Erik Falc doesn’t believe in fairy tales or God or Providence, he says, but she has to take this as a sign that she is alive and will continue to be, no-one lives without meaning, there is a meaning in just being alive, he manages to intone, or words to this effect. And she thinks it was well expressed, but also utterly meaningless, so she looks at him with a contempt that is foreign to her, and asks in a voice that isn’t hers either – and which she can’t stand the sound of – whether she had been trying to take her own life when they found her on the island, Lensmann Henriksen and that officer, what was his name, Hargel?

Erik Falc looks at her in surprise and says he doesn’t know, but – actually, he says – it wouldn’t surprise him.

She asks what wouldn’t surprise him.

That she had been trying to commit suicide.

She asks what that was supposed to mean.

“You’re playing with me,” he says.

“No, I’m not,” she says.

“But you won’t try again,” he declares, making it sound more like a guarantee than an idle hope, and Ingrid asks if this means the two men saved her life?

He says he doesn’t know that either and she can finally ask the all-important question: Did they find her sketch pad on the kitchen table?

Now he is completely nonplussed.

Ingrid closes her eyes and hauls in those dark days: she has a rough outline of when she came to the hospital up to the present day, the intricate crossword on the wall in the old room, she knows it off by heart, the days’ empty numbers, but she can’t remember if she managed to hide the pad with the Russian writing, three verses of three lines each, it is somewhere in the two or three days that still remain dark.

She counts the days again and they are and remain gone. So they must be on Barrøy, she has to go back and search for them. And Erik Falc, the doctor, says that is precisely what they have been talking about the whole time. Ingrid tries to heave a sigh of relief or to prepare herself for something that is about to happen, but then he asks why she didn’t go with him, the Russian, when he left the island, and help him.

She feels a spider’s web on her face and says that then they would have found Barrøy empty and become suspicious.

He says that cannot be the reason.

She looks down and says no, and that is the worst of it.

“You didn’t trust him?”

“No, I didn’t,” Ingrid says, feeling that now she can hide again, that she still doesn’t know the difference between what has to be remembered and what forgotten.