I stood looking down through the cut rock at the slash of fjord water. That intense Nordic summer blue. If you dived in, the water would be warm on your body. But keep diving down from the surface and you would soon feel the cold peaty dark of the fjord. Winter was always there, ten feet down, patiently waiting for summer’s end.

“Elsa,” I said, “why did you never tell me about Bror?”

“How could I guess he would become relevant?” That evasive little eye flick. So unlike Elsa. She seemed to notice it herself. She turned, made a point of meeting my eye. “I mean, here’s the thing, Cal . . . Oslo’s a small place. If you were going to parties at the Blitz squat, you knew Bror. He hung with the young Marxists. He was all Durkheim this and Lacan that, which was hilarious because he was a trance DJ. But he could make you feel that what he was saying made perfect sense, even when it didn’t.”

“So you guys used to fuck?”

“Okay.” She glanced at me, then glanced away. “I mean, he’s kind of an ex.”

“Kind of?”

When we locked eyes there was something apologetic in her gaze.

“We went out. Half a life ago. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Vee.”

“And?”

“I was sixteen,” she said. “He was nineteen. I liked that he took me seriously. He had a sense of his own ridiculousness, which is a quality I like in men.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“The sex was vanilla. Take a breath, Cal, and remember what sixteen means.”

She was right. I was being ridiculous.

“Look,” she said, “I mean, I doubt if we’d get on these days, but he was kind to me. You know, first my mother died, and then Dad went completely off the rails. And in the middle of all that I had this unplanned pregnancy, and Dad insisted I terminate it but he wouldn’t come to the hospital, so in the end I went on my own. And I was sitting in the hospital canteen afterward not knowing if I felt good or bad about what I’d done, but dreading going home to Dad, and I guess Bror was there and he could see I was suffering, because he came over and offered me coffee and a cigarette.”

I knew about the termination. She had never told me about Bror, though.