‘Have you started swearing, fru Bergman?’

‘I’ve been swearing since I was three years old, herr Recht.’

Alex smiled.

‘What now?’ Fredrika wondered.

Alex immediately grew serious.

‘Now we contact our friends in Israel.’

Chapter 4

Wishful thinking was something that took up far too much of Mikael Lundell’s time. Whenever he’d been told that something was impossible, he’d thought that his determination and obstinacy, along with prayers to the higher powers of whose existence he was absolutely convinced, would make all the difference. He had genuinely believed that this was how you achieved the improbable.

Like the idea that he and Eden would live together happily ever after.

‘I don’t understand how you can delude yourself like this,’ his father had said after meeting Eden for the first time. ‘How could a woman like her ever be your wife? How could she be anyone’s wife? She’s like a wild horse – impossible to restrain. If you try, you’ll just make yourself look ridiculous.’

Mikael had hated that gross comparison with a horse. Who would want to restrain another person? Not Mikael, or anyone he respected. What made Eden so attractive was the wildness that his father saw as an obstacle to a successful relationship. With hindsight, however, he had to admit that his father had been partially right. It had been difficult to create a life with Eden, and it had cost Mikael more than he could ever have imagined.

A child.

Or two, depending on how you looked at it.

Dani was dead, Saba was still here. But neither of the girls had been Mikael’s – at least in the biological sense. That was the biggest sacrifice he had been willing to make in order to hold on to his relationship with Eden – realising the truth, then silently accepting the idea of being a father to children Eden had conceived with someone else. She had asked him how he’d known. He’d told her that he’d seen it the second they were born, but the truth was that he’d suspected as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The dates didn’t work. They’d been going through a bad patch just before she revealed that she was expecting; it was easy to think back to the times they’d had sex, and it just didn’t fit with her due date.

Wishful thinking. Maybe that was what made the impossible possible. That and his love for Eden. Mikael couldn’t explain it any other way; as far as he was concerned, he had been Dani and Saba’s father. When Dani was murdered, he thought he was going to lose his mind.

Even then I never considered leaving her, he thought.