“Why don’t you just pay for longer and save yourself the bother?” she asks and looks like she wishes she hadn’t as soon as the question crosses her lips.

“Because that’s exactly what they want! They’re not getting a load of money for time we might not even use!”

“Oh, I don’t have the strength for this. . . .” sighs Parvaneh and holds her forehead.

She looks at her daughters.

“Will you sit here nicely with Uncle Ove while Mum goes to see how Dad is? Please?”

“Yeah, yeah,” agrees the seven-year-old grumpily.

“Yeeeees!” the three-year-old shrieks with excitement.

“What?” whispers Ove.

Parvaneh stands up.

“What do you mean, ‘with Ove’? Where do you think you’re going?” To his great consternation, the Pregnant One seems not to register the level of upset in his voice.

“You have to sit here and keep an eye on them,” she states curtly and disappears down the corridor before Ove can raise further objections.

Ove stands there staring after her. As if he is expecting her to come rushing back and cry out that she was only joking. But she doesn’t. So Ove turns to the girls. And in the next second he looks as if he’s just about to shine a desk lamp into their eyes and interrogate them on their whereabouts at the time of the murder.

“BOOK!” screams the three-year-old at once and rushes off towards the corner of the waiting room, where there’s a veritable chaos of toys, games, and picture books.

Ove nods and, having confirmed to himself that this three-year-old seems to be reasonably self-motivating, he turns his attention to the seven-year-old.

“Right, and what about you?”

“What do you mean, me?” she counters with indignation.

“Do you need food or do you have to go for a wee or anything like that?”

The child looks at him as if he just offered her a beer and a cigarette.

“I’m almost EIGHT! I can go to the bathroom MYSELF!”

Ove throws out his arms abruptly.

“Sure, sure. So bloody sorry for asking.”

“Mmm,” she snorts.

“You swored!” yells the three-year-old as she turns up again, running to and fro between Ove’s trouser legs.

He skeptically peruses this grammatically challenged little natural disaster. She looks up and her whole face smiles at him.

“Read!” she orders him in an excitable manner, holding up a book with her arms stretched out so far that she almost loses her balance.

Ove looks at the book more or less as if it just sent him a chain letter insisting that the book was really a Nigerian prince who had a “very lucrative investment opportunity” for Ove and now only needed Ove’s account number “to sort something out.”

“Read!” she demands again, climbing the bench in the waiting room with surprising agility.

Ove reluctantly sits about a yard away on the bench. The three-year-old sighs impatiently and disappears from sight, her head reappearing seconds later under his arm with her hands leaning against his knee for support and her nose pressed against the colorful pictures in the book.