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overwhelmed her. Nothing had been too expensive, no road too far to travel, no phone conversation too long. Eagerly, almost furiously, he had swept her up. Beyond all doubt and all suspicion, as if they were running a sprint. She interpreted his haste as a proof of genuine passion. The days were filled with surprises, and at night he slept close to her. As though he were a child afraid that she might disappear if she didn’t hold on to him. His glowing devotion made her dizzy, and after having been rejected and dumped she now felt restored, the centrepiece of Jan-Erik Ragnerfeldt’s universe.
    A little over a year after they met, Ellen was born.
    With that result achieved, Louise realised that he had been courting her the same way an estate agent impatiently hurries a prospective buyer through the rooms of a dilapidated house.
    She went into the bathroom. Stuck her hand in the shower, turned on the water, and stood on the pleasantly warm floor waiting for the water to heat up. The bathroom had recently been renovated. Jan-Erik had given her carte blanche to make it just the way she wanted. She would have preferred to discuss how they would like it, but Jan-Erik hadn’t had time, and she didn’t know him well enough to know what he liked. It was a vicious circle. Their outgoings demanded that he work a lot, but the more he worked, the greater their outgoings seemed to pile up. She looked at the three specially commissioned nameplates above the towel racks: Ellen, Jan- Erik and Louise. If she didn’t know better, she might think that those three names belonged together in one family.
    She hung up her dressing gown and stepped into the shower.
    Maybe Jan-Erik had seen her as an attractive prize. She had just had her fifteen minutes of fame when he whirled into her life. At least in the direct spotlight that prevailed in the world of high culture, the world to which the subsequent disintegration had shown it was so important for him to belong. After the wearisome separation from her by now ex-boyfriend, she had suddenly felt a need to write her story, even though she’d never before seriously concerned herself with words. In a moment of self-confidence she had sent off her efforts to a publisher. The poetry collection had attracted great attention, and the now yellowing clippings from the newspapers’ cultural pages were filled with words of praise. An exceptional debut, they had written. A promise for the future, she had been called. But during the thirteen years that had passed, both her existence and her writing skills had fallen into oblivion. If she had believed in her naïve stupidity that her new surname would help her literary ambitions, she soon realised that she was mistaken. Her creation had been sucked into the black hole that surrounded the name of Axel Ragnerfeldt; any attention that might compete was effectively shooed off into the wings.
    She turned off the tap and reached for the towel. She dried herself and methodically rubbed in moisturising lotion.
    With hindsight it was difficult to discern the various twists and turns. Or know which tiny steps had inevitably led them to where they found themselves now. She believed that Jan-Erik’s attention had faded at the same rate as her name had vanished from the newspapers. Maybe it was a trophy he sought, something to decorate the Ragnerfeldt family living room. But when the plain pine of her talent was revealed it turned out to clash with the elegant mahogany of the bookshelf. Once the centre of Jan-Erik Ragnerfeldt’s universe, she had been relegated to the caretaker in his empire.
    She looked at her breasts in the mirror. Round and just the right size, precisely as she had always wanted them to be. The scars were no longer visible. She had got a goodprice because it was a friend’s husband who had operated on her, and Jan-Erik didn’t know a thing about it. Why should she tell him? Her breasts were about as interesting to him as the boy next door’s