“We didn’t know it yet. But the balcony and the boy who fell were the beginning of a long goodbye. She was fourteen years old then, and when she turned sixteen she disappeared. One day she was just gone. A few clothes were missing from her closet, her toothbrush, maybe a few other things. But no message, no explanation. She called us a couple of times in that first year. We managed to track one of the calls—it came from a telephone booth in a town called Shkodër in Albania. She didn’t say much, just told us she was doing well. We asked her where she was living, what she was doing, and when she wouldn’t answer we asked again. Then she hung up. And we never spoke again.”

The adoptive father couldn’t go on anymore. He shook his head, stared down at his palms, then leaned back in the sofa. Collapsing into himself.

His wife took over.

“Our biggest mistake was trying to help her with those new words. Bringing a linguist here, buying those Albanian dictionaries, even tracking down university courses and encouraging her to seek them out later. We wanted to help her connect with her roots. But instead she became obsessed with them.”

Ewert Grens looked at the parents who seemed so alone even though they were two. That’s what happens when you lose a child.

“After that last phone call, there’s only been silence. We didn’t know anything. We still don’t, Superintendent.”

But I know.

Grens thought that, but he couldn’t tell them yet. That their grown-up little girl had journeyed backward. Back to where those new words carried her. To the memories she couldn’t reach. Or maybe she had reached them—more than her adoptive parents knew. She could have remembered her family and started asking questions without knowing the violent end they met. Maybe she was closing in on the people who had taken their lives without even knowing it. Maybe that’s when the contents of her file, locked inside the police archive, were plucked out. Because her questions awoke other people’s memories. Maybe that was when someone hired a dirty cop inside Kronoberg to find out who she really was.

And then got rid of her.

The brute they called Zaravic, who was going to be arrested today, locked up for seventy-two hours on Grens’s orders, had become even more important now, had even more questions to answer.

“I’d like to ask your permission to search your daughter’s room.”