At the end of September, an email arrived. An email arrived from Hugo Rask. Four months after they had last spoken, there was an email from Hugo Rask in her inbox. She had been convinced they would never be in touch again. She was ecstatic at simply seeing his name and thought she must have made a mistake and it was an old email playing tricks on her. What could Hugo be writing to Ester after that long silence? He wrote that he had thought of her when he read an article in the paper the other day and that he had had an operation to remove the meniscus in his knee. The knee, their shared body part, the one she had been allowed to touch before she was allowed to hold the rest of him. It was not fraught with danger but sufficiently erotic for him to use the reference to lasso her now. Every time they met in the early winter she had asked how his knee was, and felt it under the table to make a diagnosis. Repetitive stress disorder was her special subject. He also wrote a line about the recent general election and deplored the outcome, reported that he had been in a hard and intense period of work recently and had not been able to be sociable for a long time.
