I don’t answer straight away. I just wait a few seconds then shake my head.

Ms Håkonsen looks at me sternly. ‘For the sake of court proceedings,’ she says, ‘you have to answer the question aloud.’

‘Um, no,’ I reply. ‘She wasn’t.’

‘Why wasn’t she?’ Ms Håkonsen asks. ‘What happened?’

‘She … broke up with me.’

‘And why did she do that?’ Ms Håkonsen sounds as if she is already getting tired of my answers.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Well, I didn’t. At the time.’

‘You mean you didn’t know on the night of 17th October?’

I lift my head slightly, searching for Mari’s mother. My eyes lock on hers. She instantly looks away.

‘Correct,’ I reply.

‘But you know now.’

‘I do.’

Ms Håkonsen looks at me for a few moments.

‘I understand why you don’t want to talk about that, but I’m afraid we will have to go into the specifics or your break-up a little bit later. Just so you know.’

‘OK,’ I say and cough into my palm.

‘Good. When did she break up with you?’

I can feel the sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades. I hope it won’t show on my face as well.

‘A couple of days before…’ I stop for a few beats.

‘A couple of days before the 17th of October?’

I nod, angry at myself for not being calmer and cooler about this. Ms Håkonsen is about to reprimand me again, but I quickly answer:

‘Yes.’

‘OK. Alright. Let’s talk about the morning after. The morning of October the 18th. Tell us what happened.’

2

THEN

Yngve Mork had never spoken to God. He hadn’t even thought that he could, or should; but the previous night, at a quarter past two, he had sat up in his bed, lifted his gaze towards the ceiling and addressed Him directly for the first time in all his sixty-three years.

He had asked if she was OK now, if she had found peace. He asked if she was still angry with him and if He might allow him to see her one more time – for real. But his words had been quietly absorbed by the faded yellow plaster of the ceiling. They hadn’t even been spat back at him like a mocking echo.

Some mornings he woke up with the lingering remnants of a dream in his mind, and with the sudden, panicked thought that she might have come to see him during the night; that she had given him some sign he had missed or already forgotten – a wave or a kiss. He was always hoping that she really was trying to reach out to him, trying to tell him something – trying to say that she had found it in her heart to forgive him.