“Don’t worry, it’ll come off with water. Look!” Anette dipped her finger into a glass of water on the coffee table and rubbed on the stain, while she prayed she wasn’t ruining a hundred-thousand-kroner sofa.

“What are you watching?”

“Riverdale,” she mumbled. Everything about the girl radiated discomfort at being around a strange grown-up.

Anette hesitated. The police aren’t allowed to interrogate a ten-year-old on her own, but a single question couldn’t hurt.

“Essie, you told my coworkers that your dad might have gone to work last Friday. Do you remember that?”

“Dad was home.”

“It’s just that you told our coworkers that he was at work…”

“I remembered wrong.” She looked down at her plate.

“Okay.” Anette smiled.

“What’s going on?!”

Essie jumped, and her plate fell on the floor and broke. Henrik hurried past Anette groaning irritably and started scooping scrambled egg off the floor.

“I was just looking for the restroom.”

Henrik stood up with broken shards in his hands and burning eyes.

“I think that’s enough questioning for today.”

CHAPTER 25

“Here you go, Jenny. I hope you don’t take sugar, because we’re out. I don’t understand where it all goes.”

Jenny Kaliban looked from the caseworker, who was taking a seat on the other side of the desk, to the plastic cup of machine coffee she had just put in front of her. A packet of powdered creamer and a plastic spoon sat next to the cup. The woman behind the desk was her age, and had limp curls framing her tired face. Only her fingernails gleamed red and freshly polished, like solitary islands of hope in a dying ocean. You would almost think she had been born to work in the unemployment benefits office, Jenny thought unkindly. Unless it was the grim, sad surroundings that over the years had shaped her in their likeness.

What am I doing here? Jenny asked herself. How had she, who lived and breathed for aesthetics, ended up being forced to turn to these insipid, soul-sucking places year after year with her hat in her hand and a humble look on her face?

She seethed with anger but knew her fury was for herself. She was to blame. Without meaning to, she had fallen out with her family. Now she wasn’t even welcome at her nephew’s sickbed. But she wasn’t the only one to blame—they had failed her first. And society! Artists had always depended on donations from patrons, the nobility, and the upper class, but her generation of artists had been downright degraded. Forced to pander to get by and to endure society’s poorly hidden disrespect.

“You still have shifts at the museum, I see. But that doesn’t add up to very much.” The caseworker typed something on her municipal computer and peered at Jenny over her plastic eyeglasses.