Tomorrow, when she was rested, she was going to take the day off and check some things off her personal to-do list. Like making sure the bank transferred half the money from her joint account with Hampus to her private savings account. They only had eleven thousand seven hundred and forty-three kronor, but what’s right is right.

She was also going to have a look at that one-bed she’d found down on Carl Krook’s Gata in town. It wasn’t her favourite part of Helsingborg. But at least it was central, and the woman who’d answered when she called had sounded really nice and had even been willing to lower the asking price if she would consider signing a two-year contract. And given that it was available that Sunday, it could hardly get better.

Until then, she’d considered sleeping on a mattress in her office. That’s what she usually did when she left Hampus. But this time, she’d decided not to disappear before the moving men came. This time, it was real, and once the penny dropped for Hampus, he’d be capable of anything. Like cutting up her clothes or selling or even burning her furniture.

As soon as he got back around five, she was going to grab the bull by the horns and tell him. Straight up, with no extraneous bickering, she would explain to him exactly what the rest of the week would look like. That he could sleep either on the sofa or wherever he pleased, so long as it wasn’t in her bed. That they were going to have as little to do with each other as they could until she moved out, and that the kitchen was hers at breakfast, while he was free to use it for the rest of the day and night.

The problem was, he hadn’t come back at five. He still wasn’t home, which meant he was out trying to drown his guilty conscience at Pallas. In a way, avoiding the confrontation was nice; she certainly wasn’t going to wait up until he came home all drunk and needy. Instead, she was going to catch up on sleep and make sure she was out of the house by the time he woke up.

Everything was ready. The letter in which she’d written everything she’d planned to tell him in big, clear letters, to make sure he couldn’t miss any of it, even if he was still seeing double. All his clothes, which she’d removed from the bedroom and placed neatly in the armchair so he couldn’t use them as an excuse to sneak in when he got back. The breakfast that was ready and waiting in the fridge and the thermos with scalding hot coffee.