In fact, the whole flat was very quiet. Unusually quiet, now she thought about it. It was as though the traffic on Järnvägsgatan a few blocks away had stopped, and the old man in the flat below hers had turned off his TV for the first time ever. All to underline the seriousness of the situation and set her even more on edge.

She stepped into the living room and looked around. The corner sofa by the window didn’t seem to have been moved. Nor the armchair, the bookcase or the dining table in the other corner. There wasn’t really anywhere for a person to hide, which was why she managed to muster the courage to move into the hallway and from there into the kitchen.

It, too, looked exactly like it had when she left it the previous evening. The dishes from her dinner were in the drying rack and the bag with rinsed-out plastic containers lay tied up on the floor, waiting for her to carry it down to the bins on her way to the car. She only really opened the pantry door to be thorough.

Then she turned on the lights in the bathroom and saw that yesterday’s knickers lay discarded in the middle of the floor and that the shower curtain around the bath was pulled closed. Had she left it that way or was someone lurking behind it?

She raised the vacuum tube, walked over and tore the curtain aside.

There was no one there.

Maybe she had accidentally snapped a selfie in her sleep after all. Somehow, that would be just like her. Since she got her new phone, which had a front-facing camera, she had taken so many selfies she had started receiving warnings about her memory running low. There must be a logical explanation, and she had probably blown everything out of proportion because she was nervous about her presentation to the board.

Her pulse was finally slowing down, and she could at last breathe a sigh of relief and put the vacuum tube down, pull off her T-shirt and step into the bath. Then she closed the shower curtain again, turned on the tap and waited until it had turned from freezing cold to a little bit too hot before switching the tap from bath to shower.

She loved that burning feeling on her skin and turned the heat up even higher. She could stand under that jet forever, and this morning she needed it more than she ever had. She felt her fear being rinsed away with each drop of water.

She turned the shower off and dried herself quickly before stepping out of the bath. The mirror had fogged up as usual, and even though she knew she shouldn’t, she wiped the condensation off with her towel.