It wasn’t as bad as he had feared, and it was really time for him to go to bed now. But something kept him up. Where exactly was this going? Who were all these people that the reader got to follow? And what was it about this story that captured his colleagues to the extent that they couldn’t stop talking about it?

So he downloaded more issues of the newspaper and read more chapters. The person who seemed a bit like him was no longer part of the plot, but it had to be assumed that it was he who had died in the crash. Instead, a lot of it was about some alky and her friends. Jan was truly sorry about the outcasts of society and their difficult situation, but he didn’t know whether he was up to reading a whole book about their welfare.

So he brought his reading project to a close for the day, and, in Gunilla’s absence, he spread out in their double bed.

55. Sandra

55

Sandra

ON TUESDAY, the fourth day after Erik’s disappearance, Sandra was so hyped up that she struggled to sit still. Her body protested—it needed to rest when it was awake, and above all else it needed to sleep at night. But she knew that if she stopped this work, if she allowed herself to sleep, she wouldn’t be able to get up again. In that case she might as well lie down in bed and await the final news, and that would be akin to giving up.

She thought about Kerstin, who had also had to wait four days for something that would later turn out to be news of a death. Those days must have been unbearably long and comfortless, and Kerstin had been completely alone. Like Jeanette in a way, abandoned by the one she had otherwise shared her troubled times with. She had waited for days and weeks, experienced loving and longing, which then transformed into hatred; she had felt her body and soul breaking down, before finding out more than four years later that everything she had thought and felt had been wrong.

At least Sandra was surrounded by people who loved and cared for her, even if each and every one of them had their own suffering to contend with.

After having spent the best part of the night writing, she had to get some exercise and breathe some fresh air. It was raining again, but that didn’t matter—the gloomy weather reflected her state of mind. Everything had gone to hell, and she only had herself to blame. The knowledge that it was her own stupid ideas and conclusion, her own naive approach that had put them all in this situation was a dreadful thing to live with.