Page 154 of Top Shelf

I look over her shoulder. My parents are still dancing, my mother’s forehead resting briefly against my father’s cheek while he speaks too quiet for anyone else to hear. Whatever it is makes her laugh with her whole face, and my father looks at her like the sound is something he has spent his life coming home to.

“It means my darling,” I say, looking back down at Heidi. “My beloved.”

Her steps falter, and I tighten my hand at her back, holding her calmly while everything inside me becomes anything but.

“Oh,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

The song keeps playing, the words about fools being in love blaring through the speakers. My family moves around us, but the garden in front of the house narrows to her hand in mine, her breath catching, the ring on her finger.

“Viktor…”

The sound of my name in her mouth is almost enough to make me careless. I shake my head and swallow, because I can feel everything in me reaching too fast. My heart is already in her hands. I can either pretend it’s not there, or be brave enough to say it.

“There is something I need to tell you.”

Her eyes search mine, and I think of Ebba’s words in the kitchen.

Give her something real to choose.

I think of Heidi under the birch arch. I think of my father looking at my mother like every wild, loud piece of her is the exact thing he was made to love. And I think of my wife, my love, who believes she is too much and somehow keeps making every room brighter just by standing in it.

“You are like a kaleidoscope, Heidi,” I say, the words raspy in my throat. “All this color, all this light, and you think I will be distracted by the moon? Every time I look, there is more.”

Her eyes turn glossy, and I bring our joined hands between us, my thumb brushing the ring on her finger.

“I do not want to look anywhere else but at you.”

She does not move for a breath, but then her fingers tighten on my shoulder, and the smile she gives me is so joyful it breaks everything in my chest wide open.

“Viktor,” she says again, so softly, so dangerously close to a confession.

I lower my forehead to hers. The words are there. They sit on my tongue, in my lungs, beneath every place she has touched me. I do not say them yet, and neither does she.

But in the garden at Solvik, with Joyride playing through the long Swedish light, our love stands between us anyway.

Chapter twenty-three

Heidi

By the time we slip away from the celebration, the sun has dipped lower but still refuses to leave. Viktor tells me Sweden does this in summer—it holds onto light.

The sky above Solvik has softened into a pale gold with the edges rinsed in pink, and the meadow beyond the terrace is glowing in a way things do when they look so beautiful it makes you question whether they’re real.

Behind us, the family’s voices still drift through the warm air in pieces. Astrid laughing. Freja calling for someone to bring another blanket. Hugo protesting bedtime with the theatrical despair of a child who has known too much fun and refuses to surrender it. Music still hums, but it’s quieter now, threaded beneath the sounds of plates and chairs being stacked.

Viktor’s hand is wrapped around mine. He’s barely let go of me since the blessing, despite the ribbon now gone from our wrists. But I can still feel it on my skin, with his thumb brushing my pulse. His voice in front of everyone, saying words in Swedish that made his mother cry and made his grandmother close her eyes with a grin.

Min älskling.

I keep replaying it because I can’t seem to stop. The words have taken hold under my ribs, too heavy to ignore and too fragile to touch directly. He didn’t say I love you, but there are only so many ways a person can hand you their heart in the middle of a garden while your family surrounds you, I guess.

We walk without speaking until the house is peeking through the trees. The meadow opens around us, wilder here than I recall from the other night picking flowers for my pillow. A vista of wildflowers tangle through the grass, their stems brushing my ankles with every step and catching against the hem of my skirt. My flower crown is barely surviving after being mauled by dancing and children and one full-body hug from Astrid, but Viktor keeps looking at it with a gentle smile.

“You’re staring,” I say.

“I have eyes.”