Of course Ana will be there. You can’t set out to grow a friendship like theirs. But there are other things you can’t grow either: parents are a sort of plant you can’t choose, with roots that go deep and catch your feet in a way that only the child of an addict can understand.

Ana is already in the forest on her way when her phone rings. It’s Ramona. The old woman is hard but never cruel; she has made many such phone calls over the years and always speaks the same way: sympathetic but not patronizing. She says Ana’s dad has “drunk his way out through the door,” which means that someone had to throw him out of the Bearskin and he isn’t in a fit state to get home on his own. “It’s starting to get cold,” Ramona says, because she doesn’t want to have to embarrass Ana by saying that her dad has been sick all over himself and needs fresh clothes. She knows the girl understands. Ramona has watched people drink themselves into the gutter for half a century, and she has learned that some children need to see the worst aspects of alcohol so that they leave it the hell alone.

So she says, “Your dad needs company on the way home, Ana,” and Ana stops in the forest, nods, and whispers, “I’m on my way.” She always goes. She’d never leave him.

* * *

Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace.

* * *

Ana doesn’t call Maya, because Maya has perfect parents. A mom who never abandons her family and a dad who’s never been sick all over himself when drunk. They’re like sisters, she and Maya, but the only thing they haven’t had in common is that shame. Ana can’t bear the thought of Maya seeing her dad like that.

* * *

Maya sits alone on the island all night. Looking at her phone. Eventually she gets a text message, but not from Ana. Another anonymous number, again. She’s still getting messages, but she’s stopped telling Ana about them, she doesn’t want to go on making her friend sad. It’s Maya’s secret now: “Do you suck cock for 300 kronor?” this one asks. She doesn’t even know if the people writing them know why they’re doing it anymore. It could just as easily be someone in Hed who wants to break her as some girl at school who hates her or a gang of kids who are daring one another to “text that girl who got raped by Kevin Erdahl.” That’s all Maya will ever be for those people. Victim, whore, liar, princess.

Back in the summer Ana buried an expensive bottle of wine out here; her dad had been given it by an elderly neighbor in the Heights because he’d given him some meat after a hunt. Ana didn’t have the heart to throw it away, but she didn’t dare leave it in the kitchen among all the fragments of her dad’s heart, either. So she hid it out here. Maya digs it up and drinks it. She doesn’t care if she’s being selfish; being drunk doesn’t bring relief or peace, just bitterness. “I always rely on you to come,” she thinks about her best friend. “I was relying on you when Kevin pushed me down on the bed, too. My best friend will come, I thought, because my best friend would never leave me!” She throws the empty wine bottle at a tree. It smashes, and one of the pieces flies back and cuts her arm. Blood drips from the wound. She doesn’t feel it.

* * *

Every night recently Ana has dreamed that she’s being suffocated in a coffin, someone is sitting on the lid so she can’t open it, and no matter how hard she bangs, no one hears her. She hasn’t told her best friend, because Maya seems to be getting a bit better and Ana doesn’t want to upset her. She doesn’t say anything about the text messages, either, because Maya doesn’t seem to be getting them anymore and Ana doesn’t want to remind her of how horrible they are. Ping, ping. Pictures of boys’ dicks. Sometimes worse. She can’t imagine what kind of sick satisfaction they get from doing it or if they even think of her as human. Maybe she’s just an animal. A product to consume.

This isn’t what Ana thought life as a teenager would be like. Adults say you should enjoy being sixteen, that it’s the best time of your life. Not for Ana. She loved her childhood, when her best friend was happy and her dad was an untouchable hero she could worship. When Ana was little, four or five years old, two men on snowmobiles disappeared in a winter storm north of the town. The emergency services called the best local hunters, people who knew the terrain, and Ana’s dad packed his things and set off in the middle of the night. Ana stood in the doorway, begging him to stay. She’d heard about the storm on the radio, and she was old enough to know that dads didn’t always come home from things like that. But her dad crouched down, took her head in his hands, and whispered, “We’re not the type who let other people down, you and me.”

One of the lost men froze to death, but the other one survived. It was Ana’s dad who found him. A couple of winters later, when Ana had just turned six, she was playing down by the lake just after dusk when she heard a cry. A child the same age as her was in the water, already chilled through. All the children of Beartown know how to move across the ice to help someone who’s fallen through, but that doesn’t mean all the children would dare to do it alone in the dark. Ana didn’t hesitate for an instant.

Her dad has done a lot of stupid shit in his time, but he raised a daughter who saved the life of someone else’s daughter. When she got home, she was wet through and chilled and her lips were blue, but when her mom cried in horror, “What on earth’s happened?” the little girl just beamed and said, “I’ve found a best friend!”

Her mom left them a few years later. She couldn’t bear the forest and darkness and silence. Ana stayed. She and her dad played cards and told each other jokes, and sometimes when he was in a really good mood, he used to make her jump. He was brilliant at that; he could stand behind a door in a darkened room hiding just so he could jump out with a yell, making Ana shriek and laugh until she was breathless.

She always loved him, even when he was sad. Perhaps he always was, deep down. Ana doesn’t know if he got sad when her mom left or if her mom left because he was already sad. Some people just have a core of sadness. He would sit alone in the kitchen, drinking and crying, and Ana felt sorry for him because it must be a terrible thing: being able to cry only when you’re drunk.

She tends to think that she’s got two dads, one good and one bad, and she made up her mind that it was her job to make sure that when her bad dad took himself out in the evening, he wouldn’t damage his body so much that her good dad couldn’t use it the next morning.

She finds him around the back of the Bearskin now; he’s leaning against a wall, asleep. For a few terrible moments Ana can’t find his pulse and is overwhelmed by panic. She slaps his cheeks with the palm of her hand until he suddenly splutters and opens his eyes. When he catches sight of her, he slurs, “Ana?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Di . . . did . . . did I scare you?”

She tries to smile. He falls asleep again. It takes all the sixteen-year-old daughter’s strength to lift his top half so she can pull off the vomit-covered shirt and put a clean one on him. Most people probably wouldn’t have bothered, but Ana knows her good dad is in there somewhere. The dad who read her stories after her mom left them and knows there are other lullabies than whisky. She wants that dad to wake up in a clean shirt tomorrow morning. She puts her arm around his shoulder and pleads with him to stand up.

“We’re going home now, Dad.”

“Ana . . . ?” he slurs.

“Yes. It’s okay, Dad. You’re just having a bad evening. Things will be better tomorrow.”

He sniffs. “Sorry.”

That’s the worst thing. Daughters have no defense against that word. He stumbles, and she stumbles, too.

* * *

But someone catches her.

* * *

Kira’s voice echoes through the whole police station. How can you draw a dividing line between the lawyer and the mother when the boy is twelve years old? She didn’t yell at Leo in the car on the way here, because Peter has already done enough yelling for both of them. For everyone. So she’s yelling now instead, venting all her anger and powerlessness on the police officers.