Fika, the beloved Swedish ritual of taking a break with friends, wouldn’t be fika without coffee and cake.

“This is a fiskfika,” Kennet said. “A gathering of Fish. Slightly different. Same feeling, same purpose, but with a different menu. You’ll see.”

“It’s so quiet and still,” she said. “You wouldn’t know anything or anyone else was on the island.”

“The way my grandmother’s house is built, you feel like you’re in the middle of the sea. Her bedroom has big windows on three sides, and it’s like sitting in the sky.”

“Will you show it to me?”

“Her bedroom?”

They both blushed and looked away.

“Holy mackerel,” Kennet muttered.

Astrid pressed hands to her cheeks. “I keep eating my foot. I meant her house.”

“Her house. Yes. I will show you her house when the tenants leave.”

She sat on one of the large pine logs by the fire and dug in her straw bag. “So,” she said. “A secret.”

He sat next to her. Forearms on knees, fingers laced and heart thumping.

Astrid handed him a book. It was the last thing he was expecting, and he laughed a little as he took it. It was an old tome, with thick cream pages. Hardcover, yet worn and soft at its corners. It was marked in several places by pieces of stiff paper. The front embossed in gold with a single word:

BYRON

Kennet felt his world contract just a bit as he stared at the name. As if time and place stopped what they were doing and took a step in, curious.

Byron.

The oddest feeling came over him. He knew nobody named Byron, yet the sound of it in his mind was like an old friend waving. Someone he hadn’t seen in a too-long time.

Hello. I know you. Fancy meeting you here.

So strange. Was he thinking of Björn?

Of course. That must be it. Byron is an English version of Björn.

The feeling within shrugged and wrinkled its nose, unsatisfied.

“Do you know his work?” Astrid said.

A lightbulb went off then, and Kennet opened the cover to the first page:

Herre Byron: De Samlade Dikterna

The Collected Poems of Lord Byron

“I don’t,” he said, turning the soft pages. “Cripes, this looks well loved.”

Well loved and well annotated. All through the poems, around, over and under every stanza were penciled notes in a fine hand. Some in Swedish. Others in Portuguese.

“It was my father’s,” Astrid said. “All those notes are his. Except for this one…”

She took the book and fanned the pages under her thumb. She put the bookmark in her lap and turned the tome back toward him. “Look at the first line.”

Han varit fiskare i unga dagar

och med det yrket höll han stadigt i…

The word fiskare had been carefully circled in pencil.

“Huh,” he said, touching the word. “Here I am.”

“Yes.”