JUST AS SHE had feared, the days dragged while she awaited her reunion with Peter. During the daytime, she wandered around like a zombie, simply longing for the working day to be over despite the nights being even worse. She would lie there sleeplessly, tossing and turning, her guilty conscience taking a stranglehold on her and refusing to let go.
Six million kronor—was it really worth it? To slip along the walls like a shadow, the bags under her eyes growing darker and darker by the day, afraid of herself and what she was capable of, afraid of her potentially uncontrollable reactions if she were to bump into her forbidden love, her co-conspirator, at the shop or outside.
It wasn’t worth it. She knew now that it wasn’t worth six billion kronor either. If she were faced with the same choice again, if she were able to rewind the tape and experience that confounded afternoon again, she would act differently. She would be awkward, convince Peter that one of the consequences of deeply immoral acts was that you could no longer bear to live with yourself. She would summon the police and paramedics to the scene of the accident right away, and she wouldn’t even see the money.
The damage was already done—she had to adopt a constructive approach to what she had done. There was no shadow cast on Peter—he would have to take responsibility for his own decisions. She had to do something about her completely unsustainable situation.
But what?
She couldn’t very well go to the police. In that case, she would ruin not only her own but also Peter’s and their joint future. And it was for the sake of that future that she had made this sacrifice, as she now tended to regard the whole thing. Since the almost unbearable aftereffects had taken over her life.
She was basically unable to do anything. Her hands and feet were tied out of loyalty to Peter and the promises she had made to him. The relationship with Peter had given her new insights, new hope of a joyous life—even after Charlotte. She didn’t want to deprive herself of those future prospects, although she also wanted to vindicate her existence after the terrible thing she had done to another person. She had to compensate. She just couldn’t work out how.
The only thing that was currently bringing any light at all to her existence was the dreamy warmth of Peter’s embrace on the horizon. With his untroubled manner and his unshakable optimism, he would set her on a happier train of thought, suck the poison from her veins, and help her to forgive herself. All her hopes were invested in this, and that was something. But there still remained many days of suffering in solitude ahead.
Like when the article about the car accident appeared in the local paper. Anxiety dug its sharp claws into her, and this time it wasn’t just the increasingly familiar guilty conscience making its presence known. Something downright physical plunged her into a state of dizziness that almost tipped her off her chair. Her stomach was turning but, leaning on the kitchen counter, she was able to stagger to the sink to throw up the little food she had eaten.
He had been down there in the ravine for four days—four days trapped in a wrecked car, invisible to passersby under the thick blanket of snow. The article didn’t say whether death had been instant, but the whole thing was just awful. For his loved ones, it must have been four days of horrific torture, without any clue as to what had happened—whether he was alive and suffering or had already been torn away from them. And then, when it was over, the burden of the knowledge that a loved one had spent day after day in the cold and darkness without any chance of rescue. Even if he had perished immediately, it was shameful, inhuman for a dead person to spend days on end squashed inside a car covered in snow.
And Jeanette could have alleviated their suffering. Jeanette could have made life easier for his loved ones—in fact, she could have ensured he was saved. She had difficulty taking in the latter point; she didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t let herself believe it. But the thought was there, and she formulated the words, even if they wouldn’t take hold. The man was dead—beyond rescue. He must have been—that was her lifeline, because otherwise she didn’t want to live with herself any longer.
Then a few more days without any improvement, with even worse remorse. The loneliness was monumental, and she brushed up against the idea of suicide. She was exhausted, and her hopes of being able to climb out of this even with Peter’s help were fading away. And a future with Peter felt more and more remote as the days passed. She never saw him—was he still there? Or was he an unattainable dream that would never come true? A figment of her imagination that she could cling to until she went under?
One day she caught sight of the death notice in the newspaper. Unobtrusive but gripping, signed by just one person: his wife. The name of the victim wasn’t familiar to Jeanette, but she had been glancing through the deaths in all the local papers every day since the accident without finding anyone of the right age and with the right death day. But now she was convinced—it had to be him.
No children, no mourning parents or siblings, just a life partner. She could barely imagine what those four days of uncertainty had been like for her—for Kerstin, that was her name. Or what her life looked like now, as a recent widow in the middle of her life.
Jeanette would have liked to do something for her, to say sorry and perhaps somehow make good on what she had done. But the woman might very well go to the police, and regardless of how they classified the crime, Jeanette knew that they would both be in real trouble—she and Peter. The affair would get out, and everything would have been in vain.
She could at least have given the widow the money—anonymously. Left it outside the door, rung the bell and run away before Kerstin had time to open up. But Peter would never go along with it. She had no idea where he was keeping the cash, and she didn’t want to know—the thought of the money just got her worked up. And the widow probably knew nothing about the money. The kind of crime that earned millions of kronor was very much a man’s sport. She might simply have called the police, who would catch them, and no one would be any happier for that.
But there was something that Jeanette could do. Anonymously. She could give the widow the answers she needed to heal. Jeanette knew from experience that something people needed when they were grief-stricken was the knowledge of the hitherto unknown: concrete facts to hold fast to, to structure existence around.
The widow didn’t know how the accident had happened; she was living under the delusion that her husband had been careless and that his terrible fate had been self-inflicted. But there was a perpetrator responsible for his death: another motorist who had left the scene without checking what the fall-out had been or raising the alarm. When considering why, it was fair to assume that the underlying reasons, if not alcohol-related, were surely at least related to recklessness. In short, a negligent, selfish hit-and-run.
That was knowledge that Jeanette could impart to the grieving wife. The photographs she had taken at the scene of the accident were still saved on her mobile. In a gesture of respect, she had documented not just the crash site but also the other driver’s car. And the deceased’s upper body and face—but she didn’t think that was something that would make the widow feel any better.
So she printed three of the photos and put them in an envelope. Then she found out where the bereaved wife lived, addressed the letter accordingly, applied a stamp, and posted it. Without any other message—the pictures told their own story, and for that matter, who was Jeanette to moralise about others? The widow would have to interpret the pictures herself and do whatever she wanted with that information.
It wasn’t much, but in some small way, this unselfish act made Jeanette feel better. At least for the time being.