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head.
    “I’ll never forget. And I will never stop hating. Damn it, Alice, he murdered our daughter!”
    She sat in silence for a while, resignation in her eyes; she found it difficult to look at him.
    “You don’t understand. It’s not about Elizabeth anymore. You’re shutting her out. You don’t feel anything anymore.”
    She paused, took a deep breath, steeling herself to continue. “Your hate. Your hate is blocking everything out. You can’t love and hate at the same time. That’s just the way it is. And you’ve chosen, Edward. You made your choice a long time ago.”

    “I never got to see him die.”
    He paced backward and forward across the floor, the anger pulsing through him, forcing him to move.
    “We waited. Years we waited. Then he died! Before he was supposed to die. We never got to see it. He decided when it was over. Not us!”
    Alice Finnigan sat on her daughter’s bed. The only child she’d ever had. She would never stop grieving either. But this, Edward’s hate, their marriage that was no longer a marriage—she was about to give up. She had forgotten what it was like to live, for real. A couple more years sullied by this bitterness and she would go, leave behind whatever this was that she no longer recognized.
    “I’m going back to bed. And I want you to come with me.”
    He shook his head.
    “I’ll stay here, Alice.”
    She got up from the bed and was walking toward the door when he asked her to stop.
    “It feels . . . it feels just like when someone breaks off a relationship. Alice, listen to me, just for a minute . You love someone, so you feel you’ve been abandoned. But that’s not really it, that’s not what really bothers you, that’s not what’s so painful that it makes your whole damn body burn. Please listen to me, Alice . It’s the power. The power you no longer have. Being forced to be at the mercy of someone else’s decision. Losing the power to decide yourself when your relationship is over. That’s always what hurts, more than the loss of the love that is no longer there. Do you understand? ”
    He looked at her with pleading eyes. She said nothing.

    “That’s what it feels like. That’s how I’ve felt since he died. If only I could have been there and seen him die, see him gradually lose the ability to breathe, if I’d been able to be there and have closure . . . then I could have moved on, I know it, Alice. But now. It was him who decided. It was him who finished it. Alice, of course you understand, you have to understand, my whole body is burning, burning!”

    She said nothing.
    She looked at him, turned around, and left the room. Edward Finnigan remained standing where he was in the middle of the floor. He heard her closing the door to their marital bedroom.
    He listened to the silence, heard a light wind blowing outside, a branch tapping against the window. He went over and looked out into the dark. Marcusville was sleeping, would sleep for a while yet; it was three hours until dawn.

    IT WAS ALREADY LUNCHTIME WHEN EWERT GRENS RANG FOR A TAXI AND then hurried down the corridors of the police headquarters. He was late and he hated that, she was waiting, she was sitting there, depending on him, they’d made her look nice, brushed her hair like they always did, helped her to put on one of the blue dresses. He asked the driver—a short thin man who laughed a lot and talked for the entire journey about Iran, his home country, how beautiful it was, the life he’d had there and would never have again—Grens asked him after a couple of endless quarter hours on Kungsholmen to drive slightly faster, showed him his ID, said it was a police job.
    Fourteen minutes across town and seventy miles per hour over Lidingö Bridge.
    He asked to get out of the car a short walk away from the big building. He needed to gather his thoughts. She was waiting for him.
    He had been well and truly battered. First had to get rid of the man who had slurred in Finnish. Blood