The horizon was sharp and precise, as though painted around the earth’s waist with a fine nib, and he felt a distinct pride in knowing – without being able to see it – that an equally fine white vein marbled the water behind them too, like a physical marker of his presence back in the world. It was an endeavour the doubters had continually told him could never be, but they had underestimated him. He had already disproved every fact they laid at his feet, he had already beaten every target they set – and still it wasn’t enough for the naysayers who said he could never claim back what he had lost. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he couldn’t claw back time, nor the past. But to say his family was denied to him forever . . . No. They weren’t out of reach. They were tantalizingly close, and growing ever closer . . . He just had to keep believing, keep showing them he was the man they used to love. He wasn’t less now. He was the man he had been before.

He felt his spirits begin to soar as they sailed for miles in contented quiet through the beautiful desolation of the Baltic, cutting and sluicing, tacking and gybing beneath a soundless symphony of blues. He felt warily happy. It was an alien emotion these days, where pain and loneliness and frustration defined his days. But out here, he was in his element. In the rest of his life, he had to pitch himself against the odds, but out on the water, he merely had to do battle with the elements. It was an arena where he rarely won, of course, and yet he wished he could stay there for days, escape into the solace of an empty sea and feel his hair fly back and his eyes stream, the spray on his face. This was where he felt most alive. Most awake.

In front and above him, the mainsail was bellied out, taut and curved into a perfect half-ellipse as the keel tore through the water, slicing the sea as though skating over glass, until ahead, creeping into view, came the fractured embrace of the next group of skerries. He approached the ragged scraps of land with masterly ease, the specks of rock breaking up the pristine perfection of the horizon, gulls wheeling far above in scattered flocks and chasing after distant fishing boats as they piloted towards the city. He remembered the route in with dazzling clarity. His own father had always taken him here as a boy. It was one of his ‘quiet pleasures’ – isolation as luxury, when they needed to escape the Board, the press, and even the Sandhamn scene – and he knew exactly which markers to navigate by.

The rocks here were wild and ragged, jutting high out of the sea like shards of glass. No one lived here and few came this way. The inlet was narrow and only smaller boats with experienced skippers could navigate through safely, but Emil had loved it precisely because of its wildness and isolation, its air of abandonment and danger.