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puddle and managed to ram a young woman in the legs from behind.
    ‘It’s customary to apologize, you know,’ she hissed at him.
    Thomas averted his gaze and felt how the plastic handle on the package of diapers cut into his wrist and the frame of his backpack slammed against his hip bones.
    ‘I want ice cream,’ Kalle declared, pointing at the stand behind them on the pier.
    ‘Once we’re on the boat, I’ll get you some ice cream,’ Thomas promised, his forehead breaking out in a sweat. A gust of wind splattered rain against his face. Ellen whined. His heart sank as he gazed down the pier.
    The old steamer Norrskär was tied up at the far end, and it was pitching and rolling. She looked like a humpbacked old lady next to the potent modern brutes. In this weather, on this boat, it would take them more than three hours to reach his parents’ place out in the islands.
    One of the last passengers to make it aboard, Thomas stashed the stroller, their bags and his backpack indoors, under the bridge.
    ‘Come on, time for a snack,’ he said, hearing how feeble he sounded.
    The sea was pretty rough. Kalle was seasick before they even passed the first islands on the route, Fjäderholmarna. He threw up all over the table in the cafeteria and dropped his jumbo ice-cream bar in the slimy puddle.
    ‘My ice cream!’ the boy sobbed, trying to pick up the slimy stick while wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
    ‘Hang on,’ Thomas exclaimed while Ellen tried to wriggle out of his arms.
    The other passengers edged away from them as inconspicuously as possible.
    ‘Clean it up yourself,’ the girl behind the counter said resentfully, handing Thomas a roll of paper towels.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, sensing how the stares of the other passengers were growing more disapproving. ‘It’s okay, Ellen, Kalle, everything’s going to be fine . . .’
    Thomas fled out on deck, clutching his daughter under one arm, the stroller under the other and urging a tearful and unwilling Kalle on in front of him.
    There, in a shelter by the stairs, he deposited his children. He pulled off his raincoat, wrapped it around the boy and sat him down on the bench. The boy stopped crying at once and fell asleep in less than a minute. Thomas lowered the backrest of the stroller, tucked his daughter in snugly with a blanket and began to rock the stroller quickly back and forth, back and forth. Aided by the rolling motion of the boat, it did the trick. She too fell asleep.
    Thomas applied the stroller brakes and made sure that his children were protected from the rain before going up to the railing to be embraced by the spray and the wind. A sudden and inexplicable sense of loss engulfed him. There was something here that he no longer had.
    It struck him that it was the sea water, the semi-salty water found in this part of the world. The way it felt, its characteristic scent.
    Something he had grown up with. The sea was a part of his frame of reference, it had always been there. Its pure transparent depths were not only a feature of Thomas’s childhood and the summer season, the sea had been a presence in Vaxholm as well, where he had lived until the age of thirty-two. That facet of his life had only slipped away during the past few years, and he had forgotten one of the cornerstones of his life.
    She isn’t worth it , he thought.
    And suddenly another thought struck him with full force: I regret it.
    Thomas gasped, never having allowed these feelings to surface before. The acknowledgement of his deceit tied his stomach up in knots, threatened to bring him down.
    He had betrayed Eleonor, his wife, all because of a fling with Annika Bengtzon. He had left his fine house, his home and his life to go and live in Stockholm, in Kungsholmen, in Annika’s ramshackle apartment building that was scheduled to be torn down, where there was no hot water. He hadn’t kept his promise to God and to Eleonor, he had let his parents, his friends and his neighbours down.