‘You started working for the Social Democrats in the European Parliament?’ she says with a smile.

‘Worse,’ George says. ‘I’m moving home.’

‘What? Moving back to Stockholm?’

Klara thinks she must have heard wrong. George is so much a part of Brussels for her that she never imagined him leaving, it feels like the city itself wouldn’t be the same.

‘But what will you do there?’

He looks so uncomfortable that Klara almost starts to laugh, despite her condition. ‘I got a job as an official at the Ministry of Enterprise,’ he says.

Now she does start to laugh. ‘You’re becoming a bureaucrat?’ she says. ‘Well, I don’t know what to say.’

He shrugs. ‘It’s a good job,’ he says quietly. ‘And I haven’t felt so great lately either. Been through a lot.’

She turns to him and looks into his eyes. ‘Seriously, it is a good job. A dream job for a lot of people. Just odd to think of you…’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘Seriously, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?’

She hesitantly puts her arm around him and can feel herself getting goosebumps. He looks so different in his grown-up glasses and tousled hair.

‘Damn it, George,’ she says. ‘I’m proud of you.’

They end up at L’Ultime Atome on Rue Saint-Boniface, at a table in a large, bright room. George orders some kind of complicated and potent amber beer for them. This is apparently also part of his new persona; Klara never pegged him as a beer drinker. Champagne and cocaine were more his style.

She looks around at the other tables in the room, which are slowly filling up as darkness falls. L’Ultime Atome is a modern grande café, a classic place where she used to go for a beer on Sunday or a drink before dinner along with all the other newcomers in Brussels. She’d almost forgotten it, but it feels homey and safe to be back. With every gulp of beer, every minute spent with George, she feels better.

‘But you haven’t told me why you’re here,’ George says.

Klara takes another gulp, and realizes she’s almost drunk it all. George is barely halfway through his. After Ralph’s and the intense anxiety she felt there, she almost managed to suppress her reason for being here, but now she hears that slight buzz in her ears again. She downs the rest of the beer and stands up.

‘Do you have a smoke?’ she asks.

*

They’re standing outside the bar in the dark, cold drizzle, and George lights her cigarette with a silver lighter. The facade of the church on the short side of the square is illuminated, and above it hang the Christmas lights the city puts up every year.

‘Gabriella was arrested yesterday,’ she says.

‘Excuse me?’ he says. ‘But she’s a…’