The apartment building stood on heavy concrete pillars, held tight to the rock below by deep-driven steel spikes. Øvre Øvrebøhaugen 4: an address I could spell but never pronounce. Inside, the dark rooms were low-ceilinged and triple-glazed, built to hold the winter at bay. But today the Nordic summer heat had forced us out onto the terrace at the back.

I felt a low vibration through the concrete of the terrace. The apartment windows trembled in their metal frames.

“Thunder,” I said, though the day was bright and the sky was clear.

“Thunder,” agreed Elsa, watching me over the top of her glass.

We had loved this place when we first saw it—so much space, so close to town—but our daughters never did. There was something about the austerity of the buildings that silenced children, that made them speak to each other in monotones or whispers. Everything was low-slung and hard-lined, the wooden cladding painted black, the concrete gray and weathered. Everywhere there were stern little signs—play no ball, ride no bicycle, feed no birds—and children very quickly got the message that they were tolerated but never welcome: at Øvre Øvrebøhaugen the only voices that carried were old.

Today, though, none of that mattered. Midsummer’s Eve was our anniversary. Seventeen years married. Today our elder daughter was at summer camp, our younger daughter at a friend’s, our baby son asleep in his crib. And besides, we’d be gone in a week.

On a stone patio table stood two hand-cut martini glasses, emptied now. Elsa was smiling at me as she always used to smile, running her fingertips across my palm. Upright and lean, her dark blond hair scraped and casually tied, her eyes keen and sharp.

Those eyes of Elsa’s: the eyes of a wolf, shot through with ice. Her irises are always a shade too blue, a fraction too pale. Nordic eyes, you might be tempted to say, though no one here has eyes like Elsa’s. Even now, at times, I feel tracked by an alien intelligence.

She turned my hand over, made a play of looking at my watch. “How about another?”

“We have twenty-five minutes.”

“We do.”

I picked up the glasses.

On the kitchen wall hung three meter-square prints, all color and photographic grain. Elsa was a photographer. Her work in the years before the children came had been very pure; very expensive; very art. All looming shapes, shot without a lens on the camera. Carmine 12, Cinnabar 44, and Burnt Umber 11.

“Why are they so out of focus?” people would ask.

“Keep thinking about that,” she would reply. “Because the lack of focus is important.”