There was no way he was going to be like his father, who caved in to every weakness, whether that was food, drink, or the force of his own temper.

64

Marita couldn’t sleep. There was a hard knot in her belly that she couldn’t get rid of, even though she had taken long, slow breaths and spent a whole hour in a hot bath before going to bed. Now that Jónatan had been away so much, it was strange to have him 155there by her side in bed, as if she had become accustomed to his absence even though she had missed him.

She rolled onto her side and draped an arm over him. He slept soundly. She had always envied him this. He seemed to be able to fall asleep anywhere and at any time, almost like a child. There was something so innocent about how he could stretch out on the sofa or in an armchair and doze off, as if the whole world stood guard over his security and his rest. Marita could never sleep among strangers as Jónatan could, neither in an aeroplane nor in her own living room when they all gathered at Christmas. Now she was unable to sleep in her own bed in the middle of the night.

The knot in her belly twitched with its own rhythm, as if it had its own heartbeat that pumped regular doses of fear into her veins. She lay pressed against Jónatan’s back and breathed in the warm scent of him. He was a big man, so she had always felt small and feminine next to him, even though she was quite tall and had put on a few kilos after Klemmi’s birth. She had always seen him as some kind of protector. He was the big, strong man, the cop who protected her from anything evil, the foundation of her security. But all that had changed, and perhaps that was the deepest damage that had been done as she no longer had that sense of security that he had provided. This wasn’t because she was in doubt about his innocence; far from it. Of course he hadn’t raped that girl. Her doubts were about his judgement and the fact that he had placed the family’s security in jeopardy. What had he been thinking, giving beer to a kid of fifteen? He would never have given Kiddi booze, that was for sure, and he and Katrín Eva were the same age – although girls tended to be more mature at that age. And why hadn’t he taken more care, knowing that Katrín Eva had a crush on him? According to what Kiddi had said yesterday, Jónatan was very much aware of this, but had still exchanged flirty messages with her on Facebook, asking if she thought he was better looking than his sons. For a grown man, this had to be a complete failure of judgement. 156

Marita turned over, so they lay back to back, and continued to take deep, slow, long breaths all the way down to her core. She was about to fall asleep when doubt pounced on her again, like a predator from the shadows, taking her by surprise with a stab of pain. There was something she had seen in the newspaper, in the interview with Rósa that hadn’t registered on her consciousness until now. In the interview, Rósa said that after Jónatan had raped her daughter, he had rolled onto his back and thanked her, just as if she had given him something of her own free will.