Page 139 of Top Shelf

Clara looks down at her phone, but I see the smile she tries to hide.

Lukas rubs a hand over his face. “Freja.”

“No, it’s fine.” She looks at our cousin, but not unkindly. Freja is sharp, but she rarely cuts without reason. “You can be disappointed, Anton. You had a plan, and Viktor ruined it by coming home married to a woman everybody loves.”

“Already?” I ask.

Freja shrugs. “Alice has offered her half of the blue bedroom. That is essentially an invitation to join the family.”

Despite everything, Anton chuckles, and it eases the tension in the room.

“I didn’t want to destroy Solvik.” He turns to me earnestly. “That is never what I wanted. I simply wanted to make Solvik sustainable. That hasn’t changed.”

“And I want it alive,” I say.

“It can be both.”

“Not if alive means cutting off pieces until the account looks better.”

Lukas looks between us, and my father stays silent. Freja drinks from her mug as if this is dramatic theater and she has paid for her seat.

Anton’s gaze flicks toward the window, beyond it to the side meadow and the old red barn. “You’ve been away for years, Viktor.”

The words cut me because they are true. I’ve been in Denver, playing eighty-two-game NHL seasons and breaking my body against boards while other people stacked firewood, patched roofs, and sat with Farfar when his breathing got bad. I carried Solvik under my skin, but I was not always here to carry its weight.

“I know. And I’m sorry.” Anton blinks, as if he expected me to argue, but I don’t give him that. “But I am here now.”

Freja’s gaze moves to me, then away. Heidi’s warm laugh reaches us from the kitchen again, followed by my mother speaking in fast Swedish. Anton hears it too.

“She seems nice,” he says.

“She is,” I tell him. What I don’t tell him is I don’t care what he thinks of her.

“Does she understand what she married into?”

My eyes pierce his, and the room quiets around the question. I think of Heidi in the car, asking if she deserved me, sitting forward as the house appeared. Her whispered “oh.” The way her eyes moved from the meadow to the lake to the house, taking it in. The way something changed in her when she saw this was not about value, but memory.

“Yes,” I say. “She understands more than most.”

Anton studies me for a long moment, then nods. It is not an indication of peace, not yet. But it is not war.

By the time I return, my grandmother is waiting for me. She is not sitting, and this is how I know I’m in trouble. Ebba stands by the old dresser near the window, a hand resting on her cane, the other wrapped around a coffee cup. She watches Heidi at the kitchen table with my nieces, her mouth set in the same thoughtful line that made me confess every crime of my childhood long before she asked the first question.

“Mormor,” I say.

She doesn’t look at me. “Your wife is tired.”

“She slept badly.”

“She is nervous.”

“Yes.”

“She hides it well.”

“Yes.”

She cuts a glance to me. “You are not supposed to agree so easily.”