I examined her face. ‘How so?’

‘We’re career women. Can you really see yourself giving up your wonderful career to have children? You must travel most months of the year to rather inhospitable places. Not the kind of places you can bring a child to.’

‘My producer Julia manages it,’ I replied. Or did she? She’d still had to take five years off when her children were young and had admitted to me once how hard it had been to immerse herself back into the documentary-making world.

‘You’re the same too, aren’t you, Dylan?’ Cole said. ‘About not having kids. You always said you didn’t want them.’

Dylan shot his brother a look. ‘I said that years ago, Cole.’

‘I think it is a brave thing to admit,’ Hekla said, ‘especially for a woman, that we might not want children.’

‘I never said I didn’t want children,’ I said. Dylan and I exchanged a look. It felt like Asher and Hekla were desperate to impose their lifestyle on us.

‘Either way, we are alike, Gwyneth,’ Hekla insisted. ‘Like me, you have not had to rely on your parents. Mine haven’t passed away like yours but I did leave them the first chance I got, never looked back either. I was doing an apprenticeship with an artist by the time I was sixteen, was even renting my own little room in the middle of Reykjavik.’

‘Gwyneth, you were working for that wildlife filmmaker when you were sixteen, weren’t you?’ Cole asked.

Just then, food was brought in. Luckily, the subject moved on as we ate our breakfast. Afterwards, Cole and Asher had their meeting while Hekla showed Dylan some sculptures she’d acquired. I remained in the living room, gazing out at the iced fields as I drank coffee, enjoying the silence.

Then I heard footsteps. I looked up to see Cole stride in. He sat across from me and helped himself to some coffee.

‘How are you finding Dylan?’ he asked, looking at me sideways.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Does he seem different from the way he was when you knew him a year ago?’

I thought about it. ‘Not really. Why? Do you think he seems different?’

‘He disappeared for two months, didn’t he?’

‘I think that’s brave. I think it’s given him the space he needed.’

Cole nodded. ‘He never wanted to enter the family business. You know that, right?’

I looked down at my cup, not saying anything. Of course I knew. But it wasn’t my place to say.

‘And who said I wanted to enter the family business either?’ Cole added.

I looked at Cole in surprise. ‘But I thought you loved it all?’

‘Didn’t really have a chance to figure out what I wanted to do before I was steamrollered in. Anyway,’ he said, smiling, ‘this is depressing. Tell me about you and Dylan. Are you two official?’