Simon Kefas’s gambling addiction

Simon Kefas’s gambling addiction is both a private compulsion and a public liability: it costs him his money and his wife’s savings, clouds his judgment, and leaves colleagues and criminal adversaries ready to define him by his worst decisions. Its arc runs from high-stakes betting as an escape from despair to a hard-won abstinence grounded in Else’s forgiveness and their promise of complete honesty. That history gives Simon a basis for believing that people can change, even as his relapse shows how precarious that belief can be.

Origins and the Appeal of Risk

Simon traces his serious gambling to a period of emotional and financial upheaval. He was already in debt when he began betting on horses in earnest, and he describes the attraction not simply as the prospect of winning but as standing at the edge of an abyss. Whether fortune lifted him or pushed him further down seemed almost beside the point: either result promised to take him away from where he was. The wager offered a dangerous sensation of escape in which the possibility of catastrophic defeat itself could become part of the thrill.

The compulsion grew amid the painful unravelling of the old friendship between Simon, Ab Lofthus, and Pontius Parr. Simon says he could not bear Ab’s happiness after Ab and Simon’s former love became a family, while Ab and Pontius drew closer and the three-man friendship dissolved. Simon was already in debt when he began betting heavily, and his account binds the addiction to an attempt to flee emotional loss as much as to financial difficulty. He declined Ab’s invitation to be Sonny’s godfather, then secretly attended Sonny’s christening from the back of the church. The infant’s calm smile stayed with him; Simon went straight from the church and placed 13,000 kroner on a horse named Sonny. The bet turned the child’s name into an uncanny link between his private shame and the life he would later try to influence.

Damage and Exposure

The cost was not confined to Simon’s own finances. He gambled away all his money, including Else’s, and secretly mortgaged their house in pursuit of another chance, only to lose. That betrayal made the addiction a breach of trust as well as a reckless private habit: the property and savings of the person closest to him became part of the stake without her knowledge. Later, when Pontius questions Simon’s judgment, he invokes the lost money and Else’s savings as evidence against trusting Simon’s decisions. The history remains relevant to how others assess Simon even after he has stopped betting.

The addiction also shapes his reputation at work. At the river where a body has been found, a crime-scene officer makes a casual beer bet with Simon about whether the death was suicide, then catches himself and apologizes. Simon refuses the wager; the colleague’s embarrassment makes clear that his history is known well enough to affect ordinary exchanges. Another officer tells Simon’s new partner that he is a gambling addict, not an alcoholic, and that she ought to know if they are to work together. The distinction corrects a mistaken assumption, but it does not make the problem less consequential: Simon’s private past is treated as information relevant to his professional reliability.

That reputation sharpens in the view of Arild Franck, who regards Simon as a self-serving loser willing to step over dead bodies in pursuit of his gambling. Franck assumes that people do not change, despite hearing that Simon has changed since meeting Else. His judgment is hostile, but it identifies a lasting consequence of the addiction: Simon’s recovery does not erase what his past conduct has made others believe about him.

Recovery, Honesty, and Relapse

Simon credits Else not with curing him by force, but with giving him a reason to choose recovery. A psychologist had urged him to identify the force in his subconscious that overrode common sense and to ask whether anything mattered more than gambling. Simon’s answer was Else. He says he spoke to the compulsion, tamed it, and did not relapse for a time. His language personifies gambling as a tyrant, but the decisive act remains his own: Else gave the question its answer, while Simon decided to quit.

The turning point came after he secretly mortgaged their house and lost. Else did not leave him, demand that he suffer alone, or impose an ultimatum. She stroked his cheek and forgave him. Simon remembers his shame extinguishing the craving for the charged instant in which everything might be won or lost. He says he quit that day and thereafter did not gamble—not even for a beer—until the later relapse. Their promise to tell one another absolutely everything became part of the recovery: honesty answered the secrecy that had made the mortgage possible and offered a way to live with the knowledge of his own capacity for self-control.

Simon understands that recovery as a transformation in how he sees other people. Having known that he could fail, be forgiven, and still choose differently, he became more willing in later years as a police officer to offer people a second chance. This outlook stands against his experience, which might have encouraged him to regard criminals as incorrigible. The change does not depend on pretending that wrongdoing has vanished; it rests on the possibility that a person can acknowledge it and act otherwise.

But the addiction is not safely confined to the past. During a police operation, Simon recognizes that he has not relapsed once—until now. The old pattern appears in the way he thinks about improbable outcomes and putting everything on one plan: the psychologist’s account of his compulsion makes betting on a horse with his wife’s savings an emblem of the same irrational wager. The admission punctures the certainty of his recovery. Else remains the person he identifies as more important than the addiction, yet the relapse shows that love and insight do not make the compulsion disappear automatically.

Inheritance and the Possibility of Choice

Simon’s history becomes a point of connection with Sonny Lofthus, Ab’s son. When Simon recounts that he placed 13,000 kroner on the horse named Sonny after the christening, he jokes that Sonny owes him the money. Beneath the anecdote lies a serious question: whether Simon, Ab, or Sonny could have chosen differently. Simon wonders whether something might allow a different choice the next time, rather than repeating a destructive pattern in expectation of a changed result.

He speaks to Sonny against the idea that a son is condemned to reproduce his father’s moral failure. Simon insists that Ab’s intentions were good even though love contributed to his downfall, and that Sonny is not simply his father’s copy. This counsel draws force from Simon’s own life: addiction damaged his marriage and judgment, but Else’s forgiveness and his decision to stop opened a path beyond the damage. His story does not promise that change is effortless or permanent; the relapse makes that claim impossible. It does, however, explain why Simon resists treating a person’s worst act as the final definition of who he can become.