EPILOGUE
Peter Skjoren woke, a memory of shock and excruciating pain fresh in his mind. He had been in the Bantu Republic on business, was having lunch with a Deputy Trade Minister in Mandela City, when—when he had died. Keeled forward right at the table, spilling his drink on the government official’s trousers—he had noticed that, was embarrassed by it, even through the crushing pressure in his chest … and then the red-rimmed darkness, then nothing.
Until now. Here in the shop in Karijohansgate, back home in Oslo, where he’d first learned his mercantile skills, where he’d first found his calling in the world of commerce.
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 Skjoren vowed, he would do it right.
