“Take the blame to save the ones they loved”

“Take the blame to save the ones they loved” names a recurring moral pattern in the novel: a person may accept public disgrace or personal ruin to shield someone else, but the act can conceal a truth that survivors only understand later. The idea first illuminates Sonny Lofthus’s father, whose supposed role as a police mole was a cover story, and then echoes through Simon Kefas’s confession about his own father and the terrible choices Simon made in the name of protection.

The concealed strength behind disgrace

When Martha Lian reflects that her mother stayed in an unhappy marriage, she recalls accusing her of denying herself happiness. Her mother answered that she feared losing the person who brought her the greatest happiness: Martha herself. The exchange unsettles Martha’s judgment of her mother as weak. Stig uses that uncertainty to suggest that parents may appear dishonoured or compromised because they have chosen to bear a cost for those they love. He asks Martha to reconsider whether what looked like weakness might instead have been strength, and whether such strength might also be hers.

The idea becomes concrete when Stig tells Martha that his father signed a suicide note before he was shot, doing so to save Stig and his mother. The note made the death look like suicide and left the family with a false account of what had happened. Stig recalls returning with his mother from a wrestling tournament in Lillehammer: he had won his weight class and ran to tell his father, only to find him sitting at his desk with his back turned, apparently asleep, before he noticed the gun. The truth reframes both the note and the apparent disgrace it imposed on the family as a father’s effort to protect them.

A false confession and its delayed correction

The same pattern governs Sonny’s understanding of his father, Ab Lofthus. Johannes Halden tells Sonny that Ab’s suicide note claimed he had been the police mole who helped drug dealers and traffickers by passing on information about raids, evidence, and suspects. Johannes corrects that account: Ab had suspected who the mole was, and Johannes had overheard Hugo Nestor warn his boss that they needed to get rid of a policeman named Lofthus before he ruined their operation. Johannes warned Ab that he was in danger and urged the police to act quickly.

Ab nevertheless chose not to involve others. He believed other officers were indebted to Nestor and feared that the compromised police could not be trusted; instead, he decided to act alone. He made Johannes swear to keep silent, and Johannes honoured that promise until he finally told Sonny. In the light of this disclosure, Ab’s confession was not an admission of the corruption described in it but a false account that concealed the danger he had uncovered. The message reaches Sonny only after years of silence, forcing him to reinterpret his father’s death and the name Ab left behind.

Protection entangled with betrayal

Simon’s history complicates the expression: taking blame or bearing shame is not automatically an act of love. Else explains that Simon believed he had sold his soul partly because shame, degradation, and self-loathing numbed other pain. He drew Ab into his criminal bargain with the Twin when Ab and Helene were deep in debt after the banking crisis drove interest rates up. Simon used Ab’s fear that his son would grow up poor to pressure him into accepting the offer. He later said that watching Ab lose his soul was terrible, even though having him beside him made Simon feel less alone.

That coercion became fatal. When Simon realized Ab was willing to kill him for the sole position with the Twin, he warned the Twin that Ab had discovered their arrangement and urged that Ab be eliminated. Simon killed his best friend before Ab could kill him. The choice is a dark counterpoint to Ab’s concealed sacrifice: Simon invoked the needs of family and survival, but his act pulled another man into danger and ended in murder. The shame he carried was tied not simply to being compromised, but to what he had done to Ab.

Confession, repentance, and the limits of rescue

After Helene died, Simon stopped being the mole. Else says he spent the rest of his life doing penance and making amends, relentlessly pursuing corrupt officers despite the isolation that brought him within the police force. He did not regard loneliness as an injustice to himself; he thought it was what he deserved. His self-loathing persisted as a daily reckoning with the man he had been.

Else connects Simon’s later capacity to change with their relationship, but rejects the idea that her love simply rescued him. Simon had once hidden his gambling, mortgaged their home without her knowledge, and lost. When she forgave him, his shame extinguished his desire to gamble, and he quit for good. Their promise to tell each other everything helped him recognize his own capacity for self-control and honesty. That experience also changed how he regarded criminals: rather than seeing every offender as incorrigible, he became willing to believe in second chances. The expression therefore carries a tension between protection and concealment. Ab’s lie shields his family at the cost of their understanding; Simon’s secrecy and coercion injure others, while the later truth-telling that sustains his relationship becomes part of his attempt to live differently.