I followed the old routines. Ducked when I walked under the door frame, set my shoes next to Anton’s in the narrow hallway and continued on into the kitchen.

The old, thinly veneered cupboards and drawers had been replaced with gray laminate, and the smell of cigar smoke and some indeterminable dish with fried or cooked meat hung in the air. But there was also an acrid whiff of chlorine and vinegar and cleaning solution, which someone, probably a housekeeper, had brought with them from one of the nearby nursing homes. The steel sink was spotless, and a clean rag hung over the tap. There was now a woman in the house.

Anders sat at the modest dining table, back against the wall, looking lopsidedly out the window. He’d gotten thinner, cheekbones clearly protruding, and his skull seemed sharp under the bit of hair still on his head. There was no recognition in his eyes.

I offered him my hand without looking at him, and he accepted it without objection. His handshake was as lifeless as the rest of him.

“Jacob is here,” said Anton loudly as he rattled the coffee machine. “He’s come to help us.”

Anders nodded. Reached for his cup and overturned it so cold coffee ran over the tablecloth and down onto the soft linoleum. I turned around and got the dishrag from the sink. Got onto my knees and patted around the worn, woolen slippers while Anders sat motionless, staring at me, his eyes nothing but troubled glimpses into the hollows of his skull.

“Thanks.”

Anton took the coffeepot to the kitchen table and poured water into the machine. Opened a can and spooned bitter-smelling coffee into the filter with shaking hands.

Later, when Anders had been settled in the living room with the television turned on, Anton and I sat alone in the darkening kitchen.

“You still look like yourself,” he said. “I recognized you right away. You just look a little tired. You’re not sick, are you?”

“I’m an old man, Anton. Just like you.”

I tried to laugh, but of course it wasn’t funny, and he didn’t smile, either. He just continued to stare as though he had to make sure it was really me.

“It’s not that,” he said. The way he was looking at me made me feel like a child again, defiant and defensive.

“I was just a kid when you knew me, Anton,” I said lightly. “It’d be odd if nothing had happened to me in the meantime.”

“Yes.” He hesitated, as if wanting to protest. “You have a wife and children?”

I nodded without meeting his gaze.

“Right. It was nice of you to come, after all this time,” he said.

“Of course.” Sweat had pasted my shirt to my back and stomach. This bloody heat. “And it’s Ellen that we have to find?”

Anton nodded, and his eyes finally left me. The edge of his large hand stroked the oilcloth, carefully collecting a pile of nonexistent crumbs. He coughed from somewhere deep down in his chest.

“Yes. Anders has begun to ask for her. Høgh. That was her surname,” he said.

I took my little notebook out of my jacket pocket and wrote down her name, mostly so I had something to do. Ellen Høgh. Then I opened my laptop and placed it on the table. Anton was silent, and I gave him some time. After all, he was an old man. But apparently, he had nothing else to say.

“She could have gone off to college,” I said carefully. “She wasn’t that old.”

“It’s true, she wasn’t. Twenty-nine. She could certainly have gone to college. She spoke about it at one point, at least.”

I typed her name into the browser search box. There was no match on the full name, but quite a few for either Ellen or Høgh articles and Krak references for both. I selected the image search only, and the screen filled with unknown faces of all ages. I believed I’d recognize her if she were there. But there was nothing.

She could have married and changed her name—be dead, or be living a life off of the online radar. But I suspected that such a person as lively as Ellen would have left even a single beckoning clue somewhere in cyberspace. If nothing else, in the form of a few words on the screen. It was just a matter of finding that gateway.

I smiled at Anton.

“But you’ve no idea where she could’ve gone? Family or friends?”

He shook his head.

“She was from Aarhus and named Ellen Høgh. That’s all I know,” he repeated. “She didn’t say where she was going. Didn’t even say goodbye, but there could be quite a few reasons for that.”

That sharp look again, as if he was trying to catch every single one of the movements in my face and body. The corners of his mouth twitched a little, and in the living room, Anders had turned up the volume on a talk show with an enthusiastic, clapping audience.

I thought of warm blood in my mouth and nose, the stench of pigs and chicken shit. I knew what he was thinking, what he was trying to get me to say, but I’d come, and that had to be enough.

Everything has its limits.

The light in Anders’s old attic was softened by the dense spiderweb in the skylight window. A remodel in the ’60s had left the room with sloping walls in a dark-yellow pine with knots like black raisin eyes.

I couldn’t remember ever being up here as a boy. Anton and Anders had used the narrow staircase behind the door in the hall when they had come down from their one-and-a-half-hour naps. It had apparently been a long time since they’d been up here; there was a lingering mildewy smell of disuse and rodents. A thick, sticky layer of dust covered the single bookcase and the old television, standing with the antenna cable dangling loosely over the room’s only source of light: a floor lamp with a green-lacquered metal shade.

The room was microscopic. The bed was squeezed under the sloping wall, and the end wall consisted of four brown-veneered cupboards that had been cut according to the falling ceiling height.

I sat down on the bed and felt the fatigue overtake me. As if I’d run five or six miles. For dinner, we’d had the two servings delivered to the brothers every day, which Anton heated in a microwave on the kitchen table. Powdered mashed potatoes, green peas and pork chops in a dark, sour sauce. Anton also found some canned food in the cupboard: a tin of minced beef and a jar of potatoes, which I heated while Anton helped Anders eat, one painstaking mouthful at a time. Half a beer in an old mustard jar. For dessert, we had soft, dark-yellow cherry plums from the tree by the gable.

Downstairs, the brothers puttered around, following the steps of their joint bedtime ritual. The toilet flushed, and the water ran in the sink. Someone, probably Anton, growled something, and the floorboards creaked under the weight of the two old men seeking their beds for the night. Anton had moved into Great-Grandmother’s old bedroom, while a bed had been made up for Anders in what had once been the good living room. It was because the stairs had become too steep. And because they were saving energy, as Anton had said. Both the heating and their own.

I waited until it was quiet before I crept down to the kitchen and got a beer from the fridge. Then I went out to the yard, where the cobblestones were still warm from the sun under my bare feet. The evening sky above me was velvet-black and strewn with the kind of stars you didn’t see in the city. Ice-cold, clear perforations of darkness.

I walked through the tall grass by the gable, where there was once a path to the garden, and stood there for a while. The new road had eaten the tangled hedge of red currants and elderflower and nettles at the bottom border of the formerly abundant soil, but the stump of the large chestnut tree had been allowed for some reason to remain as an amputated memento on the edge of the roadside drainage ditch. There was also the little pavilion in imitation timber, the upper half door open, and I could sense the flowers on the wallpaper, resembling black splotches of mold on the walls in the dark inside. I remembered them so clearly from back then. Deep rose and picture-perfect, around abandoned garden chairs with rotten cushions on the floor.

I pulled one of the chairs outside and sat down. Listened.

There was a longer time between cars and trucks on the bypass road, islands of silence in the dark.

I typed in the number for Bjarne. My company partner. Soon to be an ex, like the wife. I knew he’d already looked at the possibilities of buying my share, and thus far had asked me to stay out of things.

I didn’t call, just like I’d stopped myself when I’d run over Janne’s number with my fingertips for God knew what time. Reminded myself how little I’d liked her the day she first entered the office. There was an instinctive reluctance that I’d have held on to if I’d been wiser. I’d had several near-fatal experiences with her very kind. Petite and dark-haired, poisonously sharp-eyed with bizarre, defiantly girlish manners. She smacked chewing gum, moody and pouting. Crimson-red Marilyn Monroe lipstick, a blouse and a neat skirt—’50s retro—and a self-importance as unbecoming as an all-too-sharp fashion choice on a young woman. I didn’t like her and couldn’t take my eyes off her, which should have been warning enough. But she wasn’t one of those girls who made it easy. She greeted me nicely and was seated at an open desk by a window, looking out over Kultorvet, which she immediately opened and leaned out of. Her transparent black stockings had a nice, strong seam that I was able to follow from her dark-green shoes with a heel up to the edge of her tight, gray-pilled skirt.

I stubbed my cigarette into the ground and went out onto the road toward the dazzling white car lights. A few miles farther down was the new on-ramp to the freeway, with new asphalt and white reflex strips. The unmistakable odor of human waste wafted up from the ditch, and long strips of semidissolved toilet paper lay in the dry grass. Last time I’d stood here, cows had grazed just a few yards away, and Ellen had sat with her sketchbook in her lap under a now long-ago-felled tree. Head laid back, eyes closed. Her neck smooth and flawless, a hand resting on the bent knee and slightly spread legs, even though she was wearing a dress and knew I was there. I felt the burning ache and the rage adjacent to it, because she was doing it on purpose.

Or wasn’t.

Both were biting defeat in a battle she won, dozing lightly under the chestnut tree.