Page 137 of Top Shelf

“Selective,” she says. “Quick. Come inside.”

And somehow, just like that, I am brought into Solvik.

Inside, the house smells of coffee and warm bread and summer air moving through open windows. The hallway floorboards creak beneath our feet, and family photographs climb the wall beside the stairs. My favorite photos are of Viktor as a serious child holding a hockey stick too big for him, and Freja with braces and a ribbon in her hair, Astrid laughing on a dock, Anders with an arm around a man I know must be Lars because grief moves over Viktor’s face as he glances at it.

His grandfather’s face is everywhere once I know to look.

In a framed black-and-white picture near the entry, in the old coat still hanging on a peg by the back door, left there either by habit or because no one has been ready to move it. In the way Viktor’s eyes pause on a chair near the kitchen window.

Memory lives in the walls of this house.

Astrid leads me toward the kitchen, talking about coffee and rooms and how I must tell her if Viktor has been impossible because he was also impossible at six, though at six he had fewer tattoos. Freja translates half of what the children say, then argues with Viktor in Swedish over whether Hugo is allowed to show me the frogs by the lake before or after lunch. Anders takes the bags from the car with Johan, Freja’s husband. And Ebba moves slowly through it all, missing nothing.

It should be too much for me. It is too much—but not in the way I expected.

No one asks me to prove anything, and no one looks at me like I’m an accessory Viktor bought in Denver and brought home for inheritance purposes. They are curious, yes. Warmly and unapologetically curious. They want to know if I slept, if I eat fish, if I’ve heard of Midsummer before, if my work is with athletes only or other patients too, if Colorado really has mountains that look like the pictures, and if Viktor drives too fast on his motorcycle.

“Yes,” I say to the last one.

Astrid points at Viktor. “I knew.”

Viktor looks at me. “You are supposed to defend your husband.”

I take a sip of coffee Astrid has placed into my hand without me noticing. “I married you, didn’t I? I didn’t agree to perjury.”

Ebba makes a pleased sound into her cup.

The kitchen opens to a terrace, and beyond it, the meadow rolls toward the trees. The light hangs long and soft over everything, touching the swaying grass and the red barns and the distant glitter of lake water.

I look over to Viktor, standing near the kitchen island with Hugo still attached to his leg, talking quietly with his father. Astrid touches his arm when she passes. Freja bumps his shoulder with hers. Ebba says something sharp from the table that makes him roll his eyes, but he gets her another coffee anyway.

Here, I can feel the love—though it’s not tidy. It interrupts and feeds and scolds, reaching without asking whether it will be rejected.

And I have absolutely no fucking idea what to do with any of it.

Viktor glances over then, as if he felt my thought touch him. His gaze finds mine across the kitchen, and the room seems to narrow around us. For a second, I see him inside the whole of it. The child in the photographs, the man with the lake in his bones, the husband who brought me here and is watching me understand why.

This isn’t about keeping land, no. It’s about keeping the memory of a life. The exact treeline he grew up under and the dock where Astrid laughed in that photograph. The kitchen window where Lars must have sat, watching the meadow that probably looks different in every season.

I thought I understood before, but I didn’t. Viktor’s eyes hold mine, and I swallow at the rawness which passes over his face before he tucks it away. But it’s too late. I’ve seen it.

Blinking hard, I look down into my coffee, and he appears beside me a moment later. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay, maybe because he knows it’s not an easy answer. His hand simply settles at the small of my back, and his mouth brushes my temple.

“Welcome home, min fru,” he says quietly.

My chest opens around his words in a way I have no hope of stopping. I look out toward the meadow and lake flashing between the trees, and let myself sit here inside the warmth of his hand, inside the noise of his family, inside the dangerous, impossible feelings I have for this man.

Some places and people don’t ask you to earn the right to belong. They simply open the door.

Chapter twenty

Viktor

By mid-afternoon, Solvik has taken my wife from me. Not in a way I can object to, though. This is the problem.

Heidi sits at the kitchen table between my mother and Freja, with her hair loose and a cup of tea in both hands. Vera is pressed against her side with the half-finished flower crown from earlier, explaining in careful English about which flowers are best and how Hugo is not allowed to pick because he only chooses weeds. Alice has brought three books from the sitting room to show her pictures of Midsommar from years before, and Hugo is under the table with a wooden fox, making it bite the leg of Heidi’s chair.

She looks tired from travel, with dark shadows under her eyes, but still as stunning as the first time I saw her. The light catches her face, and I have to remind myself that she has never sat in my grandmother’s kitchen before.