She had worn a big Fjällräven coat, puffy and exclusive. Diana had had the same one; she had nagged her parents all autumn and been given it for Christmas in an enormous package.

They had found each other immediately. It was like fate.

And they looked so alike as well. Everyone had always pointed it out. That they looked like sisters. Here come the sisters! Myran and Sillen.* Their coats gave them identical outlines, but it wasn’t just the coats. They had the same kind of hair – mousy, if she was being honest. The same heart-shaped faces, the same upturned noses. The same height, the same physiognomy. They had even had their first periods the same month – unless Susso had lied about that. The same way of speaking. And the same laugh. Above everything, the same laugh. Whose laugh it had been originally she didn’t know. It was something they had created together. The same was true of their way of speaking. They had their own language. An idiom. It was dead now, but she was certain it would be revived immediately and without effort when they met. Just like Sumerian would if two Sumerians rose from their graves and were brought together.

When they met.

Not if.

The phase they were in now, when they had, for various reasons – what you would have to call external reasons – grown apart, was just temporary.

But what if it wasn’t?

Squatting there by the moving box, clutching the twenty-year-old school assignment, she suddenly realised she had taken that for granted all these years. Subconsciously, she had assumed they would be reunited, and there had been no reason to dwell on it. She had assumed Susso felt exactly the same way. That they mirrored each other in that too. In their feelings for each other. In their memories of each other.

But what did she really know about Susso’s memories? The way Susso viewed her? What she felt when she thought about her? Maybe she felt nothing at all.