Her stomach was rumbling unhappily. All she’d had for breakfast was a cup of unsweetened black coffee, so she’d burn more calories during the walk. Images of food flashed through her head like a gastronomic kaleidoscope. If she went home, she wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to raid the larder and stuff herself. She speeded up. She was heading along Karlav?gen toward Humleg?rden. She grimaced when her back started to feel horrible and sweaty. She couldn’t stand perspiration. But, as Alice often said, “Sweat’s just fat crying.” Not that she’d ever seen the tiniest bead of sweat on Alice.

The nineteenth-century buildings loomed above her, steadfast and immovable. The sky was bright blue and the sun glinted off the freshly fallen snow that hadn’t yet had time to turn gray. In spite of the sweat, she felt more positive than she had for months. Jack’s sudden invitation to go on a date was a turning point. And she was going to make sure it really was a turning point.

She bore so much of the responsibility for the stagnation of their relationship. It was time to get back to being the person he wanted her to be. This was the dawn of a new era in their marriage.

She made up her mind once and for all to turn down Chris’s suggestion of a trip together. She was needed at home, and it would be selfish to go off for a pointless weekend away. She was avoiding Chris’s calls, aware of how Chris would react and what she’d say.

Faye quickened her pace. She thought she could feel the pounds falling off her, step by step, ounce by ounce. The horrible sweat was soaked up by her clothes.

A group of pupils from ?stra Real School were smoking furtively by the wine-red wall. Two girls and two boys. Gray smoke trailed from their mouths and noses when they laughed. They didn’t seem to have a single worry in the world. A few years ago, in a different time, a different life, that could easily have been her, Jack, Henrik, and Chris.

Jack, the easygoing joker. The carefree golden boy who always had some party invitation burning a hole in his pocket. A black belt in social activities and making people laugh. Henrik was the strategist and thinker. He came from straitened circumstances in one of Stockholm’s suburbs and had his head for learning to thank for the fact that he had got out of there. He had studied industrial economics at the Royal Institute of Technology while simultaneously studying at the School of Economics.

Faye walked past T?sse’s. Pastries, tarts, cinnamon buns, piles of them in the windows. Her mouth started to water and she forced herself to look away. She speeded up. Fled. She took a brief pause at Nybrogatan. Opened the door to Café Mocco and ordered green tea. No sugar. It tasted disgusting and bitter without anything to sweeten it, but she drank it nevertheless because she had read somewhere that green tea helped burn calories. She looked through a pile of magazines and found last week’s Dagens Industri weekend supplement, with Henrik and Jack on the cover. It was a fancy photo shoot. They were sitting on an old-fashioned motorbike and sidecar. Sunglasses and leather jackets. Jack on the bike, Henrik in the sidecar with an old-fashioned leather pilot’s cap on his head. Broad smiles, happy expressions.

THE BILLION-KRONOR EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was the headline. Faye opened the paper and leafed through to the interview. The reporter, Ivan Uggla, had spent a whole day following them around. It was odd that Jack hadn’t mentioned anything about it to her. He gave a lot of interviews, but rarely on this scale.

The article opened with Jack in their office on Blasieholmen. He told a story about all the hard work he’d put in to get the company off the ground. He said he had been living in Bergshamra, studying during the day and working on his business plan at night. At first the idea was for Compare to be a voracious telemarketing operation.

“If we were going to succeed, I knew I would have to sacrifice everything for the business and Henrik. There was no time, no money for anything but work, work, and more work, both with Compare, and to earn a living. If you want to win big, you have to play for high stakes.”

The truth was that Jack hadn’t had to work at all except on Compare, because she had abandoned her studies to support him, and spent her days wiping tables at the Café Madeleine. But they had come up with this PR strategy together. For the good of the business.

The interview went on in much the same vein. In 2005 Compare switched from being the country’s most successful telemarketing business to an investment company. They bought smaller businesses, made them more efficient, and sold them for huge profits. Often they broke them up and sold the parts for more than the whole was worth. That meant they had trodden on a fair few toes over the years, but their profits spoke for themselves, and in a world where results were the only thing that mattered, Jack Adelheim and Henrik Bergendahl were declared geniuses by a unanimous business community.

Some time later they sold off almost everything in order to invest in electricity suppliers and businesses in the service sector: private homes for the elderly, sheltered housing, and schools. With the same result. Everything Jack and Henrik touched seemed to turn to gold, and everyone wanted to be associated with the young Midases. They kept the name from the early years, the one Faye had come up with. You didn’t change the basics when the dice kept landing on six.

Those early years, when Faye had supported Jack while simultaneously helping lay the foundations for Compare, had been erased. Sometimes she wondered if Jack and Henrik even remembered that, or if they had come to believe in their revised version of the past. Her part in the story didn’t fit the media image of the two young, daring, indomitable entrepreneurs, Jack and Henrik. The backstory dynamic was also so perfect that she had actually pointed it out at the time. Jack with his aristocratic background, his good looks, and dandyish style, Henrik from a working-class family in the suburbs, handsome in a rougher way, the personification of a man who had worked his way to the top. The perfect combination. It made sense for Faye to stay in the background. So as not to complicate the simple media message.

The reporter had gone for a morning run on Djurg?rden with Jack. Ivan Uggla gave an enthusiastic account of how many miles and how far they had run. And as they ran Jack had laughed off speculation that Compare was about to have an initial public offering.

The last page had a picture of Jack taken in the office. He was bent over his desk, deep in conversation, as he pointed to a document. Beside him, closest to the camera, stood Ylva Lehndorf, dressed in a pale-blue pencil skirt, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail.

Ylva had made her name in publishing. She’d managed to turn figures that were deeply in the red back to black. She had made the business more efficient, had come up with new solutions, had challenged those who insisted “but this is what we’ve always done.” She changed structures and broke down walls. Faye had met her at a party three years ago and Ylva had mentioned that she was looking for a fresh challenge. Her ambition and quick wits had impressed Faye, and two weeks later, on Faye’s recommendation, Jack had offered her a job. One year later she had been appointed finance director of Compare. It looked good to have a woman in senior management, as Faye had pointed out to Jack. It couldn’t be her, because they had made joint decision that she should stay at home with Julienne for those first few years.

Faye ran her finger across the picture, along Ylva’s figure, down her spine, her backside, her thin, suntanned legs, all the way down to her black pumps. She was everything Faye had dreamed of becoming. The age gap separating them was only five years, but it might as well have been twenty. And instead of being in the heat of the action in an office, beautiful and successful, here she was sitting in Mocco, drinking unpleasant green tea and dreaming about the Danish pastries on the counter. She closed the newspaper unhappily. She had made her choice. For Jack. For their family.

—

Faye was lying on a yoga mat in a set of new exercise clothes doing the pissing dog in front of the television when Jack came home. He tossed his briefcase aside and stopped behind her. The room filled with the smell of cologne and alcohol. Faye finished her exercise, got to her feet, and walked up to him. When she tried to give him a kiss he turned his head away.

“Did you have a good time?” she said. The knot in her stomach was back.

Jack snatched the remote from the coffee table and switched off the television, and the YouTube video of yoga for beginners disappeared.

“Did you ask John Descentis to play at my party?” he said.

“I thought—”

“He’s a drunk, Faye. This isn’t my graduation party you’re organizing. There are going to be clients there. Investors. Relatives who have looked down on me as a loser all my life because of my father. This is the night when they’re finally going to see how far I’ve come. See that I’m nothing like my useless father!”

He was breathing hard, and his voice had risen to a falsetto.

“And you go and invite John Descentis to provide the entertainment. Like we were some sort of fucking white trash.”

Faye backed away a few steps.

“You’re always listening to him. You’ve got all his albums. I thought you’d—”