A third possibility was obviously to stick his head in the sand and hope the threat went away by itself. He had tried that tactic the last time someone had tried to extort money from him four years ago, and it had succeeded.

There was naturally another scenario—even if Sandra dismissed it as unrealistic. He could always try to scare the so-called gold digger into silence.

THE MORNING AFTER, when Erik and Sandra were going out to the car, she discovered something that had to be a bouquet of flowers dropped on the floor outside the front door. They weren’t wrapped in the usual paper from a florist’s but were in newspaper.

She let Erik wait outside while she picked off the tape, took out the flowers from their original wrapping, and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. They were beautiful, but there was no card—nothing to reveal where they had come from.

Time was scarce at this hour in the morning, so Sandra didn’t give it another thought; she simply dropped off Erik at kindergarten before heading to work. In the evening they had dinner at her parents’ and it was only when she got home and had put Erik to bed that she took the time to think about the flowers.

She didn’t have any admirers so far as she knew. There was nothing particular to celebrate, no birthdays, no lottery wins, no pay rises, nor even her name day. Hang on—wasn’t it Erik’s name day sometime in May? Today, in fact, she discovered when she glanced at the calendar. But it wasn’t something they celebrated, and who wasted money on flowers for a three-year-old? With no card to boot—something he would probably have appreciated more than the flowers.

Botany wasn’t Sandra’s strong suit, but she thought the white flowers might be some kind of lily, with their splendid stamens and pollen that she knew left a hell of a stain. She recognised the other flowers, but she had no clue what kind they were. After googling for a while she had the answer. Calla lilies: she knew of these, but it was the colour that confused her. Sandra thought she had seen calla lilies that were mostly red, but probably other colours too. She hadn’t seen this dark purple kind, however, which were almost black.

White lilies and black calla lilies, she thought, a feeling of unease creeping in. It wasn’t hard to guess what the colours black and white might mean in some contexts, but what about the flowers themselves—did they have any symbolic value in the world of floristry?