to tell me about happen that night you went to see Emil?
-We just ate cake in his room, I talked a lot and at some point, he told me it was late and we should go to bed. He was right, so I slept under his bed. He gave me a blanket and a pillow.
-Sorry if that question came out of nowhere, but the second thing I'm worried about after how he's treating the children is how he's treating you. I'm guessing you're courting him first because you ran out of other ideas to silence the part of your mind that is still considering him a potential partner, but part of me is wondering if he may somehow still turn out to be the right person for you.
-Is there anything I should worry about in what I've already told you?
-You've said nothing so far that would contradict him being a genuinely nice man with perfectly human flaws, some of which make sense in regards to what he has gone through in the past. But nothing that would contradict it all being an act, either. I think we are both aware of the problem with disproving the latter possibility. Leif, in case, you're wondering, I'm talking about the fact that any proof that one is not faking their personality will be part of the act if there is, indeed, one.
Lalli had no idea when such explanations were supposed to move from being genuinely helpful to treating the person as if they were an idiot – often needing explanations that would make others feel like they were being treated like an idiot didn't help – but he appreciated that Stefan acknowledged that Leif might be paying attention to the conversation even if he wasn't participating. He had already asked Leif about his glasses upon his arrival, but would not talking to him for the rest of the trip be rude or respecting the fact that he currently didn't want to speak to anybody besides Stefan? He didn't get to think much about it, as Isak spoke from the driver's seat:
-Hey, heads up. We are about to cross the bridge some of you may have complicated feelings about. Giving a warning both for those who might want a good look at it and those who might want to close their eyes. I need to pay attention to the road and horses, so I'll never know who is doing what.
Lalli had already spent the time he needed near that bridge and Isak's approach to Stefan and Leif's potential reactions sounded like a good one. He shifted positions as to be on the lookout all while turning his back to Stefan and Leif. The crossing of the bridge itself was uneventful, but Lalli heard a very muffled voice just as the back of the cart was leaving the bridge:
-I could have just run to the road… why did I jump… why did I ruin everything for everyone?
Lalli couldn't help but let out the words that came to his mind:
-You didn't jump just now. You could have at least tried if you wanted to. Do you think you can continue doing that? At least today?
Lalli turned his head back just in time to see Leif briefly nod.
-Good enough.
Leif started sobbing, and soon another set of sobs, that weren't Lalli's, joined them.