Still, she knows she is lucky in many ways, and she especially feels that when she is immersed in her art. She feels overcome with beauty and hope and gratitude when she brings the elegant curve of a bird’s wing to the canvas, or when she succeeds in capturing the spill of moonlight on the surface of the fjord in winter, like shattered crystals, or when she pinches a leaf from a branch in the garden and holds it up to the light, exposing its curiously perfect skeleton, later folding it into one of her thick coffee table books to dry.

There is a man here at Villa Vinternatt whose company she enjoys. He’s much older than her, at least in his mid-fifties, and they sometimes paint together, positioning their easels side by side in front of the bay windows overlooking the sound. He’ll pause his own work for long moments and watch her paint, handing her a color tube she hadn’t yet realized she wanted and it’s always exactly right. His name is Joel and in another life he was a concert pianist and hobby painter, whose life broke apart after his pregnant wife and his three-year-old son died in a car accident. He succumbed to alcohol addiction and eventually full-blown cocaine and heroin abuse, until he got clean after over a decade and got another chance at life at Villa Vinternatt.

Elisabeth gets up from the bed and sits at her desk in the dark, shivering slightly at the feel of the metal chair against her bare thighs. The huge house is quiet, yet comfortingly humming with the telltale signs of life – a tap running somewhere, footsteps in a corridor downstairs, the unmistakable feeling of a building filled with people.

She opens the selfie mode on the phone camera and studies herself. She still looks young, in spite of everything. She smiles at herself and takes a picture but when she looks at it she realizes she looks so sad it takes her breath away. She tries again, consciously bringing a smile not only to her lips but to her eyes. Better, but still visibly fake. She thinks about padding down the corridor and around the corner to room 21, where Joel lives. She could knock softly and he’d appear, disheveled but awake and he’d smile, happy to see her. They could sneak downstairs, through the big dining hall, onto the covered terrace overlooking the gardens and the fjord, and they could sit together on a bench, sharing a rollie Joel has smuggled into Villa Vinternatt, looking out on the trembling lights from buoys and reef markers on the water.