At age ten they had smoked their first cigarette together, hidden away inside the cavernous beech-hedge-lined paths in King’s Garden, the park surrounding Rosenborg Castle, and throughout their school days they had taken turns falling in love with the same boys. They had hated each other’s enemies with great fervor, loved each other’s families twice as passionately, and they had both cried (and cried and cried) the summer between second and third grade when Heloise’s parents told her they were getting a divorce. “The two of us will never part,” Gerda had said, and they’d sworn on it. Twenty-seven years later, that still held true.

“Maybe he is crazy,” Gerda said, and started dividing the contents of an Onassis box from Sticks’n’Sushi between the two of them. “What did you say his name was?”

“Ulrich. And yeah, maybe. At any rate, Bøttger says he’s been out on sick leave for a long time with stress or something like that.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make a person crazy.”

“Then maybe it’s anxiety or a depression or something.”

“Again, that does not a crazy person make.”

Gerda worked as a trauma psychologist for the Danish military, and she didn’t let people play fast and loose with diagnoses—not even in jest. If out of frustration Heloise happened to call an exasperating source a schizophrenic douchebag or crack a joke about how she felt like she was suffering from PTSD after having completed a particularly demanding work assignment, Gerda would raise an eyebrow in a way that said You have no idea what you’re talking about.

Gerda had been deployed multiple times to both Afghanistan and Iraq, and Heloise knew that five days a week Gerda listened to tales from the bottom of existence on down. She had seen and heard about more horrors in her six years with the military than most people did in a lifetime.

“All right, but he looked like someone who was on the verge of shitting himself, then. He had clearly worked himself up, and he seemed really terrified. I couldn’t talk him down again,” Heloise said.

“What is he afraid of?”

Heloise hadn’t told Gerda what Ulrich had said about the man with the gun.

“He had the impression that they wanted him to mind his own business, or else …”

“They? Who’s they?”

“I don’t know. Johannes Mossing and his people, I guess.”

Heloise arranged a little heap of pickled ginger on top of a big piece of shrimp tempura, dipped her masterpiece in soy sauce, and bit into it. She chewed for a long time before she was able to speak again.