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prepared him for the sight of the woman leaning towards a man who shows every sign of being a reporter. Dark corduroy jacket, suitably arrogant presence, the ‘did-everyone-see-the-scoop-I-pulled-off-yesterday’ expression. He sports designer stubble which makes his face look more sallow than it is. His thinning hair is gelled and swept back. But it’s the woman. Henning had never imagined he would see her, here, on his first day back.
    Nora Klemetsen. Henning’s ex-wife. Jonas’s mother.
    He hasn’t spoken to her since she visited him at Sunnaas Rehabilitation Centre. He forgets when it was. Perhaps he has suppressed it. But he’ll never forget her face. She couldn’t bear to look at him. He didn’t blame her. She had every right. He had been looking after Jonas, and he had failed to save him.
    Their son.
    Their lovely, lovely son.
    They had already separated at that point. She only visited him at the hospital to finalise the divorce, to get his signature. She got it. No ulterior motives, no questions, no conditions. In a way, he was relieved. He couldn’t have coped with her in his life – a constant reminder of his own shortcomings. Every glance, every conversation would have been tarred with that brush.
    They hadn’t said much to each other. He was desperate to tell her everything, tell her what he had done or failed to do, what he remembered of that night, but every time he breathed in and got ready to speak, his mouth dried up and he couldn’t utter a single word. Later, when he closed his eyes and daydreamed, he talked like a machine gun; Nora nodded, she understood, and afterwards she came to him and let him cry himself out in her lap while she ran her fingers through his hair.
    He has been thinking he should try again, the next time he saw her, but now is clearly not the time. He is working. She is working. She is standing very close to some reporter – and she is laughing.
    Bollocks.
    Henning met Nora Klemetsen while he worked for Kapital and she was a rookie business journalist on Aftenposten . They ran into each other at a press conference. It was a run of the mill event, no drama, merely the announcement of some company’s annual results with so little headline-grabbing potential that they only warranted a paragraph in Dagens Næringsliv and a right-hand column on page 17 in Finansavisen the next day. He happened to sit down next to Nora. He was there to profile one of the senior executives who would be retiring shortly. They yawned their way through the presentation, started giggling at their respective and increasingly hopeless attempts at disguising their boredom, and decided to go for a drink afterwards to recover.
    They were both in relationships; she was living – semi-seriously – with a stockbroker, while he had an on-off thing going with a stuck-up corporate lawyer. But that first evening was so enjoyable, so free from awkwardness that they went for another drink the next time they found themselves covering the same story. He had had many girlfriends, but he had never known someone who was so easy to be with. Their tastes were compatible in so many ways, it bordered on scary.
    They both liked grainy mustard with their sausages, not the usual bottled Idun rubbish. Neither of them liked tomatoes all that much, but they both loved ketchup. They liked the same type of films, and never had protracted arguments in the video store or outside the cinema. Neither of them liked spending the summer in hot foreign places when Norway offered rock faces and fresh prawns. Friday was Taco day. Eating anything else on a Friday was simply unthinkable.
    And, gradually, they both realised they couldn’t live without each other.
    Three and half years later they were married, exactly nine months afterwards Jonas arrived and they were as happy as two sleep-deprived career people in their late twenties can be, when their life is a plank full of splinters. Not enough sleep, too few breaks, minimum understanding