Edith sat bent over the desk, her blonde hair drooping past her cheeks like two unkempt bird wings, and she wrote in her childish, ceremonious handwriting: One house, potentially for sale, down payment approx. twenty thousand kroner.

Then she paused and looked at the number. Why is money comforting? A substitute for something else? Men who leave their homes guiltily fling a sack of money over their shoulder to their family without looking back. They pay for their liberation, but in the little side room a child is kneeling, whispering: Dear God, Please let my daddy come back. And in the living room, which has already acquired an indefinable new style, apparent in every place only touched by female hands, her mother sits making plans for the future. The amount he has given her ‘once and for all’ is to be used for the child’s education, so she won’t end up in a similar situation. This was the most important thing in the world – and parents, thought Edith, blinded by pride, believe they really know what is most important for their children. Even now there were remnants of this old resentment in her heart. Because wasn’t it she who, in an obscure, unexplained way, was right? One morning her mother had said: Little Edith, Daddy has left us. And the world was never whole again, and she was always searching for him. She thought she saw him in all kinds of different places, but when she caught up, out of breath, to the person she was chasing, it was only a stranger. And right now none of this would be so terrifying and fateful, if it hadn’t happened back then. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all, because the thing parents fear for their children might be the very thing the children inevitably gravitate toward, without knowing or meaning to. And since all this was a perpetuation, Edith knew her children would always secretly resent her. They would think it was her fault, no matter what she told them. They would think for all eternity that their father, from some unknown location, was trying to reach them, while their mother, with an adult’s horrifying omnipotence, was hindering it.

Edith pushed the paper away and sat motionless, her elbows on the desktop, and her head in her hands. She stared at the sea-green curtain, and the room she was sitting in was like an island of light sailing across a dark, stormy ocean, and she was alone, without a husband, without children, without a future. And then she thought again about the mountains.