“You live around here?” Stefan asked, looking around. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“I promised my mom I’d be home by now,” the boy repeated, and started pulling his bike down the bike path.

“What grade are you in?” Stefan continued. “Fourth? Fifth?” He accompanied the boy down the path without removing his hand from the boy’s shoulder.

“Fifth.”

“Fifth grade.” Stefan whistled, impressed.

The boy twisted free and jumped on his bike. He pedaled hard without looking back.

“Well, have a good one, Daniel,” Stefan called after him. “Catch you next time, huh?”

He kept watching the boy until he was nothing more than a dot far away down Amager Strandvej. Then he walked back to the bench and settled back down.

There still wasn’t any sign of life in the apartment across the street. The building’s glass facade allowed an unimpeded view of both the kitchen and living room, and both rooms were dark and empty. It didn’t look anywhere near as cozy as the single-story house in Amager’s Greektown neighborhood where Ulrich Andersson had been living the last time Stefan visited him. In fact, it didn’t look at all cozy. Everything about the apartment was cold and modern, and it didn’t seem like Andersson paid much attention to interior decorating now that his wife had left him.

Not that it mattered now, Stefan thought, looking at his watch.

When he looked up again, the light in the kitchen was on.

CHAPTER

15

“HE SEEMED TOTALLY out of it,” Heloise said. “I mean, almost crazy.”

She squeezed the bottle tightly between her knees and, with a long, persistent tug, managed to get the cork out. She walked into the kitchen, grabbed two wineglasses, and returned to the balcony.

“Chardonnay?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Gerda replied, drumming her chopsticks to the beat of Bruno Mars’s “Treasure,” which was pouring out of Heloise’s iPhone on the folding table in front of them.

“Do you think we drink too much?” Heloise asked as she poured the wine. “In general, I mean.”

“Yes,” Gerda said promptly and without even a hint of shame.

Sometimes happiness was having a friend with the same vices as you, Heloise thought, and Gerda was her best—and in fact only—friend. The only person left in the world who knew her, really knew her.

For the first many years of their lives, they had lived next door to each other in the Yellow Houses—an ingenious moniker they’d come up with for some townhouses in Copenhagen’s Frederiksstaden neighborhood that were—insert drum roll—yellow. On their first day at Nyboder Elementary School as six-year-olds, they had walked to school together hand in hand in matching pigtails and matching Danish-mailbox-red backpacks the size of little chest freezers on their backs.

Inseparable from day one.