Someone touched her upper arm. Softly, carefully, and completely lovingly. She cautiously turned her head. At first all she saw was a pair of glasses, which made her jump—an odd reaction given that it was her mother wearing them.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “Are you finally awake?”

“What are you doing here?” Sandra asked, dumbfounded. “Where’s Erik?”

“Erik’s with Grandpa, eating lunch in the dayroom.”

“He’s okay then?”

“He’s absolutely fine,” her mother said with a smile. “We’ve been more worried about you.”

“But why?” Sandra said impatiently. “What’s happened?”

“Somehow, you ended up with a big dose of some drug or other in your system—they’re still not sure what. But it may have been Rohypnol or something like it. You lost consciousness and they had to pump your stomach. Don’t you remember any of it?”

“I remember waking up in a different room from this one,” Sandra said hesitantly, unsure whether it was a genuine memory.

“That was the recovery room in the intensive care ward. They had you under full observation there for hours and hours. You can’t feel anything now?”

“I feel like normal, although I’ve got a sore throat.”

“That’s because of the gastric irrigation, as they call it. You’ve had a tube down your throat.”

“I began to slur my words,” Sandra remembered. “I was talking to my friend Kerstin on the phone, but she couldn’t hear what I was saying.”

“Someone called Kerstin came by this morning,” her mother said, with a strange expression on her face. “She wanted to check that you were okay. So she said. But she didn’t look . . . like she was one of your friends.”

Sandra had no response to offer to that remark for several reasons, one of which was that she had never met Kerstin.

“The important thing is that you had a visitor when you lost consciousness.”

“He was the one who . . .” Sandra began.

Then she stopped herself. She didn’t really know anything.

“He was the one who raised the alarm,” her mother said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you probably wouldn’t be alive.”

Sandra could scarcely believe her ears. Hallin? What had he done? Apart from stealing her computer, which was one of the absolute worst things that could happen to her?