Most of the men Schäfer knew in his line of work didn’t share the details of their work with their wives. They packed the workday’s experiences away in a little mental box when they punched out and left it back at headquarters. Then they drove home to their typical Danish suburbs, where they ate typical Danish dinners like meatballs with stewed cabbage and talked about typical everyday things and watched Netflix series with their wives. The next day they went back to work and opened the box again.

Schäfer didn’t work like that.

He didn’t know how to separate himself from his work. And he couldn’t and didn’t want to separate himself from Connie, so she got him the way he was: the whole package, the skin, the hair, and everything else, including the occupational damage and the scars from his investigations.

He told her everything he could think of about the case, but he was still left with a nagging feeling that there was something he had overlooked.

“I’ve got this nasty little worm digging tunnels inside my brain, and I just can’t get rid of it. It feels like I’ve forgotten to do something. Or like there’s some angle I’m missing that I should be looking at the case from,” he said, and scratched himself irritably behind the ear. “You know?”

“Maybe you just need a good night’s sleep,” Connie said. “You worked the whole weekend, and you’ve been tossing and turning for several nights now. Go to bed early tonight, and tomorrow you’ll be able to look at the whole thing with fresh eyes.”

Schäfer chuckled. “The apostle of health has spoken: Remember to get eight hours of sleep! Drink more water! No smoking! Eat less butter!”

“Yes, go ahead and make fun,” Connie protested, “but it helps.”

She looked down at her foot in his hands and sighed. “How can you love a woman with such ugly bunions and crooked toes?”

“That’s the part of you I like best,” Schäfer retorted.

He lifted her leg and held it in front of him like a guitar, while he turned the toes as if he were tuning the strings.

Connie giggled, and Schäfer felt happy deep in his bones. But when they went to bed that night, he slept an uneasy sleep, woke up several times, and lay there in the dark thinking. He followed the worm around through the corridors, reviewing every detail of the case, dozed off, woke up again, and started over again.

At 6:20, he got up to go take a shower.

“Where are you going?” Connie asked groggily, looking at her watch.

“Shh …” he whispered, and kissed her. “Just go back to sleep. I have to go to headquarters.”