Grens sought the woman’s eyes and saw a flash of grief for a child that never was. He knew how that felt, and sometimes he grieved for it too. Things don’t always turn out like you plan.

“And right here, Detective. This is the only place . . . there behind that chair, do you see? They pried up the floor a little bit.”

He remembered how a bed used to stand right there, flush with the wall that had a window in it; the older daughter had been lying with her face turned in that direction. Now it was a sofa bed with blue and white stripes, and he was struck by a sudden and overwhelming desire to just lie down there and finish the sleep that had been interrupted.

“You can see for yourself.”

The woman pushed away the sofa and a small side table and threw up a corner of the rug.

Ewert Grens’s leg ached as he kneeled down on the wood floor. Hurt even more when he lay his heavy body down to get a closer look.

A pried-up plank, split at three places, sharp splinters.

Underneath sat a four-sided hole, almost a perfect square, cut into the concrete that formed someone else’s roof.

He measured it with his fingers, guessing four by four centimeters.

A void with no contents.

Something had been lying here. For seventeen years. Something that was gone now.

Chapter 6

That damned heat.

Ewert Grens exited a beautiful building out of a beautiful door, trying his best to make room for his ungainly body in the dense and slippery air. Twenty-seven degrees had just risen to twenty-eight and had its eye on twenty-nine. He took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and kept his stride short.

He’d walked this way last time, too, carrying a child in his arms.

Grens remembered and swallowed hard. It felt like that empty hole—four centimeters by four, missed by him and all of the crime scene technicians—was in his throat, pressing down on his stomach, a cavity, an empty box, a container that no longer contained what had been there for so long.