Ester Nilsson had arrived at that point in her life when each birthday leaves its mark. It had happened, she determined, when she had turned thirty-seven. In the past five years, she’d published four more slim but densely written volumes, two of anti-lyrical poetry and two philosophical examinations. As for love, she had been in full and continuous operation and hadn’t taken on board any lessons she considered inhibiting; to be precise, she thought that such lessons must always be weighed against the risk of tedium and tristesse, of a passive life ruled by the fear of rejection and failure.

You could also say that she hadn’t yielded to cynicism. She suffered from a certain naive open-mindedness: each situation, each person was new and had to be judged independently and on their own merits, they had to be given the chance to defy the dictates of nature and do the right thing.

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she’d written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at the country theatre in Västerås. The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet. The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love. Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that’s exactly what she thought she’d achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

It was during the first read-through in August that she met Olof Sten, one of the actors in the play. Ester hadn’t heard of him and neither did she recognize him, but after the first day-long meeting she experienced a familiar fluttering inside that she had no intention of quelling. It had something to do with how his gaze lingered in hers – pure, vulnerable and naked – and with his deep melodic voice, what it did and did not say, and how nothing bromidic ever spilled from his lips; rather, he displayed a sober restraint that Ester greatly appreciated. The rest came down to a sense of recognition, chemistry, encountering and corresponding, all of which would be pointless to question or ponder. There are neither words nor syntax for falling in love, however many attempts have been made to parade it through the alphabet.

Olof Sten wore a thick oxblood-coloured shirt too hot for the season, but in it he looked cool. The first question Ester asked him was how he spelled his name.

‘With an f and one e,’ he said, giving her a second glance, as if he understood.

Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can’t bring himself to leave his wife. The play was not prophetic. Nothing is prophetic. What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass. What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime. And it’s likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.

When the ensemble broke for the afternoon and scattered in their various directions, Ester sought out Olof Sten in order to ask him an irrelevant question that had taken her some minutes to think up. She thought his behaviour towards her made it clear he didn’t belong to anyone in particular. On the train home from Västerås that evening, longing ravaged her cells, nerves and veins. Walking up Fleminggatan from Central Station, she was deep in thoughts of embraces and courses of action.

The next day she posted her latest poetry collection to his home address in Stockholm with an inscription she had worked on for a good while to make sure it seemed insouciant and casual. Not one week later, when Olof had been home over the weekend, a handwritten thank-you note arrived. It said that he would read it with great interest. Ester wrote back and asked if they couldn’t go for a coffee sometime during a break in the rehearsal schedule. Another weekend and a few weekdays went by, after which he called from Västerås to say that he’d read her book and liked it. As for the coffee, he said nothing. Nothing Ester heard, anyway. Only much later did she realize that he’d accepted her invitation, but in a manner so cryptic and covert it had passed her by: a while into their conversation he’d mentioned walking past a lovely cafe on Skånegatan at the weekend, one he’d never seen before and that looked cosy. Had she ever been there?

When she didn’t immediately reply, he added that he wasn’t wild about coffee or about sitting in cafes, but of course one could make an exception when a new spot opened up in the area. Perhaps.

It was too early in their entanglement for Ester to know that this was Olof’s way of saying he’d very much like to go for a coffee with her. It was subtle, and that was the point. Ester would eventually get used to Olof Sten’s negative affirmations and would become their most experienced exegete.

When Ester didn’t think her invitation to coffee had been accepted, she retreated with an unpleasant feeling of having misread the signals, downcast that no ecstatic encounter was to materialize from their obvious chemistry.

Her silence caused Olof to ring her a week later, asking if they could meet up to discuss the interpretation of his role in the play, the one she’d written. He said he had a dentist’s appointment in Stockholm on Wednesday. They met at Pelikan over creamy macaroni and Falun sausage, and there a conversation began.