He sees Myriam everywhere, feels his paranoia growing, thinks he sees cars waiting outside his front door. Thinks he sees men on the street who quickly avert their eyes when he looks at them. He no longer knows what’s real and what’s just in his head. His only wish is that this had never happened, that he never would have met Yassim, never gone to that party on the roof. That Myriam was just a fantasy, just air, nothing more.

At the embassy, Frida asks absentmindedly and without much interest how it’s going with his memo, and he answers evasively that he’s waiting to meet someone for an interview.

‘I can send you what I have,’ he says.

‘Finish writing it first,’ she says. ‘I’ll read it when everything’s done. There’s no hurry.’

Then she’s gone, and Jacob is left alone with the certainty that the work he’s doing will never be finished.

He spends his days at his desk thinking it surely can’t be possible to miss someone you barely know this much. He hardly leaves his phone for a moment for fear of missing a call. He needs to let go. Especially now that everything indicates that Yassim is nothing but trouble and destruction. Now when a happy ending seems impossible.

He should sleep. He should eat. But he tosses and turns, thoughts racing, until he wakes up one morning and autumn is outside his window: grey rain, grey seas, and only sixteen degrees celsius. Now is the moment to finally shake this all off and say: Enough.

And he almost gets there, almost convinces himself he can put his foot down. Then one day he goes to the American University campus to have a cup of coffee with a young professor he’s become friendly with. He turns towards the sea and takes a deep breath. Looking at the trees and grass and water. For the first time in a long time, he feels something close to peace. In the distance he can almost sense something like freedom.

And at that very moment a soft hand closes around his elbow, and he turns and sees who it is and freedom vanishes before his eyes, and he forgets all of his longing, his yearning, and his worries. In the blink of an eye, it all becomes meaningless. And he’s only here, in the present.

‘Come,’ Yassim whispers in his ear. ‘I need you in my arms.’

22 November

Stockholm

She freezes in the doorway – obviously entering a cordoned-off apartment was a bad idea, she should have known – and slowly she turns around.