Her hair dropped out, she said. Her skin broke out in scales. She lost her period and it never returned to normal. Personally, I believe that it was the trauma that robbed her of the chance to have children. I asked, carefully, about the trauma, and she told me that you and your two friends were held at gunpoint in Venezuela. She went there with her two best friends, Elisabeth Eliassen and Trine Rickard. This rang an instant bell and I felt exhilarated; it was the feeling of discovering a crucial piece of a puzzle. Rickard – it was one of the names on the doorbells of the building in Rosenborggata 11, where you go on Fridays after seeing me. And Elisabeth – the name in your diary. They thought they had to travel across the world to that dangerous country to find themselves. Only Elisabeth and Kristina came back, but they didn’t come back as themselves.

She spoke for a long time; it was clear that she needed to get something off her chest.

Everything she told me became part of the backdrop. I didn’t yet know what to do with it, or where I was going with any of it – I just wanted to be close to you. At that point, I was driven by needing to prove my illusion of you as perfect, because if it was possible for you, then it might be possible for me. I didn’t know, then, that it would be up to me to piece you back together.

It was your mother who first told me about Elisabeth. She spoke of a sensitive and beautiful little girl with natural charisma and a love of the arts who’d lived just next door – she pointed to the left, and my eyes traveled through the windows into the gardens outside, yours and Elisabeth’s separated only by a low hedge, and it was almost like I could see two little girls out there, running through sprinklers, chasing a ball, playing hopscotch.

She turned out badly, said your mother, her face grief-stricken.

*

After, I went home and hit Google, as one naturally would. It wasn’t hard to find the old articles about the three girls from Bærum who were held hostage in Venezuela back in 2003.

‘The Trine Rickards Tragedy,’ read Aftenposten’s headline. ‘The nineteen-year-old aspiring vet was traveling around South America with close schoolfriends, Elisabeth Eliassen and Kristina Hellerud, when she was shot at point-blank at a private address on the outskirts of Carúpano on August 24th. It was, quite simply, an execution, says Jorge Aruelo, police chief in the Eastern Venezuelan region of Sucre. A local man with an already extensive criminal record, including several drug-charges as well as assault, Xavier Miguel Rodriguez, was apprehended at the scene and will face trial for first-degree murder.’