11 minutes

The minutes became hours, she must have gone to sleep in his arms, because when she woke up, although it was still dark, she was in a room with a TV in one corner, and nothing else. White, empty.

Ralf appeared with a cup of hot chocolate.

'Good,' he said. 'You got to the place you needed to get to.'

'I don't want hot chocolate, I want wine. And I want to go downstairs to our place by the fire, with books all around us.'

She had said 'our place'. That wasn't what she had planned.

She looked at her feet; apart from a small cut, there were just a few red marks, which would disappear in a few hours' time. With some difficulty, she went downstairs, without really looking around her. She went and sat down on the rug by the fire - she had discovered that she always sit good there, as if that really was her 'place' in the house.

The woodcutter told me that whenever you do some amount of physical exercise, when you demand the maximum from your body, the mind gains a strange spiritual strength, which has to do with the "light" I saw in you. What did you feel?' felt that pain is woman's friend.'

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