Sun Ni

Sonny Lofthus is the son at the heart of Simon Kefas’s most damaging betrayal: Simon exploits Ab Lofthus’s fear for Sonny’s future to recruit Ab as a police mole for the Twin. The bargain turns Sonny, who is not present in the recalled account, into the pressure point through which one father is made to compromise another—and into the measure of the harm Simon later carries as shame.

Identity and Family Background

Sonny is Ab and Helene Lofthus’s son. When the banking crisis drove interest rates sharply upward, his parents were deep in debt and faced the prospect of losing their home. Their need for quick money gave Simon an opening, but it was Sonny’s dependence on his parents and the future they wanted for him that made the offer coercive.

Simon’s Bargain with Ab

After striking a deal with the Twin, Simon went directly to Ab and offered him money in exchange for his cooperation. Ab initially refused and threatened to report Simon to their boss. Simon then pressed on what Else later described as Ab’s Achilles heel: his son. He argued that this was how the real world worked, and that Sonny would suffer for Ab’s pride by growing up poor. The appeal recast a criminal arrangement as a choice made for a child’s welfare, making Sonny the means by which Simon overcame Ab’s resistance.

Consequences for Ab and Simon

Else recounts that Simon hated Ab because Ab had taken from him the only thing Simon valued. By drawing Ab into the Twin’s scheme, Simon felt that he had dragged him down into the abyss and watched him lose his soul. Yet the betrayal also made Simon feel less lonely: Ab’s corruption placed another person beside him in the same moral ruin. The companionship was therefore inseparable from the harm Simon had caused.

That arrangement could not last. The Twin wanted his mole to rise through the police force, and Simon’s account, as Else tells it, ends with the recognition that there was no longer room for both Simon and Ab. Sonny’s part in this history is indirect but decisive: Simon used the threat of poverty in Sonny’s future to secure Ab’s involvement, while the later struggle over advancement turned their shared compromise into a conflict.

Recalled History and Significance

The episode reaches the reader through Else’s explanation to Kari of what Simon found hardest to speak about. She describes his belief that shame, degradation, and self-loathing numbed other pain, and that his conduct amounted to a form of mental self-harm. Against that account, Sonny’s role clarifies how Simon’s corruption entered the Lofthus family: not through a direct act by the boy, but through a calculated appeal to a father’s responsibility for his child. The memory makes Sonny both the intended beneficiary of Simon’s offer and the instrument of its pressure, exposing how the language of protection can be used to draw people into the very harm it claims to prevent.