Faye didn’t know what to say. She just put her hand on top of Johan and Chris’s interwoven hands.

“At least she’s not in any pain,” Johan went on. The words came out jerkily. “What will they do with her when she’s gone? I don’t want her to be taken off to the basement like some dead animal and left there all on her own.”

He fell silent.

Faye leaned back. Her chair creaked.

“Can I have a few minutes with her on my own?” she whispered.

Johan flinched. Then nodded.

He stood up, put his hand on her shoulder, then walked slowly out of the room. Carefully, as if she were worried about waking Chris, Faye moved to the chair he had been sitting on. The seat felt warm.

Faye leaned closer to Chris, her lips nudging her ear.

“It hurts so much, Chris,” she said, fighting back tears. “It hurts so much that I’m going to get old without you. That all those dreams we had, of moving to the Mediterranean, opening a restaurant, sitting outside playing backgammon, getting blue-rinsed hair . . . that none of that’s going to happen. Right now it feels like I’ll never be happy again. But I promise you that I’ll try. I know you’ll be angry with me if I don’t . . .”

She cleared her throat, breathed air into her lungs.

“What I want to say is that I’ll never forget you. Being your friend for the past sixteen years has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sorry I’ve never told you the truth about who I am. About what I am. I was scared you wouldn’t understand. I should have trusted you. I should have told you everything. But I’m going to tell you now, in case you can hear me . . .”

In a whisper she told Chris her secrets. About the accident, about Sebastian, about her mom and dad. About Matilda and the darkness. She didn’t hold anything back.

When she had finished she stroked Chris’s hair and touched her lips to her cheek. That was her last goodbye.

She fetched Johan. Then they sat in silence as life left Chris. Seven hours later she drew her last breath.

—

When Faye left Chris’s room Johan was still sitting motionless with his forehead on his wife’s cold hand. She took one of the big bouquets of flowers that had filled the room with her. She got in the car, Googled an address, and started to drive. Her eyes were dry now. There were no tears left. She was empty, dried up. Her secrets were safe with Chris.

She parked under the shade of a large oak tree in the parking lot and walked toward the entrance. The door wasn’t locked. She looked around warily. The lobby and corridor were empty. She could hear voices from a room farther along the corridor, it sounded like the staff was on a coffee break.

She counted the doors. The third door on the right, Kerstin had said. Without asking why Faye wanted to know. She walked quickly toward it, pushed the door open firmly but silently and stepped inside. She didn’t feel scared. Just empty. She felt the loss of Chris as bluntly as if she’d had one of her arms amputated.

She had been hiding her face behind the bouquet of flowers in case anyone came into the corridor. She put it down on the chest of drawers to the side of the door. Yellow roses. Very apt. She knew yellow roses signified death, something their sender must not have been aware of.

She heard deep breathing from the bed. She crept toward the top end. The blinds were closed but faint light was filtering into the room. Ragnar looked weak. Pathetic. But Kerstin had told Faye enough about him for her not to be fooled. He was a bastard. A bastard who didn’t deserve to live, not when Chris’s body was growing cold in another hospital bed.

Faye reached carefully for a pillow lying a little way down the bed. The sound of loud laughter in the corridor made her start, but it soon faded away. The only sounds were Ragnar’s breathing and the ticking of an old clock.

She looked around the room with the pillow in her hands. Impersonal. No photographs, no personal belongings. Sun-bleached walls and a tatty plastic rug on the floor. The old man’s smell hung in the air. That stale, slightly cloying smell of old people when they fell ill.

Slowly she raised the pillow and held it above Ragnar’s face. She felt no uncertainty. No anxiety. He had reached the end of his time on earth. He was nothing but a lump of flesh, dead weight, another evil man who had left women scarred and crying in his wake.

She leaned forward. Used her whole weight to press the pillow over his face, blocking his mouth and nose. Ragnar jerked a bit when he found he couldn’t breathe. But there was no strength in his movements. Just some feeble twitching in his hands and feet. Faye barely had to exert herself in the end.

After a while he lay still. No more twitching. No movement. Faye held the pillow in place until she was quite certain Kerstin’s husband was dead. Then she put the pillow down on the bed, picked up the bouquet of yellow roses, and crept cautiously out.

Only when she was in her car driving back to the city did her tears for Chris start to flow.

FJ?LLBACKA—THEN

I LOOKED AT THE FURROWS on the policeman’s face. His expression was one of sympathy, but he wasn’t seeing me, not the real me. He saw a gangly teenager who had lost her brother and now probably her mother as well. I could tell he wanted to put his hand on top of mine as we sat there at the kitchen table and was grateful that he didn’t. I’ve never liked being touched by strangers.

I had called the police at five o’clock in the morning and they took Dad away an hour or so later. I was so tired I felt like laying my head on the tabletop and shutting my eyes.

“When did the noise stop?”

I forced myself to stay awake, to listen to his questions. To provide whatever answers I needed to.

“I don’t know, sometime around three, maybe? I’m not sure, though.”

“Why did you get up so early?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I always get up early. And I . . . I realized that something had happened . . . Mom would never leave the house as early as that.”

He nodded seriously. Again with that look that told me he wanted to comfort me. I hoped he would continue to resist the urge.

I didn’t need comforting. They had taken Dad away.

“We’re still looking, but I’m afraid we’re very concerned that something may have happened to your mom. There’s some evidence to suggest that. And from what I understand, your dad has a history of . . . violence.”

I had to make an effort not to laugh. Not because there was anything remotely funny about the situation, but because it was so absurd. A history of violence. Such a bloodless phrase, such a concise summary of the years of terror within these walls. A history of violence. Yes, that was one way of putting it.

I knew what they wanted, though, so I just nodded.

“There’s still a chance that we might find her,” the policeman said. “Unharmed.”

And now it came. The hand on my hand. Sympathetic. Warm. How little he knew. How little he understood. I had to make a real effort not to snatch my hand away.

The weeks passed. The newspapers were told that Jack had been fired. The news that the company had a new owner who was promising to get to grips with things and conduct a thorough ethical review of the business meant that Compare’s shares had risen to more normal levels again, while Jack sank ever deeper and seemed completely lost. It was as if time had suddenly decided to intervene in Jack’s life: he aged, his hair turned gray quicker than he could dye it, and his movements became slower, wearier.

He tried to put a brave face on things. After all, he was still a multimillionaire. He assured the business press that he would soon be back. But he would call Faye at night, clearly drunk, babbling about the old days. About the people he had let down, about Chris, about all the sacrifices he’d made.

Faye managed to show sympathy but thought he was pathetic. She detested weakness, and he was the one who had taught her that. Jack’s meltdown merely made it easier to crush him.

He broke off his friendship with Henrik because he believed his friend had betrayed him by remaining on the board of Compare. Neither Henrik, Jack, or anyone else on the board had any idea that she was the new majority shareholder in Compare because she only communicated with them via her British lawyers.

It was time to take the final step. It was Ylva’s turn now.

Her tears for Chris were gone. It was strange how quickly things came to seem normal. She thought about her, missed her every day, every hour, but she had accepted the fact that she was gone. Accepted that nothing was going to bring Chris back.

Maybe Chris would have tried to stop her if she’d known what Faye was planning. Now she’d never know.

—

Jack was standing outside the door when Faye and Julienne came home with the groceries. When she texted that afternoon to ask if he’d like to come over he had accepted almost instantly.

“Hello, my darlings,” Jack said, clumsily wrapping one arm around Julienne. “I thought you were two angels walking toward me.”

“Flatterer,” Faye said as he pecked her cheek.