‘I forgot to tell you to talk to your upstairs neighbour about the generator,’ she yells. ‘There’s a note on the table in the living room. Electricity can be a problem. Call me if you can’t figure it out.’

And then she’s gone. Jacob sits down on one of the plastic chairs on the balcony, lets the heat and smog and the cacophony of honking traffic and loud voices wash over him. This is his home until Christmas. This city. This apartment. For a moment he feels no joy or satisfaction at all, just a sense of rootlessness that steals over him, empties him until he’s gasping for breath with his eyes closed.

He’s alone. As alone as he felt in Uppsala in his shabby sublet room on Rackarberget during the first few weeks of his new life there. After everything he’s gone through to get here. And for what? For this emptiness and futility? He takes out his phone and finds Simon’s text message.

It would be so easy to answer. To write: ‘Yes, babe! When are you coming to visit?’ To just let go and let everything he still feels for Simon bubble up. Maybe it would grow? Maybe it’s enough to live a life in a tasteful one-bedroom in the inner city of Stockholm. Simon would get a job at some museum or art auction house. Jacob would work as an analyst at a PR agency. Or maybe he could build a career at a ministry that would include short trips to Brussels. Maybe he would even tell Simon the truth about himself.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But he knows that’s impossible, that’s not the life he’s striving for. There’s more out there. Bigger missions. His heart pounds.

He swallows heavily and forces the emptiness down deep inside. With a few quick clicks, he deletes Simon’s message. And with a few more, he deletes Simon from his phone.

*

It’s dark by the time he realizes he forgot to ask the neighbour about the electricity, which is just as unreliable as Agneta indicated. When he does reach Alexa, which is apparently her name, using the number the French diplomat left on the kitchen table, she tells him nobody will be able to fix the generator until tomorrow morning.

‘But come up to the roof,’ she says. ‘There’s a terrace. And wine.’

The lights don’t work in the stairwell either, so Jacob fumbles forward using just faint light spilling in through the open windows on each landing. It gets dark so fast, not at all like Sweden. He didn’t even notice the dusk, and it’s no later than six.

Light suddenly returns to the staircase with a burst of yellow and a humming light bulb, just as he’s pushing a wrought-iron gate onto what has to be the shared roof terrace.