Shame

everything else that was taken for granted. Only with its loss could you gain the ability to really understand its true value.

    She had been so envied. A well-paid head surgeon with a fancy company car and luxury flat. A life full of coveted status symbols. The generally accepted proof that she was a successful person, someone important. But each step she had taken to raise herself above mediocrity had distanced her from freedom, because the more she had to protect, the more afraid she had become of losing what she had managed to achieve.
    Now she had lost everything. In one single blow all the success she had built up with such effort was shattered, and it was as irrevocably gone as if it had never even existed. Was it really success, if it could so easily be taken from her? She no longer knew. She really didn’t know anything. All that was left inside was a vacuum, and she had no idea how she was ever going to fill it. One day when she was forced once and for all to look back on her life, to take stock in earnest with eyes wide open, what would she then find had been of real value? Pure and genuine. If she were forced at that moment to look back, there were only two things. Her overwhelming sorrow at Lasse’s death, and her breathtaking love for Thomas. But she had not permitted herself either of these life-changing experiences. She had shut them off, in favour of maintaining appearances. She had let herself be hollowed out so that in the end she had lived as a shadow. She had achieved so much. Oh, what she had accomplished, and, oh, what an effort she had made.
    Yet she had lost it all.

    Aggravated embezzlement from her superior.
    In evaluating the extent to which it was an aggravated crime, they had taken into account whether she had caused her superior significant or pronounced injury.
    They had decided that she had done so. The talented and successful Monika Lundvall.
    She had deposited the money into the bank account of Save the Children and stuffed the deposit slip in an envelope with Maj-Britt’s address on it, and she thought she had posted it. A week later she had found the envelope in her coat pocket, but by that time it was all too late. When she came home from the bank she turned off all the phones, placed both the packet of Zopax and the one containing the sleeping pills within reach on her nightstand and went to bed. Three days later the head of the clinic and a colleague had entered her flat with the help of a locksmith. The bank had called up the head of the clinic. They just wanted to check that everything was in order with regard to the large sum she had withdrawn from the clinic’s donation account, and they mentioned her odd behaviour. Naturally they could have been mistaken, but she seemed to be under the influence of drugs. When she awoke in her bed with the head of the clinic and her colleague in the room, the shame she felt was so deep that she couldn’t even speak. And although he offered to refrain from filing a complaint with the police if she would only tell him what was going on and what she had done, she chose to keep silent, even when her ability to speak had returned. The daily life that had been hers was already lost. She would never again be able to look any of them in the eye if she confessed to what she had done.
    She preferred to face the music.
    And in some peculiar way she actually felt liberated after escaping from the absurd reality into which she had locked herself.
    Because there were many types of prison. And for that matter, a person who was imprisoned never needed to have come anywhere near a court of law.

    There was a letter from Maj-Britt lying in the hall. With deepest regrets she had begged forgiveness for what she had put Monika through, and wrote that she had tried to call repeatedly to take back what she had said. But Monika never answered. She read the letter over and over. First in anger, but later with more and more sorrow. In vain she had tried to find scapegoats in order to create a way to exonerate herself, but in the end she was forced to admit that there was no one else to blame.
    A few days before the trial, a letter came from Pernilla. Monika hadn’t been in touch, and in her desperation she had refused to answer phone messages, and finally they had stopped coming. The letter was a sign that Pernilla had found out, and the return address frightened her like a sudden noise in the night. Fingers stiff with dread, she had opened the envelope, and