I put down my drink untouched. Elsa watched me, her glass still by her lips, intrigued.

“Do you need to get that, Cal?”

I looked at her: at the keen intelligence in her wolf eyes; at the implied question in her gently parted lips. I looked down at the water droplets on her breasts, at the exhilarating angle of her thigh. I switched off my phone.

For the first time in a year we fucked. It was slow and intense, far too full of expectation and longing to be satisfying. Neither of us came, but there was an intimacy to it that I thought we had lost. Something simple and overwhelming and beautiful.

We took the train into town, saying nothing, each lost in our own thoughts. We stood for a while in front of the town hall, watched the cranes as they hoisted girders into place on the facade. Still we said nothing.

We headed into the East End of Oslo. People thronged the street, speaking languages we did not understand. There was dirt here, and color, and life, and noise. Kids on snakeboards glided through gaps in the crowds, bumped fists with friends as they passed. White boys with face tattoos and plaited Nordic beards sank beer from cans. Laughing women passed by in niqabs. Lesbian couples held hands or made out in the doorways of bars. There was an edge on these streets, something intoxicating and new.

Elsa put her arm around me. She rested her head on my shoulder and we stood stock-still, let the people flow around us, watched them as they surged and ebbed.

“Why did we never choose this, Cal?”

“We’re choosing it now.”

“We chose the part of town that’s the very opposite of this,” she said. “And we wondered why our daughters weren’t happy.”

“It was for six months.”

“That’s what we told ourselves. But we never chose this life anywhere we lived. We’re not even forty. How did we become this old white married couple?”

“Tonight we chose this.”

“No,” she said. “No, tonight we chose a cocktail bar that has a barbershop on the second floor. They take thirty bucks for a peach Bellini. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not this.”

I looked around me, at the ebb and surge of the crowd. “All right,” I said. I led her to a bench table outside a dirty bar that opened onto the street. “Turn your phone back on. Tell your friends they’re meeting us here.”

“Hedda won’t like it.”

“No,” I said. “She won’t.”

She put her handbag on the table. She rummaged.

“That bag,” I said. “Not really you.”

“And what do you know? No cigarettes.”

“I’m trying to start a fight, Elsa.”

“Okay.” She leaned her head to the left, then to the right. “Okay, fuck you. I like the bag. And I like Hedda. Even if she doesn’t like you.”