I didn’t choose these three cities for variety. I chose them because each one does something specific to the story, and none of them could do another’s job.
Copenhagen is where the loss happens, and it had to be the city that once meant something good. My protagonist and his family build a life that starts in Hamburg but keeps pulling them back to Denmark – visits, memories, a long weekend meant to be nothing more than that. Copenhagen City Hall Square, in the book, is the last ordinary place before everything changes: a sunny afternoon, a family crossing a street, nothing about the moment suggesting what it’s about to become. I wanted readers to have walked that square with the family before the accident happens there, so the location itself carries weight the second time it appears – during the trial, and later, when my protagonist has to return to the same city with an entirely different purpose.
Hamburg is home, or what’s left of the idea of home. The family moves there for an ordinary, almost mundane reason – a good job offer, no complications with paperwork, a fresh start that felt, at the time, like nothing more dramatic than a sensible decision. I wanted that ordinariness on the page precisely so the apartment in Barmbek-Nord – four rooms, a balcony, a bicycle cellar – would read as achingly normal rather than symbolic. It’s not a metaphor. It’s just where a family lived, until it became the place one man came home to alone. Hamburg also gave me the city’s other face later in the book: the Reeperbahn at night, rain smearing neon across wet streets, an atmosphere that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with what a city looks like when you’re no longer able to feel anything it’s offering you.
Prague is where the story turns, quite literally, into something the reader hasn’t seen my protagonist do before. He can’t source what he needs in Hamburg – the risk is too visible, the local networks too closely watched – so the plot pushes him east, into a city that, in the book, smells of cold stone and diesel and doesn’t ask questions it already knows the answers to. I wanted Prague to feel like a city built for exactly this kind of transaction: old enough that every kind of mask has already been worn there, indifferent enough that one more person with too much purpose doesn’t register as unusual. Writing those chapters, I was careful not to romanticize the city the way travel writing tends to. This isn’t the Prague of postcards. It’s the Prague behind the address someone gives you in a low voice, and the two versions of the city exist a few streets apart from each other without ever quite touching.
There’s a practical dimension to all three cities too, one I probably enjoyed more than I should admit given my background. My protagonist has to think logistically about how he moves between Hamburg and Copenhagen – whether the Storebælt Bridge toll cameras will photograph his car, whether he needs two separate parking garages in Copenhagen so he doesn’t become a familiar face in either one. None of this is dramatic in the traditional sense. It’s closer to an engineering problem: minimize your visible footprint, account for every point of exposure, plan for the failure mode you haven’t thought of yet. I wanted that mindset legible on the page, because it’s exactly how someone like him would actually approach a plan of this kind. Not through instinct. Through calculation.
Geography, in this book, isn’t backdrop. It’s structure. Copenhagen holds the wound. Hamburg holds the after. Prague holds the turn. Moving my protagonist between them wasn’t a matter of giving the book scenery – it was a matter of giving each phase of his transformation a place that could actually hold it, the way certain rooms in a house only ever seem to hold certain kinds of conversation. I don’t think this story would have worked set in one city, or in a single country. It needed borders to cross, because crossing them is part of what let him become someone his old life would not have recognized.
There’s also something quietly true about how borders function in a story like this that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was deep into drafting. Crossing from Germany into the Czech Republic isn’t dramatic anymore, not the way it might have been a generation earlier. No checkpoint drama, no tension at a barrier. That ease is exactly what makes it useful to a man trying to disappear briefly from his own life. The absence of friction at the border becomes its own kind of danger, because nothing about the crossing forces him to stop and reconsider what he’s doing. I wanted that frictionlessness on the page – the way modern Europe lets you move through consequential decisions almost as easily as inconsequential ones, with no border guard standing between a person and the worst version of themselves.
