A few months ago, when Aylin asked Karen if she wanted to go with her to Sande to look at a house she was thinking of buying, Karen had initially felt worried. Aylin’s parents were both from Frisel and they already had a summer house down there. But Karen had never fully understood the island where luxury villas sit cheek by jowl with tattered houseboats, old holiday villages, and vast marshlands. Aylin’s financial situation precluded it being one of the big houses in Sande’s safer areas. And the idea of her being dependent on the ferry in her situation had made Karen pause before replying.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ she’d asked. ‘You’d be very isolated down there.’

‘Not Sande on Frisel,’ Aylin had reassured her. ‘North Sande, here, in Dunker. A terraced house.’

And in reply to the unspoken question, she’d added, ‘My parents are helping me, I wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise. To be perfectly honest, they’re the ones buying the house.’

Sande, or North Sande as it’s called on newer maps to distinguish the picturesque terraced suburb north of Dunker from the biggest town on Frisel. Plans to change the latter’s name to South Sande had been met with such fierce protests the idea had withered on the vine. The fact that Sande on Heimö had a longer history than its namesake on Frisel had apparently made no difference once the Frisians got fired up. They weren’t about to let some stuck-up people from the capital come in and fix things that weren’t broken.

Karen had heaved a sigh of relief. A better or safer place than North Sande was hard to imagine for a divorced mother of two who lived in constant fear of her abusive husband coming after her again. It was densely populated and with an old-fashioned sense of community – at least according to Karl Björken, whose house, to Karen’s further delight, was only a few streets away.

*

Now that she’s here, having driven over on a whim, she realises she probably should have called first. Aylin’s heart rate probably goes through the roof whenever the doorbell rings unexpectedly, she thinks to herself.

‘Come in. I’m not entirely done moving in, but it’s getting there, I think. Want to see?’

And while she gives Karen a tour, Aylin points out all the things she has done or is planning to do to the house.

‘The kids aren’t home?’ Karen says when they reach the upstairs bedrooms.

‘No, they’re with my parents today and tomorrow. I painted both Tyra and Mikkel’s rooms yesterday and I want the paint to be bone dry before I let the little beasts back in.’

‘You’re doing it all yourself? Why haven’t you asked the rest of us to help out?’