She had almost finished Elena Ferrante’s fourth novel.

It was always Maggi who packed for her. Packed and unpacked her travel bag. Maggi washed the clothes as well. The home help had been with them since Hege’s mother had died, and on the whole attended to most of the chores she and her father found tedious. Changing the bedclothes. Cleaning. Tidying. Preparing food. Following strict instructions, certainly; a dietician, commissioned by her father, had put together an all-year diet Hege stuck to as if her life depended on it.

And it did, of course, in a sense.

It was a matter of optimizing the possibility of winning, as her father said.

Since Hege had collapsed into bed when she came home on Sunday evening, and then woke to the news that she had failed a drugs test, she had not noticed that her bag had been emptied, the contents washed and everything put back in place. In the following days, Maggi had sneaked around like a kind, but deferential and almost invisible, ghost.

Hege ran down the stairs, taking three steps at a time. She dashed into her own room and flung open the double doors of her wardrobe. The light came on automatically. On one side of the seven square metres of storage hung her training gear. It was impossible to say if anything was missing, but the bag was empty and in the right place on the floor beside the bathroom door. She let her fingers slide across the row of hanging clothes. Stopped and tugged at a sleeve. She had worn that jacket on Sunday.

For a moment she stood deep in thought.

There were the pull-on trousers she had packed at the bottom of the bag; the zip was faulty and needed to be fixed.

Everything was here. Maggi had done her job, as Maggi always did whatever she had to. The big toiletry bag, with extra room for her carefully measured asthma medications, should be placed in the top drawer under the bathroom basin. She only used it when travelling. It contained everything she needed, and lest she forget anything on a trip, she had a double set of everything. Hege opened the door into her own bathroom and pulled out the drawer. The toiletry bag was where it should be. She picked it up, placed it on the counter beside the basin and opened it.

Deodorant. Approved by the national team’s doctor. Make-up. Approved by the national team’s doctor. Toothpaste, hairbrush in a plastic bag, mint dental floss. The perfume her father had given her at Christmas, examined and approved by all the expertise with which her father always surrounded himself. Three inhalers. A packet of Paracet, unopened.

She stacked the items one on top of the other in the wash-hand basin. The toiletry bag was soon empty.