Marthe looks at me.

‘Can you just…’ she begins, tailing off.

‘What?’

‘Just drop it,’ she says. 66

‘Eat your sandwich, Olea,’ Kristoffer says. ‘You’ve barely had a thing all day.’

Marthe looks past us, up to the bend in the road where the car appears. Shortly afterwards I hear the thud of a car door and Mum shouting hello.

‘Hi,’ Marthe and I reply in chorus, like before, like always.

‘I see we’ve caught you in the middle of lunch,’ Mum says, coming around the corner.

Stein is wearing khaki shorts and clip-on sunglasses over his normal frames, but now he has them flipped up, it makes him look like an insect. Mum bends down and hugs Olea first, she’s talked a lot about wanting to treat Olea as if she were her own granddaughter, and every time she looks at us as if we ought to be bowled over by her generosity.

‘Nice to have visitors, isn’t it, Olea?’ Marthe says.

Is this the kind of thing people do when they’re with children, say totally unnecessary things? It’s as if she were talking to a dog, she and Kristoffer both do it all the time, wasn’t that lovely? Isn’t it nice to get our pyjamas on? Did you feel sad when that happened?

‘Well, we’ve had quite a trip,’ Mum says.

‘I’ve been fishing,’ Olea says, looking up at her.

‘Have you?’ Mum says, clapping her hands. ‘Wow. What was I going to say? We’ve been stuck in traffic virtually all the way from Sande. We left this morning.’

‘We had to stop at Rugtvedt for a hot dog,’ Stein says.

‘Stein likes his hot dogs with prawn mayonnaise,’ Mum says. ‘That was quite something, learning that after six years,’ she says teasingly. 67

‘I didn’t see that coming from you, Stein,’ Kristoffer says.

‘And then there was a diversion just outside Risør and we got stuck at the lights,’ Stein says.

Marthe and I lock eyes and raise our eyebrows.

He shakes his head. ‘Unbelievable. Sometimes it really hits you that you’re in a very different part of the country.’

‘Well, you’re here now,’ Marthe and I say, practically in chorus.

‘You could probably do with some coffee,’ Kristoffer says, going inside. Stein ambles in after him.

‘And you two, my girls, have you been having a lovely time in this warm weather?’ Mum asks, patting my cheek and ruffling my hair, then turning to Marthe and stroking her overly dyed hair and gently touching her stomach, why would she be touching Marthe’s stomach already?

‘Are you tired, my love?’ she asks Marthe. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘Yes,’ Marthe says, leaning in to her.

She doesn’t have any problem giving Mum a long hug, sinking into her embrace and resting there in her arms, and I pat Marthe’s shoulder, perplexed, we’re like a sculpture with Marthe at the heart.