The silence that follows is so thick you could split it with an ax. Jimmy does not look up. And Ove doesn’t say anything. He goes inside the trash room. Comes out. Goes into the bicycle shed. Comes out. The penny seems to have dropped. Jimmy’s last words hang like a veil over his movements and an unfathomable anger builds up inside Ove, picking up speed like a tornado inside his chest. He tugs at doors with increasing violence. Kicks the thresholds. And when Jimmy in the end mumbles something about, “Now it’s all screwed, man, now they’ll put Rune in a home, you know,” Ove slams a door so hard that the entire trash room shakes. He stands in silence with his back to them, panting more and more heavily.

“Are you . . . okay?” asks Mirsad.

Ove turns and points with anything but controlled fury at Jimmy.

“Was that how she put it? She didn’t want to ask for Sonja’s help because we had ‘enough troubles of our own’?”

Jimmy nods anxiously. Ove stares down at the snow, his chest heaving under his jacket. He thinks about how Sonja would have taken it if she’d found out. If she’d known that her best friend had not asked for her help because Sonja had “enough problems.” She would have been heartbroken.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do. And Ove had probably known all along what he had to do, whom he had to help before he could die. But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

Time to appeal.

Again Ove turns to Jimmy with a grim expression.

“Two years?”

Jimmy nods. Ove clears his throat. For the first time he looks unsure.

“I thought she’d just started. I thought I . . . had more time,” he mumbles.

Jimmy looks as if he’s trying to figure out who Ove is talking to. Ove looks up.

“And they’re coming to get Rune now? Seriously? No bureaucratic rot and appeals and all that shit. You’re SURE about this?”

Jimmy nods again. He opens his mouth to say something, but Ove has already started moving off. He makes off between the houses with the movements of a man about to take his revenge for a deadly injustice in a Western. Turns off at the house at the end of the road, where the trailer and the white Škoda are still parked, banging at the door with such force that it’s difficult to tell whether it will open before he reduces it to wood chips. Anita opens, in shock. Ove steps right into her hall.

“Have you got the papers from the authorities here?”

“Yes, but I tho—”

“Give them to me!”