“And what does Sønstebø get in return?”

“He thought it was fun. He loved that I wanted to do it, he loved the idea.”

“Everyone loves your ideas.”

Then Mommy turned to face me. “You can make a snowman, Signe. Wouldn’t you like to do that? We can make a snowman, all of us!”

I didn’t want to make a snowman, but still I said yes.

I slipped in my good shoes and almost fell, my balance was off on the white surface she called snow, but Mommy grabbed hold of me and kept me on my feet.

The moisture and the cold penetrated the soles of my shoes, hard granules of ice spilled across my feet and melted against my thin knee socks.

I bent down, took a fistful of snow in my hands, and tried to make a snowball, but it was like nib sugar, it just disintegrated.

I looked up. Everyone was watching me, all the party guests were watching. Magnus stood completely still, only his eyes moved, his gaze going from the snow to me and back again. He had never received snow for his birthday—it was probably only hotel daughters who received that—and I wished he wasn’t here to see this.

But Mommy smiled, smiled as broadly as the doll, the largest in the store. And again I tried to make a snowball—I had to manage it, there had to be a snowball. I had to make a huge snowman, because I didn’t remember that I’d wished for a winter birthday. I couldn’t remember that I had ever spoken with Mommy about this, or that I had cried on Birgit’s birthday. But I had, and now Daddy was angry with Mommy. Maybe I had said that I wanted a doll too, and forgotten about it. It was my fault, all of this—that I was standing here and that my feet were so exceedingly cold, with ice water dribbling through my fingers, that everyone was standing here and behaving oddly around me, that the dry courtyard was turning muddy and vile, that Daddy looked at Mommy with a gaze that I didn’t understand, and that he put his hands down into the pockets of his trousers in a way that made his shoulders narrow. And also that Magnus was here. I wished with my entire pounding seven-year-old heart that he hadn’t seen me like this.

That’s why I lied. For the first time in my life I lied. Some children can lie—they do it without thinking twice. It’s easy for them to say that they didn’t take the cookies from the jar or that they lost their workbook on the way home. But I wasn’t that kind of child, just like I was not a child who liked to imagine things; make-believe games and pretend worlds were not for me. And maybe for that reason, lying wasn’t either. I had so far in my life not been in situations where I needed to lie, and I had also never considered the idea that it was actually possible, that a lie could solve something.