Gut feeling. She’d talked about it. Repeated it. It wasn’t enough. That’s why he couldn’t rest. A young, fresh police officer just doesn’t act like that. Even if she is uniquely present, shoots without hesitation, and is better than everyone else.

It didn’t make sense. She didn’t make sense.

The time was approaching two. It didn’t matter. He found his phone and called the same contact he’d called at the beginning of this investigation. The administrator at the Swedish Tax Agency, who he sometimes traded favors with. And it was obvious when he picked up the phone he had been deeply asleep.

“Yes . . . Hello?”

“It’s me. I need your help.”

“Not now.”

“Yes now.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“If you do, we will never work together again. And you know that next time you might be the one who needs my help.”

The man whose name he never said out loud on the phone because that’s what they’d agreed on didn’t hang up. He asked Grens to wait, and it was possible to hear him getting out of bed and trudging out into his home.

“What’s this about?”

And now he pulled out a chair and turned on a computer, the sound was easy to recognize.

“I want help with a name.”

“Yes?”

“Amelia Schmidt. Spelled with a s-c-h at the beginning and d-t at the end.”

The administrator tapped on the computer’s keys, hard, smashing them like an old typewriter. A few seconds, he returned.

“One hit—only one person by that name in the whole country. Registered in Stockholm. Twenty-two years old.”

“That’s correct. That’s her.”

“And what do you want to know?”

“I’m not sure exactly. See if you can find anything else connected to the name. Anything at all. You and I have worked together before, I know you’ll know it when you see it.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

Grens returned to the warm wind over the rooftops of the capital, which was resting up for the day to come. There was a time when he used to come out here to see if he dared to jump. Over the balcony railing, toward the street, away from everything. When what he’d feared for so long finally happened. When Anni left him. What he didn’t realize then is that once the thing you’ve feared finally happens, it can’t happen again. And that once you know that, make peace with that, you can rebuild. Come back. Not the same as before, not the same life—but something that’s different and sometimes a little different in the most beautiful way.

“I think I have what you’re looking for.”

The administrator at the Tax Agency sounded almost excited, his voice clear despite his tiredness and unwillingness to get out of bed.

“When I went through her history.”

“Yes?”