Page 157 of Shatter

I think, at the very end, he'd have understood.

I close the news site.

Behind it, another window.

I've had it open for three weeks, in between ledgers, whenever the door's shut and nobody's looking.

The Oslo District Court's archive, and a dozen search windows in a language I'm learning one word at a time from a phone app and a secondhand dictionary with a cracked spine.

Solheim, Signe

He told me not yet.

I haven't looked for her.

Not really.

I've only been looking at the edges of where she went.

The records from the winter of 2005 are thin, mostly sealed, stamped with words I had to look up.

Vitnebeskyttelse.

Witness protection.

But on a Thursday afternoon two weeks ago, at the bottom of a scanned judgment from the appeals court, dated June of 2006, I found a line in dense legal Norwegian I read nine times before I let myself believe it.

A protected witness, identified only by her initials.

S.S.

Testimony given in person, over four days, against the leadership of two motorcycle clubs.

Both convicted.

And a note at the end, three lines long, releasing the witness from further obligation to the court, and referring all future correspondence regarding her to the county governor's office in Tromsø.

Tromsø.

A city at the top of the world, above the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn't set for two months in summer and doesn't rise for two months in winter.

Where a woman who told her son to forget her face could live the rest of her life in the dark, and nobody would ever find her.

I printed the page twice, because my hands were shaking so hard the first time I smeared the ink.

I folded it into quarters, then eighths.

It's tucked behind Mormor's photo, in the frame on our dresser, beside the old man with the black Lab.

He hasn't asked.

When he does, when he's ready, I'll give it to him.

***

The common room is loud by seven.

Somebody's put quarters in the jukebox, and the pool table's cracking.