And then when he had left to go back to work, the road had been as slippery as an ice rink. He had driven carefully, just as he usually did—even more carefully than usual in fact, precisely because he knew there might be people out on the roads who were less practised drivers using worse tires. This had turned out to be true sooner rather than later. A minute or so after that he had encountered a madman driving straight towards him, who—in an insane attempt to avoid a head-on collision—had put his foot on the brakes, skidding on his worn-out tires. You hardly needed a Nobel Prize to predict that. And he had plunged straight over the edge into the ravine.

“I saw the wreck and knew the driver was dead,” Jan had said, by way of excuse. “Was I meant to climb down into the ravine to check something I already knew?”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” Gunilla had agreed.

“I should have called emergency services. Anonymously, if nothing else.”

“Of course you should have, but he would have died anyway.”

“He wouldn’t have spent hours there suffering before he did,” Jan had noted unhappily.

“I doubt he suffered, sweetheart. He probably lost consciousness on impact.”

Jan had been distraught, but Gunilla had stroked his back and relieved him of his burden of guilt. She appreciated his honesty, and was big enough to accept that people—even Jan—were rarely infallible.

And it had all settled down, Jan noted as he lumbered forward in the rain. The agitation had levelled out, thanks to the rock in his life that was Gunilla. Since that occasion she had never mentioned one word about the trying experience that he—both of them really—had been through. No stray words, no insidious looks, no bitter reproach, and no self-pity. She had taken him for the person that he was, forgiven him and moved on.

For four long years. Until this spring when that girl—Sandra—had turned up out of nowhere and stirred up old emotions. Called Jan a “rapist” and claimed that he was the father of her child. A child he would never get to meet—whom he truly had no desire to meet—but that she still wanted him to pay child support for. She had threatened to involve the authorities and the police, which he regarded as a veiled threat to file a report about the rape. For what it was worth, he strongly doubted she would be able to get over the finishing line with that, given the time that had passed, but he really did not want to draw the police’s attention to where he had been at the time of that confounded car accident.