Was he … another hard word … hurting … horrible … was he abusing Micha?

She stood up. “I have to do something,” she said, but she said it in such a very low voice that she could barely hear the words herself. “I have to find the truth. I have to talk to somebody about all of this, somebody who exists, somebody real. Possibly the police, the ones who are trying to find Marinke’s murderer …”

Before she left the bridge, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the picture of Micha’s schoolyard again: how Abel flew across that yard, meeting Micha in the middle, swirling her around in the clear winter air. And she felt again how he’d hugged her tight in their literature class, in the tower made of newspaper pages. No. She couldn’t talk to anyone. And least of all to the police.

She just couldn’t. Part of her—unreasonable Anna—still loved him. Maybe she would never stop loving him.

Anna hadn’t only lost her hold on reality, she’d lost her flute as well. She’d had the flute with her that night, in her backpack. Stupid enough in the cold. The flute had borne silent witness to what had happened in the boathouse. After, she’d wrapped it in Abel’s dark-blue knitted sweater and stashed it in her closet. She’d called her teacher and told her she couldn’t make it to this week’s lesson.

It had been a long time since she’d played the piano in the living room. She had stopped piano lessons a while back, deciding to concentrate on the flute instead. The final music exam only required you to play one instrument, but on that instrument you had to be pretty perfect. Now she went back to the piano. The piano seemed safer somehow, something neither Abel nor Micha had touched with their presence. She practiced her flute pieces on the piano. That was crazy, of course; she couldn’t hide the flute in her closet forever.

She no longer felt a part of the small, domestic scenes in her everyday life. She saw Magnus feed the robins. She saw Linda cut vegetables in the kitchen. She contemplated them from the outside, like painted scenes. She, Anna Leemann, was on the other side of these pictures, with no real connection to any of the things happening within.

On Tuesday morning, there was another white envelope on the floor in the hall that someone had pushed through the mail slot. White as snow, white like white noise … with her name on it. She tore it up into tiny white flakes and let it snow into the trash. She returned to school. She saw Abel walk through the schoolyard outside. He looked up—maybe he sensed her there—she looked away. She felt dizzy all of a sudden.

In her head, Gitta, who wasn’t there, whispered … words, angry words: Don’t you start thinking that rubbish again, blaming yourself, little lamb. You know what they ought to do with guys like that? I’ll tell you. I’ve got some disgusting ideas for how to punish them …

Anna tried to avoid the student lounge during break time, but Frauke, whom she’d met in the corridor, pulled her inside. She was afraid Abel would be there. And he was. He was sitting on the radiator, at the back of the room, rolling a cigarette he would have to smoke outside. He looked up when she came in, just for a second, and then turned away. He couldn’t run away—he was trapped in that corner by the amorphous mass of other students—and Anna couldn’t turn on her heels and leave either, without Frauke asking her what was the matter. It was an impossible situation.

Anna managed to hold herself together. She managed to drink a cup of horrible coffee from the broken coffee machine with Frauke and to talk about nothing for five whole minutes, or rather, to let Frauke talk and pretend she was listening. She’d turned her back on Abel but felt his presence.

At lunchtime, he was standing at his usual place near the bike racks. Anna saw him from the window—black hat down over his ears, hands in pockets, earplugs in his ears. He’d shut out the world. At one point he talked to two guys—maybe he sold them something; she didn’t see.

He wasn’t Abel anymore. He’d turned back into Tannatek, the Polish peddler, whose presence at school was a riddle to everybody and whom most people were a little afraid of.

She wondered if that was it. If things had turned back to an earlier point, if everything was now as it had been before, and if she could just act as if she’d never known him.

No. Things weren’t how they’d been before. Rainer Lierski was dead. Sören Marinke was dead. And a small girl with pale blond braids and a pink down jacket was wandering over the ice, in a fairy tale, helpless in wind and weather. The weather forecast said there would be a snowstorm.

“Little lamb,” Gitta said, turning up at Anna’s door in the afternoon, very real now, not just a voice in her head. “Little lamb, what’s wrong?”

“I’m poring over my books,” Anna replied, standing in the doorway, refusing to let Gitta in. “Why should anything be wrong?”

“Oh, come on,” Gitta said. “Something’s happened. Between you and Abel. You’re not talking anymore. Do you think we’re all blind? We’re worried about you.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Anna asked.

Gitta brushed the question aside with her hand and searched for her cigarettes. “If you won’t let me in, then I’m going to smoke,” she said. “And the smoke will get into the house through the door.”

Anna shrugged.

“But you won’t get rid of me so easily. So things didn’t work out, did they? With Abel? The whole thing has run up against a brick wall.”

“So what?”

Gitta blew a smoke ring into the cold air. “What do you know about him?”

Anna narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, what do I know about him?”

“I mean it just as I said it. What do you know about Abel Tannatek?”

“Maybe,” Anna said, “the question is what do you know about Abel Tannatek? Is there something you want to tell me? Is that the reason you came?”

Gitta smoked in silence for a moment. “No,” she said finally. And then, “Sometimes I find myself thinking about that police tape on the beach. It pops into my head that …”

“Oh, does it,” Anna said, suddenly defensive, “and do you know what sometimes pops into my head? Hennes von Biederitz. And Bertil Hagemann. One of them bragging about what a good shot he is, the other trying not to talk about the fact that he’s probably a good shot, too. Hunting. Bertil was out there on the beach both days before Marinke’s death. He said so himself. As to where Hennes was … I guess you’d know better than I would. Or maybe you wouldn’t?”

Gitta stared at her, perplexed. “What do these two have to do with anything?”

“That,” Anna said, “is exactly what I’m wondering.” And she closed the door.

• • •

On Wednesday, there was a third white envelope in the hall. When she touched it, it wasn’t glowing like the first one. She would tear it up like the two other envelopes. She would … she saw her fingers opening the envelope, knowing these were the fingers of unreasonable Anna. The paper was filled with tiny haunted letters. There was her name.

Anna. Anna, are you reading this? I’m not going to stop writing to you.

I have nothing, only words. I am a storyteller.

I want to explain something to you. But I can’t. Later, maybe later.

The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses. There is a reason for what happened. I can’t be forgiven so I am not asking you for forgiveness. We lost each other, and we will never find each other again. Rose girl, the sea is cold and …

She put the letter back into the envelope and tore it up, into even smaller pieces than the other envelopes. The icy wind took the scraps from her fingers and carried them away with it, high up into the sky like snowflakes falling up instead of down. There were tears burning in her eyes. We will never find each other again. No, she thought, we won’t. Ever.