She’d already seen the glances passed between grandparents when she’d visited a few months before, right before summer. Noticed he’d lost weight, his cheeks looking sunken, and they kept mentioning trips to Norrköping or Linköping for ‘errands’. But these were errands she didn’t ask about, signs she didn’t want to interpret, an all-too-simple puzzle she refused to solve. It would have been easy to disappear into the chaos of London, to bury herself in work at the university. To just focus on her job, finding a way back to a normal life, and not drinking. But when they asked her to come home for a weekend in September, she knew.

There was no wind that Saturday morning; the boat was still, and Klara took a sip of her coffee, grimaced, then swallowed the whole cup, burning her tongue and the roof of her mouth in the process. And while the liquor flowed through her like a wave, she met her grandfather’s eyes.

‘How long?’ she said. ‘How long do you have?’

But she didn’t cry. Not when he told her the cancer had spread and was aggressive and they found it too late, though that probably didn’t matter, and it would have ended up the same. She didn’t cry when he told her he’d refused treatment, because it was useless anyway, would only buy him a few months of vomiting and pain at the most. She didn’t even cry when he sat on the bench next to her and held her close just like when she was a child, when he and Grandma were raising her on the outskirts of the archipelago.

‘My time has come, Klara sweetie,’ he’d said. ‘What do I have to complain about? I’ve had a long life with your grandmother. And when we lost your mother, we got you. Sorrow and joy.’

He grabbed her chin and looked at her intensely with those bright blue eyes.

‘Don’t be afraid of any of it,’ he said. ‘Not sorrow, not joy. You have to learn that, my heart. Do you promise? Will you remember?’

Klara didn’t understand what he meant, could barely hear his voice. But now, at last, she knew. Now as she stood here in the snow, in the arms of her very best friend, she knew.

‘You can’t hide,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t hide from it.’

And then she starts to weep. No words, almost silently, against Gabriella’s neck.

She doesn’t know how long they stand there, in silence, the snow falling hard and fast around them.

‘I should have got here sooner,’ Gabriella whispers after a while. ‘I can’t even imagine… You grew up with them, with him. Out here. And now he’s gone. It…’