The Supervised Hours

By Elias Solbak Årnes

On Sundays, Elias Dahl sits in a beige room and waits for his son. A supervisor watches. A pen records every pause.

Two hours a week. That is what the ruling left him: supervised contact at a family counselling office in Lillestr m, where seven-year-old Teodor draws small red horses and a stranger writes down everything his father does.

Then a sentence appears in the file that does not match the room.

Hesitation was observed before physical contact.

Recorded during twelve minutes when the room was empty.

Elias verifies documents for a living. He knows how records are built, and he knows what it means when a report describes twelve minutes that never happened. He starts comparing contact logs, timestamps and missing pages. The same phrases return, month after month. Then he finds them in other families' files.

The trail leads from one observation room into procurement codes, training seminars and a private foundation whose language has quietly become the state's. Every complaint he files is entered into his record as proof of fixation. Every question narrows the file around him. The few people willing to help know what it costs.

And Teodor's mother has always known exactly how the machine is operated.

To keep seeing his son, Elias must prove what happened without becoming the man the file already describes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDRFXV9Y
• ISBN13: 9798191348414
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"