She looked up and made a reflexive gesture to cover her breast. Lots of thoughts swirled in her head. You couldn’t trust anyone. The real estate agent was going to get one percent of the price, so he was only interested in closing the deal. He didn’t care about the down payment. He didn’t like her. What had she done to him? If only the kids hadn’t gone and said those things. That was embarrassing. But they didn’t understand. They didn’t want to leave the house. They had grown up in it. They had friends on the street. They didn’t have socks. The grocer’s bill was growing; the stores were starting to complain. They all stared at her with the same expression as the men in the house. Countless people had stomped around her rooms and still wouldn’t buy. Hopefully her son wouldn’t come running in to tell them how the sewer system backed up regularly and flooded the cellar. Twenty thousand was still a lot of money. She was exhausted. She had been abandoned by one man and was dependent on other men, who looked at her as if she were an invalid, as if they could sense why he had left. And the children were misbehaving. Sometimes they looked at her the same way.

She sighed deeply and stood up with the baby in her arms.

‘If you think it’s reasonable,’ she said.

The real estate agent’s face was hidden in a smoky fog. She bent over the crib, tucking the comforter around the infant.

The two men winked at one another behind her back. Grete cast her eyes down and carefully straightened a crease in her dress. There was a charged atmosphere in the room.

‘But you know I was expecting twenty-five thousand.’

The mother stood up and, with the back of her hand, brushed the hair from her forehead. She looked at the pregnant wife as if making a plea, but the younger woman looked away, as if meeting her gaze was dangerous. Her ears were buzzing. He had decided! She didn’t have to walk around in strange houses anymore on the heels of this agent she couldn’t stand. Why did Ejnar go along with cheating the poor woman? They had planned on putting down twenty-five thousand the whole time. But maybe they weren’t cheating her. They were men; they understood business transactions. This could be nice, when it was painted and fixed up. Would the woman and her three children like their little apartment? Her heart was beating fast. ‘You don’t even know the person you’re married to.’ That was a strange thing to say to her. What was true for one person wasn’t necessarily true for other people.

‘That was the agreement,’ said the woman dispiritedly. ‘It’s hard to know what to say, when I don’t have anyone to talk it over with.’