On Christmas Eve morning in Helsingborg, Sweden, the narrator writes to his son, confessing that he has killed a person. He tells his son about meeting a five-year-old girl a week earlier in the cancer ward of a hospital, where both the narrator and the girl were patients. He questions whether all lives are valued equally, particularly when one is a child.

The narrator describes the way the girl colored a hospital TV-room chair red with 22 boxes of crayons, knowing that seeing her absorbed in an activity comforted the adults around her. Her toy rabbit, Babbit, sat on the red chair when it felt frightened. The narrator, hiding in the corridor, overheard the girl tell Babbit that she expected to die soon. Suddenly fearful, she fled to her mother’s room, saying that someone was coming—a woman in a gray sweater who walked the hospital corridors carrying a folder of names. The narrator knows who the little girl was referring to because he’s been running from her his whole life.

The narrator then recalls being in a recent car crash, where the woman in the gray sweater pulled him from his wrecked vehicle. Desperate, he begged her to take someone else instead. She explained that she handles only logistics and transportation, not decisions, and cannot swap “a death for a death,” only “a life for a life” (16). She asked the narrator to give her her folder.

Six days earlier, while smoking on the hospital fire escape, the narrator heard the girl and her mother playing a game where the girl listed possible jobs she would like to do when she grew up. After her mother fell asleep, the girl colored the chair and asked Babbit if death is cold, packing gloves in her backpack in case it is.

The girl spotted the narrator through the glass, waved without fear, and approached. She recognized him from her mother’s newspaper and asked if he was famous. He reflected that his death would make news due to his wealth and success, while hers would go unnoticed. He told her that his cancer was very unusual—different from hers. When she asked if death is cold, he said he did not know and told her to stop drawing on furniture. She retorted that having cancer meant she was allowed to draw on the furniture. They both laughed.

The narrator admits to his son that he, like most successful people, is a “bastard.” He muses on how easily one can kill with a car, relying on implicit trust between drivers—that another driver is not drunk, distracted, or waiting on an on-ramp with headlights off for a truck.

He writes that the girl reminded him of his son and confesses that he abandoned his family because he could not handle the power that his son’s love had over him. He devoted his life to traveling for work, believing that time was the only truly valuable commodity and that he had built something meaningful to leave behind.

He recalls comforting his young son’s fear of falling into the starry sky by describing it as a grotto ceiling with star-shaped cracks to let light in. He had told his son that his eyes were also cracks letting light out. The narrator reflects that, with his wife dancing to Leonard Cohen inside, they briefly felt like a family.

He acknowledges that his son wanted an ordinary father, not a famous one. His wife was smarter than he was, which the narrator resented; he could hurt her with words, exploiting what he saw as her weakness of feeling more deeply than he did. It took him two days to notice that she and their son had left him.

Years later, when his son was around 11 or 12, the boy fled to the narrator’s house after arguing with his mother, begging to live with him. The narrator refused. When his sobbing son protested that it wasn’t fair, the narrator replied that life isn’t fair. His son answered that it was fortunate for him—a moment that the narrator believed may have been when he truly lost his son. He later reflected that, if so, life is indeed fair.

The narrator writes that one night, the girl asked him to play. He initially refused, but when she asked if he was brave—noting that everyone called her brave—he told her that it was okay to be scared. He told her that all survivors feel fear. They both admitted to fearing the woman with the folder. Moved, the narrator promised to stand watch that night to protect the girl. The next morning, awake in the corridor, he overheard the girl listing birthday-party guests for a party that would never happen. His name was on the list.

The narrator says that his wife once accused him of valuing only those above him and trampling those below. He says that he once had a twin brother who died at or before birth and imagines himself clambering over him in the womb to survive. He had seen the woman in the gray sweater in the background of photos from around the time of his birth. In one photo from a gas station on the day before the twins were born, his father is laughing—something the narrator never saw in life.

When the narrator was five, the woman appeared by his side and shouted, stopping him from walking in front of an oncoming train. At 15, while climbing rocks by the sea at Kullaberg with his best friend, they passed the woman, who warned them that the rocks were treacherous when wet. It rained half an hour later, and his friend fell to his death. He saw the woman at the funeral. When his father was dying in a care facility, he saw her outside the room writing in her folder. His father died the next morning. After his mother’s death, an appraiser’s photo of her bedroom showed a black pencil on the floor. When the narrator arrived home, the pencil was gone, but gray wool clung to his mother’s slippers.