She heard nothing. A week passed. The anxiety and self-reproach made her intensely queasy. The girlfriend chorus told her an opportunity is not that easily lost. If this were worth anything, he would still be there. She had done nothing wrong and he could take the initiative, too, it was not always up to her. The girlfriend chorus comprised the collective good advice and exhortations of her dearest friends. They helped her to endure for a few more hours when the blackness descended like a shroud on life itself.

On the Monday evening of the following week, Hugo was due to give a lecture on the eye’s perception of colors. She had known about this for a long time and he had asked her to come. One of his major interests was color and perception, and how the human eye discerns nuances of shade. It was not her area but his lecture took such a pedagogical approach that she understood what he was saying and felt she had learned something.

Once he had finished speaking and taken the applause, they waved and nodded shyly to each other. She stayed in the background while the audience flocked around him. When he had not disentangled himself after ten minutes, she forced herself to leave the building. They had not arranged to meet afterward and she did not want to expose herself to the answer that he was not available. She must show her independence even at the cost of a missed encounter. She must not be the obedient dog that she felt like. A behavioristically autonomous dog, albeit phenomenological.

The lecture had been held in a school on Banérgatan. She walked as slowly as she could towards Karlavägen to get to the underground. Or the bus. Or anything. She hoped he would catch sight of her when he came out of the front entrance and hurry to catch her up.

She reached the crossroads and turned cautiously to look back. He had not yet emerged. On this street corner the evening was to be decided, she knew, and perhaps their future life, since every meeting could be decisive. Once she went round that corner he could no longer see her and the opportunity of spending the evening together would be lost.

Now she was out of sight. Now it was too late. She went for a prowl, circling the block so she came back to the same corner again. She rounded it for a second time and thought that she could not do another circuit in anticipation of his arrival.

At that moment she heard his voice. He called her name, looked both ways for cars before venturing into the road and cut across on the diagonal, walking fast. Even in the dark, broken up by street lights and snow, she could see his big, warm smile.

“You weren’t going, were you?”

“No. Well yes. I was on my way home.”

“I got stuck with some of the audience. They wanted my view of one thing and another. One has to be pleasant to people who take an interest. What did you think of the lecture? Was it OK?”

He frowned doubtfully, as he did when he was seeking confirmation but also worrying that his contribution had been weak. She praised his lecture in well-rounded sentences with plenty of content-rich bolstering. It seemed to make him happy.

“Shall we go for a bite to eat?” he said.

“Aren’t you going to work? You generally work late.”

She wanted this so much that she felt she had to make him these offers of freedom. They could easily have been interpreted as a polite brush-off. The fact that he did not view them as such meant he must have felt confident of her feelings.

“Haven’t I done my bit with the lecture?” he said. “I thought I’d finished work for the evening.”

“Yes, of course you have.”

“Don’t you ever relax?”

His tone was jocular and gentle. Ester felt light-headed and giddy and said:

“Oh, all the time. I’ll do anything.”

They hunted round for a bit and ended up at a little local restaurant on a side street that crossed Kommendörsgatan. There was a buzz of chatter inside and the windows were steamed up; the volume of the other diners was low enough for them to talk but loud enough for no one to eavesdrop. The decor felt warm compared to the frost outside. There were no free tables but he knew the owner, or perhaps the staff recognized him, and all of a sudden a table for two stood ready, with thick drinking glasses and the cutlery in a ceramic pot; it was that sort of place, down-to-earth.

She perceived them now, and this evening in particular, as entirely equal in their will to be together. The distanced laughs and amused facetiousness were gone. All evasiveness was gone. He wanted something of her. He had moules frites, she had scampi.

“You once told me you mainly ate plants,” he said. “But I see you eating animals all the time.”

“Only invertebrates. It’s hard to restrict yourself to plants when you’re eating out.”

“But there are always plant options, aren’t there?”

“Drowned in cream, milk and eggs. That amounts to the same as eating animals. But I think of shellfish as almost like a plant. A marine plant.”

“Perhaps I ought to go in for plants, too,” he said.

“I think so.”

“Or for only eating invertebrates. But why is someone more worthy of protection just because they have a backbone?”

He had a crack in his lower lip with a thin streak of dried blood. The crack widened as he smiled. It looked rather painful. When she got to her feet to hang up her coat, which had slipped off its hanger, she could feel him following her body with his eyes and how much she liked it.

Between the main course and the dessert he looked at her and said:

“When shall we have that dinner at your place? So I can see your new apartment.”

She gripped her glass, not the stem but the bowl, with both hands and drank some of the wine in order to be utterly present with all her senses at this moment of breakthrough, so as not to sabotage it all again with her words and impetuosity.

“How about Saturday?” he said.

“But I’ve only got one chair,” she said, and was struck at the same instant by the realization that this was not the sort of thing you had to say aloud simply because the thought popped into your head.

“We’ll take it in turns to sit on it,” he said.

The split in his lip opened again.

He reached out his hand and stroked her hair.