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after year out of sheer cowardice held their tongues about the truth. And he, too, walking beside her and holding his tongue as well, he was the worst traitor of them all. He recalled a conversation he had heard once when she was sitting with a neighbour in the kitchen. His mother thought that he had gone out and didn’t hear, but he was lying in bed reading a comic book. He heard her in tears, talking about her suspicions that her husband had met someone else. Heard how she sat there at the kitchen table and overcame her own reservations enough to dare express her shameful misgivings. And the woman lied. Straight into his mamma’s face she lied as she accepted coffee and home-baked buns. Lied and said that his mamma was surely just imagining things and that every marriage had its ups and downs and that there was certainly nothing to worry about.
    And then the slaps on the back from the men urging his father on to new conquests, and more overtime to keep alive his reputation as an irresistible ladykiller, while Jonas stayed at home covering for him. Constant lies that were compensated for by the growing pressure to perform his rituals to dull the sense of dread.And then new lies, to hide the compulsion.
    How he had wondered about all those women. Who were they, what were they thinking? Did they know that his father had a wife and a son somewhere, waiting for the man they were seducing? Did it mean anything to them? Did they care? What made them give their bodies to a man who only wanted to fuck them and then go home and deny them to his wife?
    He never could understand it.
    The only thing he knew was that he hated each and every one of them.
    Hated them all.
    The bubble burst a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Something as trivial as a little lipstick on a shirt collar. After five years of lies the constant betrayal was revealed, and his father had used Jonas’s knowledge like a scared rabbit to protect himself from her pain. To avoid bearing all the guilt himself.
    She had never been able to forgive either of them.
    She was doubly betrayed.
    The wound they gave her was so deep that it could never heal.
    He had remained in the house in silence after his father moved out, watched her from a distance in the destroyed home. It reeked of shame and hatred. She refused to talk to anyone. In the daytime she seldom left her bedroom, and if she did it was only to go to the toilet. Jonas tried to make up for his betrayal by taking care of shopping for food and other errands, but she never came out to the table when he fixed their meals. Every night at two-thirty he set off on his moped to his job delivering newspapers, and when he came home at six he could see that she had takensomething to eat from the refrigerator. The dishes she used stood carefully washed in the dish rack.
    But she never spoke a word to him.
    ‘I don’t have time to talk now.’
    He cut off the connection and leaned over the steering wheel.
    This is the third embolism she has had in two months. And each time her level of consciousness drops.
    How could she do this to him? What more did she want from him to convince her to stay?
    He wouldn’t be able to stand the loneliness in the flat. Not tonight.
    He looked over his shoulder and backed up. He didn’t know where he was going.
    Only one thing.
    If she didn’t touch him soon, he would go crazy.

E va had a hard time remembering the last time she had left work early, if ever. The biggest advantage of the fact that Henrik worked at home was that he could collect Axel from day-care or dash over there on short notice if the boy was sick. This went without saying ever since she became a partner and also contributed the major part of their common income. But she tried never to get home later than six.
    Today she was going to surprise him and come home earlier than usual.
    No one could claim that she got very much done that day. With her eyes on structural efficiencies and profitability calculations, the