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LET’S START HERE One morning, September 2014               Gusten Grippe is walking down to the waterfront Kallsjön, Villastan: it’s been a long time since he’s come down here on his own A few years ago he moved away from the suburb where he grew up and vowed to never come back So what’s he doing here now, on this specific September morning at the beginning of a fall that’ll throw him back to what he’d once left behind? The right answer: nothing No reason, no mission He just sort of ended up here on a morning jog Yes, sometimes he still goes running here in Villastan, drives out from the nearby suburb where he currently lives, extravagantly, in a swanky bachelor pad with two floors (this here Gusten is a real estate agent, the realtor from hell as they say, his nickname, because he’s that good) Perhaps it’s an omen, a sign, something from the sixth sense Most likely just a coincidence, an ironic fluke   But at one point, when Gusten was a child, this was his world: Villastan, Kallsjön, the encircling shores, the properties surrounding the lake, and the little patch of forest and the wooden footbridge that runs along the perimeter of the muddy stream that wasn’t deep or cold or dangerous or even the least bit mystical, as they’d imagined when he was little – he and his buddy Nathan When they would stand here side-by-side, in matching caps Squinting their eyes and fantasising, telling each other stories about all sorts of exciting things that COULD happen, even here, but the stories were left unfinished, hanging in the air, loose threads Just open your eyes again and it was clear: mere fantasies, daydreams, without reverberation in reality – anyway, it was shallow, the water, browned by soil And the properties around the lake – it was Gusten’s own mamma Angela who was in the habit of making these kinds of proclamations, right here on the footbridge where she and her son would go on their morning walks, almost as if it were