People usually open up to Anna. Håkan always said that there was something about her that made this happen, but in fact it’s all down to her stammer. She knows it’s barely noticeable, a minor stumble over certain sounds that she can sometimes pre-empt, sometimes not. She never even thought of it as a problem until her parents sent her to a speech therapist at some point during her years in primary school. As a result she began to avoid speaking and focused on listening instead. Most people listen with only half an ear; they’re mostly thinking about what they’re going to say next, and so they miss what is really being said – not only the words themselves and the nuances of tone, but also the involuntary micro-clues that human beings constantly give. The head movements, the gestures, the grimaces, the pauses. Signs that sometimes directly contradict the content of the conversation. That was how she realised at an early stage that her parents were going to split up. And that Håkan was cheating on her.

Agnes’s silence, on the other hand, makes Anna hyper-conscious of every word, every syllable that crosses her lips, and somehow that feeling transfers to her speech centre. It becomes an electrical fault in the communication between her brain and her mouth, makes her appear uncertain. She hates this, because stammering has nothing whatsoever to do with uncertainty.

Breathe, breathe . . .

She glances at herself in the rear-view mirror, sees that she is clenching her jaw in the way she really doesn’t like. She has inherited her dark hair and eyes from her father, along with her slightly angular nose, but that particular bitter expression is definitely a legacy from her mother. She shakes her head, tells herself that she is doing the right thing in following the school counsellor’s advice to be patient and avoid confrontation. Which of course is easy for him to say, because he only sees Agnes for an hour a week. He doesn’t have to live with her.

Breathe . . .

The trees are closing in around the track, and Milo is still pressing his nose to the side window and making excited little noises. The dog was one of Håkan’s bright ideas. He simply appeared on the doorstep on Agnes’s fourteenth birthday with the puppy in his arms. They’d promised each other that they wouldn’t turn into a stereotype. They would stick to a mutually agreed line, they would never play the divorced parents’ equivalent of good cop, bad cop. And yet that’s exactly what they did.