No children, no mourning parents or siblings, just a life partner. She could barely imagine what those four days of uncertainty had been like for her—for Kerstin, that was her name. Or what her life looked like now, as a recent widow in the middle of her life.

Jeanette would have liked to do something for her, to say sorry and perhaps somehow make good on what she had done. But the woman might very well go to the police, and regardless of how they classified the crime, Jeanette knew that they would both be in real trouble—she and Peter. The affair would get out, and everything would have been in vain.

She could at least have given the widow the money—anonymously. Left it outside the door, rung the bell and run away before Kerstin had time to open up. But Peter would never go along with it. She had no idea where he was keeping the cash, and she didn’t want to know—the thought of the money just got her worked up. And the widow probably knew nothing about the money. The kind of crime that earned millions of kronor was very much a man’s sport. She might simply have called the police, who would catch them, and no one would be any happier for that.

But there was something that Jeanette could do. Anonymously. She could give the widow the answers she needed to heal. Jeanette knew from experience that something people needed when they were grief-stricken was the knowledge of the hitherto unknown: concrete facts to hold fast to, to structure existence around.

The widow didn’t know how the accident had happened; she was living under the delusion that her husband had been careless and that his terrible fate had been self-inflicted. But there was a perpetrator responsible for his death: another motorist who had left the scene without checking what the fall-out had been or raising the alarm. When considering why, it was fair to assume that the underlying reasons, if not alcohol-related, were surely at least related to recklessness. In short, a negligent, selfish hit-and-run.

That was knowledge that Jeanette could impart to the grieving wife. The photographs she had taken at the scene of the accident were still saved on her mobile. In a gesture of respect, she had documented not just the crash site but also the other driver’s car. And the deceased’s upper body and face—but she didn’t think that was something that would make the widow feel any better.

So she printed three of the photos and put them in an envelope. Then she found out where the bereaved wife lived, addressed the letter accordingly, applied a stamp, and posted it. Without any other message—the pictures told their own story, and for that matter, who was Jeanette to moralise about others? The widow would have to interpret the pictures herself and do whatever she wanted with that information.