He opened a new pack and kept the cigarette in his mouth until he was back on the Silver Road, going north this time. The homeward stretch always went faster, felt bleaker. Lina’s silver heart hung from its chain over the rear-view mirror and reflected the sun. She was sitting next to him again, her blonde hair falling like a curtain over her face.

‘Dad, you do know you’ve smoked twenty-one cigarettes in only a few hours?’

Lelle knocked the ash out of the window, blowing the smoke away from her.

‘That many?’

Lina rolled her eyes as if she were calling on higher powers.

‘Did you know every cigarette takes nine minutes off your life? So this evening you’ve shortened your life by one hundred and eighty-nine minutes.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Lelle. ‘But what have I got to live for, anyway?’

The reproach clouded her pale eyes as she looked at him.

‘You’ve got to find me. You’re the only one who can.’

Meja lay with her hands on her stomach and tried not to listen to the sounds. The hunger that growled under her fingers, and the others, the nauseating sounds that came up through the gaps in the floorboards. Silje’s heavy panting and then his, the new man’s. The squeaking of the bed and then the dog barking. She heard the man yell at it to go and lie down.

It was the middle of the night by now, but the sun was still shining strongly in the little triangle-shaped room. It fell in warm, gold shafts over the greying walls and revealed the pattern of capillaries under her closed eyelids. Meja couldn’t sleep. She kneeled beside the low window and brushed away the cobwebs with her hand. There was only blue night sky and blue tinted forest as far as the eye could see. If she craned her neck she could see a slice of lake down there, black and still. Enticing, almost. She felt like a captured princess in a fairy tale, locked inside a tower surrounded by deep, dark forest, doomed to listen to the sex games of her wicked stepmother in the room below. Except Silje wasn’t her stepmother, but her mother.