She went down the stairs and out onto the street. She looked in the windows but saw only darkness. She held her breath, listening, and had the feeling that the whole building in front of her was also holding its breath.

Maybe I was imagining things, she thought.

At that very moment, she got a text from Per asking if they could get together for coffee. Realizing she was now hungry, she answered him immediately.

With a determined gait, she left without noticing the shadow moving slowly inside one of the windows of the building.

* * *

He heard her puttering about in the kitchen. Margaretha had been at it all morning. The aroma spread through the house. Like a gas, it had filled its container, reaching into every corner, permeating the clothes, fabrics, curtains. The smell of a freshly baked cake coming out of the oven. The smell of anxiety.

Karl Berzelius closed the door to his office.

He couldn’t sit still. The only thing he could think about was that Jana was coming today, and that didn’t feel right.

He tried to focus on one of the paintings on the wall, but it was like the color had been suddenly sucked out of it, black horsemen in a gray landscape.

The painting next to it was just as colorless. Three faces immortalized in oil. He tried to remember when it had been painted.

Searching through his memories, both light and dark ones.

Some consciously repressed, others erased by alcohol.

But then he saw tiny, minuscule glimpses of color. Red, green, brown. Swirling around each other. Autumn leaves dancing in the wind, against a clear blue sky. And he remembered the day they were walking around Stockholm. They had eaten at the Grand Hotel, walked along Strandvägen, gone into shops and looked at furnishings and china.

And a necklace.

It had been resting in a red box in the middle of a display window, all by itself.

He had gone into the shop and bought it, and had it engraved with both of their initials: to JB from KB. He had put it around her neck and said something apologetic to her, something that really could be taken as nonchalant, that couldn’t be taken as a declaration of love. Or maybe he hadn’t said anything, he couldn’t remember now. Margaretha had laughed, at the purchase, at the occasion or lack thereof, happy that he was finally showing some affection for their daughter. It was as if all of his feelings lay in the glittering, expensive necklace that now encircled her neck.

Jana’s neck.

But she didn’t smile. Not then, not ever.

It was as if she couldn’t.