‘You’re staying with him?’

Áróra was astonished. She wasn’t aware of much of a connection between Daníel and her mother.

‘He’s going to support me through all this. He’s a lovely man, your uncle.’

‘He’s not my uncle,’ Áróra said, sounding sharper than she meant to. She put her mother’s case in the boot of the hire car, and they didn’t say a word until they were out of the car park and Keflavík could be seen stretching away down the slope below the road.

‘This is familiar,’ her mother muttered.

Áróra nodded. ‘The airport has really grown since tourism took off. Just wait until you see what Reykjavík looks like.’

‘Reykjavík needed to grow a bit,’ she replied. ‘I never liked the 153way we always ran into your father’s friends and relatives every time we went downtown.’

Áróra had heard the same observation from her mother before. She had never been comfortable in Iceland. She found it too sparsely populated, too personal, and too small in every possible way. Áróra put her foot down once they were past the last of the roundabouts on the road past Keflavík and the straight line of main road lay ahead of them. Her mother sniffed at the smell of the Blue Lagoon, which carried all the way to them, and then stared out over the moss-covered lava that stretched from the shore to their left, all the way up into the Reykjanes Mountains, in the distance to their right. Hanging in the air were the sentences that her mother always dropped when they drove this way when Áróra was small, either with her father at the wheel or sometimes a relative who had come to fetch them. Every comment had been along the lines that this was a tragic and barren place, a cold desert, like the surface of the moon.

If her mother found Iceland a sad place back then, those emotions must be magnified now that she was here to search for her lost daughter.

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63

I’m staring at the picture in Ísafold’s text message, trying to fathom the emotions I feel deep inside. The last picture she sent before this one was of the cut on her forehead, almost in the roots of her hair, where there were eight neat stitches.

Now she’s sending me a picture of her hand, a ring on her finger.

I answer with questions. Are you back at Björn’s place? Is that picture what it looks like? She calls right back.

She’s happy, and it’s all I can do not to snap at her. I don’t have it in me to wreck her moment of joy.

My Ice-Bear Björn is changing his ways, she says.