TROLL HUNTER’S PICTURE POLICE’S ONLY CLUE. The article was from January 2005. There was no picture of her. She clicked on a link. There she was. She was standing in front of a snow bank. Rosy cheeks and squinting eyes. Inca hat and Lovikka mittens. And that coat. It was the same one she had worn in secondary school. Or was it an identical one? Neither possibility seemed less distressing than the other.

She closed her laptop and pushed her chair back. Opened the door to the walk-in closet and pulled out the moving box lurking in the dark under the clothes that hung in there. It contained stack upon stack upon stack of papers and was so heavy the handle on one side had ripped. This is where Håkan and she had mingled their lives together. Implicating them. The way Kiruna was an implication of their genes.

Håkan’s yearbooks looked virtually untouched. Had he even opened them? She flipped to ninth grade, scanned the grey faces until she found him. She found his name too. Håkan Hellström. He had a side parting and his shirt was buttoned all the way. He was, in fact, the only person in his class wearing a button-down shirt, aside from the teacher, who wore both a shirt and a waistcoat. They had probably had a great relationship. Håkan had always had perfect grades. Not good, like hers, perfect. From the first term to the last. It had probably made him a strange bird. At least that’s how he looked, squeezed in between lads in Adidas jackets and young men with intense stares and black crosses on their hands. In medical school, on the other hand, he had found his peers and blossomed. He had been a shining star. Who had he been before he started studying medicine? She didn’t know. His yearbook picture offered no answers.