The journey had finally neared its end. She hadn’t eaten since her extravagant breakfast, and felt tired. Her mobile had vibrated only once. It was Maggi, but Hege could not bring herself to talk, so she had sent a reassuring text instead.

She wanted to quit, she thought, as the subway train ascended the hill.

Everything would ease off if she just stopped skiing. The story would be forgotten in a couple of months, maybe before that, at least until the Winter Olympics started, and Hege had really always wanted to study. Maybe medicine. Or pharmacy, since chemistry had been her favourite subject at high school.

Mum would have listened and let her give up.

Dad would never go along with it.

Her phone had vibrated again.

Hege did not recognize the number. A journalist, probably, even though approaches from them had diminished drastically in the course of the past few days. They had begun to learn that she wouldn’t answer.

Not now either.

It took only a few seconds from the call ending before a text message illuminated the screen.

This is Sølve Bang calling. I realize that these days you need to know who it is. I have something urgent I need to speak to you about. Can you phone me back?

Hege had never been particularly keen on Sølve Bang. She didn’t really know why. She had read all his books and liked them. Particularly Forgotten Tracks, his first novel. All the same, there was something sleazy about him, especially the way he spoke to Maggi. He was so exclusively friendly to the almost invisible home help, but Hege was convinced this was mainly an opportunity to impress the other guests by speaking Polish. There was something servile and at the same time exaggeratedly self-assured about the man, and she had always felt slightly ill at ease in his company.

Dad liked Sølve Bang. Called him a colourful character. A renaissance man. Well versed in languages, knowledgeable and an important writer. As if Dad had any idea about that, as he never read anything other than business documents and newspapers.

Hege could not fathom what he wanted with her.

However, she called him back. He was a friend of her father’s and had delivered a beautiful speech at her mother’s funeral. Hege did not remember much about that day, but she had never forgotten that. Sølve had called her mother ‘a fairy straight from the pages of Tolkien, a gracious bearer of light and goodness’.

Hege had read the whole of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the following six months, even though she was only eleven years old and her mother had thought she ought to wait.

She phoned Sølve Bang and heard what he had to say. Gave him a blunt response, broke off the conversation and then took off at top speed. She had never run so far and so fast, and when she reached her destination, her head was in a spin.