Faye barely had time to get back inside the house before her mobile started to ring. That evening she heard from another four dog owners asking if she had time to take their dogs on. Her gut feeling had been right, there was a definite need for this service.

She could hear clattering from the kitchen downstairs. Faye had offered to cook dinner, but Kerstin insisted on doing it. But she had at least agreed to let Faye pay two thousand kronor into a shared grocery pot. That was a solution they were both happy with.

Faye opened her laptop, clicked to bring up Excel and made a simple schedule for her future activities. The very next day she had two walks booked. She was charging one hundred and twenty kronor per hour. When the spreadsheet was finished she registered a private company in her name. She had already decided on the name in readiness for the day when she turned the business into a corporation.

—

The rain was pouring down, creeping under her raincoat, getting in everywhere. Faye couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this wet. Zorro and Alfred were tugging at their leashes, the rain didn’t seem to bother them.

If anyone had told her a month ago that she’d be celebrating her birthday in the pouring rain with two golden retrievers she’d have thought they were mad.

But life was full of surprises. Faye of all people had learned that lesson.

Her routines had changed entirely over the past few weeks. She got up at five thirty every morning, showered, ate a breakfast consisting of a boiled egg with smoked fish roe, then headed out. The two dog walks per day had quickly become eight, and some of the dog owners were booking her for two walks a day. Kerstin had no objection to her volunteering to dog sit some evenings as well.

Faye sneezed. She was looking forward to getting home and sinking into a warm bath, like she did every evening after the last walk.

“Okay, that’ll have to do, boys,” she said as the skies opened up.

After handing the dogs back to their owner, Mrs. L?nnberg, Faye hurried home. Her feet hadn’t felt this tired in years.

She opened the door gently so as not to disturb Kerstin, who usually sat and read at this time of day, and went carefully up the stairs. When she reached the bathroom she discovered that the bath had already been run. There was a vase of handpicked flowers from the garden on the sink.

Kerstin appeared behind her.

“Thank you,” Faye whispered.

“I thought you might need it,” she said. “There’s . . . I got you a little something. A present. It’s on the kitchen table.”

“How did you know?”

“That it’s your birthday? It’s in the rental agreement. I may be old, but I’m not blind. Now get yourself in that bath.”

When Faye got out of the bath her stomach was howling with hunger. She crept down the stairs, opened the fridge and took out some boiled eggs, sliced them and spread fish roe over them. She sat down at the kitchen table with her crispbread sandwiches on a side plate and opened the green parcel.

It was a pair of black Nikes.

Tears welled up in Faye’s eyes.

She put the shoes on and walked around the living room. They felt soft, perfectly molded to her feet. She stopped outside Kerstin’s bedroom door. There was a crack of light beneath it, so she knocked.

Kerstin was lying in bed with a book. Faye sat down on the edge of the bed and lifted her feet so Kerstin could see the shoes.

“They’re perfect—thank you!”

Kerstin closed her book and rested it on her stomach.

“Have I told you how I met Ragnar?”

Faye shook her head.

“I was his secretary. He was married. Ten years older than me, a company director, a millionaire, with a smile that made me feel faint. He took me out for fancy lunches, gave me flowers, deluged me with compliments.”

She paused. Ran one hand over the covers.

“I fell in love. So did he. In the end he left his wife, she took the children and moved out of their house. And I moved in. I gave up my job. Spent my days playing tennis, running the household, looking after Ragnar. We went traveling each summer, Spain, Greece. One year we went to the United States. Four years passed. Five. Six. I didn’t even have the sense to feel ashamed of what I’d done to his ex-wife. I didn’t have the courage to protest when I saw the way he treated her and their children. On the contrary, I was happy not to have to share his attention with them. I persuaded myself that they deserved it. That they had never loved him like I did.”

She ran her tongue across her bottom lip.

“All the rest of it . . . that sort of crept up on me. The darkness. The violence. The first few times I thought they were isolated incidents. He came up with excuses. Explanations. And I was only too happy to accept them. But gradually it increased. And I couldn’t get out. Don’t ask me why—I can’t explain it to myself, let alone anyone else.”

Kerstin coughed behind a clenched hand.

“I didn’t have the courage to walk out,” she went on. Her voice was simultaneously weak and strong. “Even though I grew to hate him with every fibre of my body. I could live with the affairs. That was nothing compared to the beatings my body was taking. To what he took from me. We . . . I was expecting a child. But he beat me up and I miscarried. Since then I’ve wished him dead. Every waking second I dream about him dying. Stopping breathing. When he had the stroke at first I wasn’t going to call an ambulance. I sat and looked at him lying there on the floor rolling about. His eyes were pleading for help. I enjoyed seeing him so weak, in need of my help. I was thinking of letting him lie there, but one of the neighbors had seen we were home and rang the bell. I had to go and answer, and in the end I had to call an ambulance. I played the role of shocked wife well, but when they were lifting Ragnar into the ambulance I could see in his eyes that he understood. And that he’d kill me if he ever got well again.”

Faye didn’t know if Kerstin was expecting her to be shocked, but nothing about male brutality surprised her anymore.

Kerstin adjusted a stray lock of white hair.

“I know who you are,” she said. “And I understand what’s happened. You were married to Jack Adelheim.”

Faye nodded.

Kerstin picked at the bedspread. Then she looked up at Faye.

“I’ve figured out that you’re up to something. I’ve seen you with your notebooks, your lists and sketches for the future. Let me know what I can do, and I’ll help you any way I can.”

Faye made herself more comfortable on the bed. Leaned back against the headboard and looked at her new landlady. What Kerstin had told her was terrible, but it came as no surprise; Faye had already guessed as much. The fact that Kerstin was a fellow sufferer was beyond doubt, but could she trust her? Faye knew she was going to have to rely on other people’s help, and she had made up her mind to trust the sisterhood. Though she wasn’t so na?ve as to believe she could trust every woman, in the older woman’s voice she recognized the same darkness as her own. So she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then explained how she was thinking of crushing Jack.

The plan had taken shape during all those hours of dog walking, where she was able to plot her strategy calmly and methodically.

Kerstin listened and nodded, occasionally smiling.

“I’m good at organization. I could be quite useful,” she said.

Calm. Matter-of-fact. Then she picked up her book and carried on reading. Faye took that as a signal to leave the room.

Things had started to move. There was no way back. And she was no longer alone.

Faye developed her activities with Kerstin’s help. The months flew by and the business grew. They brought in two women as part-time employees, expanded the area they operated in, and rearranged the basement so they could have dogs stay overnight.

Kerstin helped Faye with the administrative side of things, and anything she didn’t know after so many years as a housewife she looked up on the internet. She was a marvel of efficiency, and with her help the figures were soon in the black. It took time to build up the capital that Faye needed, she had set herself a target of two hundred thousand, but forced herself to be patient. It would just have to take as long as it took.

Of course there was no way she could build up enough capital merely through walking dogs, but she invested every spare krona. She read the financial papers and followed all the major news media to keep herself up-to-date, and was able to use that knowledge in her investments. She had a natural gift for finance, but didn’t take any great risks. She stuck at a level where her capital was slowly but surely growing larger.