Peder leant back in his desk chair and gave a dejected sigh. It hadn’t been particularly great last night, either. He hadn’t got home until ten, despite having made up his mind to get back earlier, and he’d found Ylva sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of tea. She’d been at home all day, but she was still feeling tired. For some reason, Peder found that infuriating, and had to make a real effort not to say anything critical or unkind. He made himself repeat the same old mantra that had been going round and round inside his head for the last ten or eleven months:
She’s tired; she’s not well. She can’t help it. And if we take it slowly, one step at a time, she might improve. Things can only get better.
Until about a year before, Peder had been one of those people who really enjoy their lives to the full. He considered it almost a duty for anyone lucky enough to have a healthy body and a decent situation in life. He enjoyed going to work every day. He enjoyed life in general, and a career that was finally taking off, and he enjoyed his Ylva and the thought of the family they were about to become. In short, he was a secure, straightforward, positive and harmonious person. Happy and outgoing. That was how he saw himself, anyway.
But things changed when Ylva gave birth to the twins, their first children. Life as Peder knew it evaporated, never to return. The boys were immediately put in a special care incubator, and Ylva disappeared into a vast darkness called ‘post-natal depression’. In place of the life he had before, Peder got a different one: full of dissatisfaction and regret, of prescription drugs and long-term sick leave, and constant phone calls asking his mother to look after the children again. What was more, he had to cope with the misery of an everyday life with a total lack of sex. Peder felt instinctively that this was a life he had neither asked for nor deserved.
‘Ylva is so depressed that she doesn’t feel she wants any kind of physical relationship with you,’ the elderly, not to say ancient, doctor had explained to Peder. ‘You’ll have to be patient.’
And Peder really had been patient. He tried to think of Ylva as incurably ill, almost the way he thought of Jimmy, with no prospect of getting better. Peder – and his mother, he mustn’t forget – took over all the day-to-day running of things at home. Ylva slept her way through September, October and November. She cried all through December, except for Christmas itself, when she pulled herself together for a day for the family’s sake. In January she was a little better, but Peder still had to be patient. In mid-February she had another setback and was down all month. In March things improved a bit again. But by then it was already more or less too late.
In March, the Södermalm police, where Peder was working at the time, held its big spring party, and Peder spent half the evening having sex with his colleague Pia Nordh. A delicious relief. Horribly sinful. Totally unforgivable. And yet – in Peder’s world – entirely understandable.
Afterwards he felt the deepest and most awful remorse he had ever known. But then, as Ylva gradually got better and better, and the days longer and longer, Peder started to forgive himself. He had a right to a bit of physical pleasure now and then, after the hell he’d been through. He had the solidarity and support of some of his colleagues, who knew his secret. It was only natural for him to fancy screwing someone else. Not all that often, but occasionally. He felt sorry for himself, thought he deserved a better fate. Bloody hell, he wasn’t even thirty-five. So he got together with Pia every so often. The damage was already done, after all.
He stopped like a shot when she asked him if he was thinking of leaving Ylva, though. Was she crazy? Leave Ylva for some colleague dying for a fuck? Pia obviously had no idea about what was important in life, thought Peder, and dumped her by text message.
Soon after that, he got a new job, moving on from the uniformed branch to become a DI – sooner in his career than most people. He was allocated to the investigation team of the almost legendary Alex Recht, and threw himself wholeheartedly into the new job. At home, to Peder’s genuine delight, Ylva started talking about the future, and how it would be in the autumn, when Peder was to take a spell of paternity leave, and then the boys would start at nursery; and they all went to Majorca for the last week in May. Peder and Ylva made love for the first time in over ten months, and after that some things seemed to start going back to more like what Peder thought of as normal.
‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get everything back to how it was,’ his mother warned him. ‘Ylva’s still sensitive.’
Peder actually felt like saying that Ylva was still bordering on the unrecognizable, but the week away had given him new hope. Ylva was gradually showing more sides of herself that he could recognize. It really would be risking everything to tell her about the affair with Pia Nordh, he told himself. And anyway, he had so deserved a bit of fun just then.
Now it was the end of July. Two months since Majorca. He still had Pia’s number if he felt miserable again. He hoped he wouldn’t need to use it, but you never knew.
There were times when he simply could not accept his situation, times when it was all too much. The evening he screwed Pia Nordh had been one of those. Last night had been another one.
‘Have you been working all this time?’ Ylva asked.
Peder tensed. What the hell was this? An accusation?
‘Yes, there’s a kid gone missing.’
‘I saw,’ said Ylva, looking up from her teacup. ‘I didn’t know you were on that case.’
Peder took a beer from the fridge and a glass from one of the cupboards.
‘She didn’t go missing until this afternoon, before that there was no case. And now I’m telling you that I’m working on it.’
The cold beer chilled his hand as he filled the glass.
‘You could have rung,’ Ylva said.
Peder lost his temper.
‘But I did,’ he sputtered, and gulped down some of his beer.
‘Yes, but not until six,’ Ylva said wearily. ‘And you said you’d be late, but you’d be back by eight. And now it’s ten. Don’t you realize how worried I’ve been?’
‘I didn’t know you cared where I was,’ Peder said curtly, and regretted it the same instant.
Sometimes, when he was tired, stupid things like that just slipped out. He met Ylva’s eyes over his beer glass, saw the tears come to her eyes. She got up and went out of the kitchen.
‘For fuck’s sake, Ylva, I’m sorry,’ he called after her, keeping his voice down.
Keeping his voice down so as not to wake the children, sorry to try to get her back in a good mood. There was always somebody else whose needs he was supposed to prioritize over his own.
Peder felt anxiety and his guilty conscience clawing at him as he sat there at his desk. He simply didn’t understand how it could all have turned out so wrong when he got home. He’d rung, hadn’t he? The only reason he hadn’t rung again was that he hadn’t wanted to wake the children. Or he tried to convince himself that was the main reason, at least.