After the call ended, she stayed seated with her phone in her hand. Kiruna’s untouched breakfast was on the kitchen table, a suspension of milk and dissolved cereal in a bowl decorated with fairy-tale creatures in light pastel colours. There was milk on the table, a small system of lakes. Through the window, she could see their neighbour’s kid standing out on the street with a floorball stick in his hands, shovelling water out of a puddle; it felt like the blade was scraping the inside of her skull every time it scraped against the crust of the asphalt. Against that torment, painkillers were powerless to help.

She dragged herself upstairs. The little girl was sitting on the floor in her silent room, playing with something small she was cradling close to her body.

The curtains in the bedroom were closed and Håkan was in bed, facing the wall. A small rectangle of light faded on the nightstand, a sign that he was awake.

‘I’m going out for a bit.’

He made no reply.

‘Håkan?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going out for a bit.’

She pulled up the hood of her jacket and tramped up the steep incline of Adolf Hedinvägen. She passed the hospital without so much as a glance; it was like an anonymous rectangle at the edge of her vision.

Leaving Kiruna alone with him when he was in that state was perhaps not entirely appropriate, but she would be right back. Besides, she told herself the forced responsibility would do him good, make him pull himself together. She didn’t know how to approach his collapse yet. That her disappearance had made him fall completely to pieces was in a way pretty touching and in time, she might learn to appreciate the vulnerable side of him he hadn’t shown her before, but at the moment she was mostly angry. Angry he was lying there like a dissociative wreck but mostly angry because it was so unlike him. This was not the man she’d married, and she felt, to put it plainly, duped. At the same time, she was highly aware that it was unreasonable to walk around feeling duped. Especially now, given what they’d been through. She tried and for the most part succeeded in maintaining control by reminding herself that she had endured an extraordinary psychological ordeal. The medical terminology served as a warding spell against the panic that was constantly threatening to erupt inside her, but adopting a scientific perspective to understand what she had seen and what Gudrun had told her about also moved her toward a horizon from which the trolls could not be observed. That made them evaporate like swirls of mist. And so her brain had quarantined all thoughts on the topic until further notice.