A Child Made to Order

VIOLA (41) is an investigative journalist living in Oslo. Viola has kept hidden from everyone that she has a rare genetic disease, the mitochondrial disease, which causes fatal damage to one’s offspring. Several years ago this culminated in Viola going against doctor’s orders and giving birth to a child which soon thereafter died. Since then she has lived with an overbearing feeling of guilt on the one hand, and an obsessive and unfulfilled desire to have another child on the other. This inner battle has laid her life in a ruin. One day Viola is visited by STINE (59) who is the mother of a mysteriously disappeared woman, named MARIANNE (26) and who also has the mito-d disease. It turns out Stine has new evidence Marianne is alive. Viola resigns at the last minute from her prestigous correspondent position in the middle east, just so she can pursue the search for Marianne. (excerpt)