The shop that had been razed for an apartment block, twenty years ago.
Peter opened the ledger on his desk, saw the date, looked at his hands and saw young, smooth hands, no wedding band.
None of it had happened yet. Not the avalanche in Switzerland that had taken his son Edvard from him, not the nights of brooding melancholy that had driven his wife Signe into her hopeless downward spiral of alcoholism. He had no son, no wife; he had only a bright new future, whose pitfalls and opportunities he knew intimately, and could avoid or seize as the occasion demanded. Those years, those familiar and long-past years from 1988 to 2017, were his to live again, knowing the mistakes he’d made before. This time, Peter Skjøren vowed, he would do it right.