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that day… That was predicted.”
    Julia said nothing. She was just staring at the desk now.
    “We should think about that,” Gerlof insisted. “We need to think about who would have had the most to gain from the fog that day.”
    “Can I see it now?” said Julia.
    Gerlof knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He nodded, and spun his chair around to face the desk.
    “It’s here,” he said.
    He pulled out the top drawer, reached in, and carefully lifted out a small object. It didn’t seem to weigh any more than a few ounces, and it was wrapped in white tissue paper.
    Julia walked over to Gerlof as he unwrapped the little package on the desk. She looked at his hands, where his age was visible in the wrinkled skin, the brown liver spots, and the thickened veins.
    His fingers were shaking, fumbling with the tissue paper. It seemed to Julia that the rustling as he opened the package was deafening.
    “Do you need any help?” she asked.
    “No, it’s fine.”
    It took him several minutes to open the packageor perhaps it just seemed that way. At last he folded back the final layer of paper and Julia could see what it had been concealing. The shoe lay in a clear plastic bagshe couldn’t take her eyes off it.
    I’m not going to cry, she thought, it’s only a shoe. Then she felt her eyes filling with an intense heat, and she had to blink away the tears in order to be able to see. She saw the black rubber sole and the brown leather straps, dry and cracked with age.
    A sandal, a little boy’s worn sandal.
    “I don’t know if it’s the right shoe,” said Gerlof. “As I remember it, it did look like this, but it could be a”
    “It’sjens’s sandal,” Julia interrupted him, her voice thick.
    “We can’t be sure of that,” said Gerlof. “It’s not good to be too certain. Is it?”
    Julia didn’t reply. She knew. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her hand, then carefully picked up the plastic bag.
    “I put it in the bag as soon as I got it,” explained Gerlof.
    “There might be fingerprints …”
    “I know,” said Julia.
    It was so light, so light. When a mother was going to put a sandal like this on her little son’s foot, she picked it up off the floor by the outside door without even thinking about what it might weigh. Then she stood beside him and bent her back, feeling the warmth of his body and taking hold of his foot as he steadied himself by holding on to her sweater, standing there quietly or saying something, all the childish chatter that she only half listened to because she was thinking about other things.
    About bills that needed paying. About buying food. About men who weren’t around.
    “I taught Jens to put on his own sandals,” said Julia. “It took all summer, but when I started college in the autumn he could do it.” She was still holding on to the little shoe. “And that was why he was able to go out alone that day, to sneak out… He’d put on his own sandals. If I hadn’t taught him he wouldn’t have …”
    “Don’t think like that.”
    “What I mean is … I only taught him to save a bit of time,”
    said Julia. “For myself.”
    “Don’t blame yourself, Julia,” said Gerlof.
    “Thanks for the advice,” she said, without looking at him.
    “But I’ve been blaming myself for twenty years.”
    They fell silent, and Julia realized suddenly the picture in her memory was no longer fragments of bone on the shore in Stenvik.
    She could see her son alive, bending down with enormous concentration to put on his own sandals, finding it difficult to make his small fingers do what he wanted them to do.
    “Who found it?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. It came in the mail.”
    “Who from?”
    “There was no sender’s name. It was just a brown envelope, with an indistinct postmark. But I think it came from Oland.”
    “No letter?”
    “Nothing,” said Gerlof.
    “And you don’t know who sent it?”
    “No,” said Gerlof, but he was no longer looking Julia in