He leaned over to her and kissed her. “Are you ready to go home?”

“Yes,” Heloise said. “I wasn’t five minutes ago, but now I am.”

They drove over Fredens Bridge with the windows open on their way to Heloise’s apartment. In just a few days the leaves on the trees had turned an orangy brown, and there was a freshness in the air that hadn’t been there last week, a crispness.

Fall had arrived.

They parked in front of the rosebush by her front door, and Martin held her hand the whole way up the stairs.

Heloise unlocked the door and looked around her apartment.

“You can’t tell at all what happened here, can you?” she said. “It actually looks nicer in here than it usually does.”

“Gerda came by to tidy up and clean the place.”

Heloise spotted a large bouquet of purple flowers standing on the dining table in the living room. She walked over and read the card. It was a get-well-soon card from the editorial crew, signed by Karen Aagaard and Bøttger and the rest of the investigative team.

Heloise smiled a little to herself. Then she set the card down and looked around.

“My rug is gone.” She pointed to the bare wood floor under the coffee table, where she usually had a Moroccan Berber carpet with a blue diamond pattern.

“Yes,” Martin put an arm around her. “Unfortunately, it couldn’t be saved.”

“Did it get thrown away?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Do you really want to hear about that?” He scratched his cheek as he watched her.

“Yes,” Heloise said. She couldn’t remember anything between when she ended up on the sofa with the man’s knee on her back and when she woke up at the hospital with Martin’s hand in hers. “I need to hear it. I need to know what happened.”

“Okay,” Martin said, and led her out into the kitchen. “There was blood on the rug, so it got thrown away.”

“His blood?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get in here that night? Why were you even here at all?” Heloise sat down at the kitchen table.

“After we talked on the phone, I decided to come over to your place.” Martin opened the fridge and took out a bottle of mineral water. He grabbed a glass from the shelf over the sink and filled it. “Here, drink this. You need to stay hydrated.”

Heloise reluctantly took a sip.

“You said you came over here?”

“Yes. Because … I know you’re afraid to let anyone in and get close to them. I know that you’ve had a hard time trusting me. But we have something together, you and I, don’t we? Something real?”

She didn’t respond.

“So even though you told me that we shouldn’t see each other anymore, I came over here, because I knew that you would feel differently if we were face-to-face.”

Heloise nodded slightly.