“Until I was a teenager, I had no real memories of my father. I couldn’t reach him. But you, Superintendent Grens, I could remember. Not your name or who you were, but just that you existed—I could always call to mind how you lifted me up, held me, protected me. Sometimes I wondered if you were real or just something I dreamed up. Maybe I was remembering wrong.”

So far she’d stood with her back to her small kitchen, now she moved toward the window, glanced out quickly and then back at Grens again.

“I see your reinforcements have arrived.”

“It doesn’t matter. What I said still applies—if you let me arrest you, here, just you and I will go to Kronoberg. No one gets hurt, no drama. And you won’t get the book thrown at you. Trust me just like you trusted me back then. You’re still young, Amelia, you have a long life ahead of you, when you’re released and all this is finally over, forever.”

“You know my name isn’t Amelia. You also know, Superintendent Grens, that this will never be over for me.”

Amelia who had once been Hannah who had once been Zana, was now just herself. It was as if he was meeting every version of her at the same time. A little girl who was reinventing herself. She’d been as clever as she was patient. Applying to the police academy, positioning herself in the right place to seek the answers she needed, then participating in the investigation of her own revenge and using every available scrap of information to stay ahead of them, whether it was stolen cell phones or technically advanced equipment hidden in the unit’s corridor.

“Seventy-two hours, Superintendent. That’s how long you could hold him without proof, and that’s how long you could stop me from finishing this. The same amount of time I—according to the autopsy records I’ve now read—lived with my dead family.”

A few days and a few nights.

He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that would have affected a child who had lost everything she knew.

“Amelia, I . . . or do you want me to call you Zana? Like back then? I can . . .”