This was what he had always wanted, this was what he had imagined: a house by the water, a bench on the mountainside where we would sit when we were old and look at the view. A garden with a wharf where Blue could be docked. I could go out fishing and he could take care of the garden, even spend time in the kitchen on the odd Sunday to prepare food for a party the guests would praise him for. But first and foremost he had imagined the trip he would make every day to and from this house, to and from. The suit he would wear—the suit, the symbol of stability, of respectability—maybe even carry a briefcase. The office where he would sit, the secretary he would have eventually, the promotion, the carbon paper, the file cabinet, the reassuring scent of mimeograph ink, freshly brewed coffee, and the paycheck he would receive every month: a piece of paper, tangible proof of his proficiency that he would put in the bank, where the money would grow, so that eventually he could buy a larger house by the fjord, a nicer car, matching floor lamps for the living room, winter clothes for the children, a girl and a boy.

A wholly ordinary, relatively good life was what he wanted. A life where there weren’t any sharp edges, not too much noise, or too much of everything that was me.

How would life have been if I had given in on that day? If I had embraced his dream? Would it still be Magnus and me? Would we have acquired the house by the fjord? The children? The bench? Would it have been a good life also for me?

But I embraced neither him nor his dream. I ran.

I ran away from Mommy and Magnus, Daddy, Lars, and Svein. I passed the protesters, who shouted even more insults at me, at a girl they’d seen grow up in the village, someone who had been one of them.

But none of them attacked me—they let me run.

I ran down the haul road, past all the parked cars—there had to be more than one hundred, with five men in each. Five hundred men had come up the mountain to take us down.

They’d gotten rid of me.

I ran, I walked, I ran some more.

It wasn’t until I reached the wharf that I stopped, inhaling the damp air from the fjord, the smell of salt water. But it didn’t help.

Chapter Thirty: David

Chapter Thirty

David

I cried until there was nothing left of me.

Afterward I sat calmly on the berth, with my legs curled up underneath me, the way Lou usually sat.

There was a new kind of silence in me. Now that I remembered. Now that I couldn’t forget. A silence like the silence inside a shell, I thought. A shell, a mussel without any inner body.