Page 102 of The Living and the Dead

Filip raised an eyebrow, as if this were a scenario he hadn’t imagined. He seemed to be considering what it meant as he finished his cigarette. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“You know Rasmusgården? There’s a spot there for me, if I want it; it would probably be good for me.”

“Where is that?”

“Near Falkenberg, I think. You get to spend a lot of time outside, like on the grounds, I mean. Did you hear about the guy who disappeared, by the way?”

“Who?”

“That guy they’re looking for, Hampus Olsson, he went to our school. I saw it in the paper last week.”

“Oh. Yeah, I read something about that. Did you know each other?”

Filip shook his head.

“Not really, it was more like he was just there. But it’skymigas hell, isn’t it? When people disappear. Maybe it’s actually better to know that they’re dead.”

Sander realized he was bracing himself. As if his body needed to make him say something before he figured out what it was.

“I’m sorry,” Sander said. “About what happened, with Mikael and all. I don’t think I ever offered my condolences before.”

Filip took one last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out with his shoe. Exhaled smoke. Blinked, then touched his lip again. He stood up, still unsteady. “I think I’ll go back down again.”

“With those guys? Why?”

“Gotta do something. I’m thirsty. Take care of yourself, Sander.”

“You too, Filip.”

Sander was reeling when he got back to the student apartment. As soon as he took off his shoes and greeted Felicia, he went to the bathroom and took a long shower. The water washed away not only the physical traces of his encounter with Filip but also, he told himself, the remains of something more difficult to articulate.

75

Olivia was—for lack of a better word—different. She had grown up in one of the fancy houses on the hill by the hospital, and when Sander began to chat with her one night when he was out, he realized there was something inside him that had never been fulfilled. For the first time in a long time, he thought about the departure that had never come to pass, the person he could have become. Maybe he could still change his life; after all, he was barely twenty. The idea took root in him, and in Olivia’s presence everything seemed new, everything was politics and literature and art, a glimpse of a world he wondered if he would one day be able to make his own. Maybe.

The temptation proved too great. That was perhaps an odd way to put it, but that was how it felt.

In any case, the consequences were perfectly clear, and cold as ice: he began to cheat on Felicia.

Yet he was crushed when his unfaithfulness came to light and Felicia left him.

The hatred, if that’s what it had really been, vanished and was replaced by something deeper, murkier. Perhaps it wasn’t until that point that he understood it was real, what he’d done, and that he was about to lose her. In its early stages, infidelity takes place within a fragile membrane, in a space the everyday world can’t reach. What happens in there will never get out, you tell yourself. Maybe it wasn’t evenSander himself in there with Olivia, just someone very much like him. He often thought so after the fact, when he looked at his reflection and wondered who he was seeing.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said on the day Felicia moved out, back home to her mother.

Tears in her eyes, she laughed in resignation, apparently amazed at what an idiot he was. “Sander, it’s not just that you slept with someone else. You lied about it for months. I can’t stay.”

In that moment, he hated her. Not Felicia—he loved her more than ever—but Olivia. Suddenly she was distorted, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong, all the twisted parts inside him. For a while he avoided her, stopped answering when she called, and stayed away from places she frequented.

Killian was dead; Felicia was gone. Sander entered adult life all on his own, and slowly he sank through the darkness toward the bottom.

When he heard, two months on, that Felicia had started seeing someone else, jealousy began to eat at him, moving through his blood like poison. But it was never pure jealousy; it was always mixed with guilt. This was his fault, all of it. If you traced the events far enough back in time, you would never find any other origin.

His nights were sleepless and his days endless. Everything was falling apart. He loved Felicia. He told himself that his love for her was one of the few constants he’d ever had in life. His happiest moments had been shared with her. How could she not feel the same, despite what he’d done?

He’d had years to prove how much he loved her. Now, without warning, it was too late.