Marjan’s eyes went to the shopping bags. “What on earth are you lugging around in there?” She leaned forward and peered inside. “Garbage bags?”

“That’s my stuff, not yours,” Helen snapped. “Maybe you should stop sticking your nose into other people’s business.” She snatched the bags from where they stood by Marjan’s feet and rushed down the corridor.

There was a clock hanging in the hallway. She had been unconscious for fifteen minutes at most, but even if she headed straight to her ward now, she would still be late. Only she wasn’t going to the ward. There was another waste room on the next floor.

8

8

It was a remarkably warm day for October. The terraces of the cafés in town were all packed. Sara and Floris were walking hand in hand ahead of Ralf and Naomi. Two people who had no idea what it was like to be short of money. They stopped in front of the windows of shops that Ralf wouldn’t dare set foot in and discussed Moncler and Stone Island jackets as if they already had one in every color hanging in their closets at home. Ralf had seen the prices: just one of those jackets cost as much as two months of minimum wage. And Floris kept bleating on about “genuine goose down” and how wonderfully light it felt. Sara told them she hated designer knockoffs. “So pathetic, you know?”

Naomi clung to Ralf’s arm. She was remarkably quiet. Ralf didn’t know what her parents did for a living—they had never spoken about it—but she lived with her brothers and her little sister in a small row house, just like his.

“My parents drive me totally crazy sometimes,” said Sara.

“How come?” asked Floris.

“They had a fight this morning. I heard them in the kitchen.”

“What about?”

“About tonight. My father will be working, but my mother thought they’d be going out together.”

Ralf pricked up his ears. “Working?” he asked.

Sara turned around. Daylight glittered from her sunglasses. “I thought you knew that already—that we own some restaurants?”

“The Horn of Plenty,” explained Floris.

Sara certainly knew how to present it: suddenly the restaurants belonged to the entire family. “Surely your father doesn’t have to do the washing up himself on a Saturday night?”

She shrugged. “He just likes to be there on busy evenings. Have a chat with the guests, check that everybody is doing their jobs properly. And he likes to go to the bank with the day’s takings himself. It’s like I said yesterday—he’s married to his work.” Her eyes softened. “When we were little, we always used to go to a theme park or the beach on the weekend.”

Floris nudged her. “Oh, come on. Like you’d still want to go to Disneyland with your parents.”