The ocean closed over his head, and he sank to the bottom, away from the light at the surface. A kelp plant caressed his arms, inviting him deeper. He was tempted to just let go, exhale one last time, and fall, let his body dissolve into motes dancing in the sea’s vertical rays of sunlight and surrender to the mermaids of the bottomless blue.

But the gray waters of Snekkersten Marina were far from the bottomless blue. Jeppe Kørner pushed off from the bottom and stretched his arms up toward the light. Seconds later, he broke the surface and inhaled.

“I was starting to think you would never come back up.”

Jeppe shook the water out of his ears and squinted up at the figure on the dock. Above the surface the world was warm and bright. He swam to the ladder and searched with his feet for the slippery bottom rung, then he looked down one last time. The cool depths of the sea always stirred a longing in him, some kind of death wish perhaps.

“I don’t understand how you can stay in so long. Ten seconds and I’m freezing.” Johannes Ledmark shivered in his bathrobe and held a towel out to Jeppe. “Let’s hit the sauna and warm up before the senior crowd arrives. I can’t stand the sight of all those varicose veins.”

He winked as if to take the sting out of his harsh remark and headed for the sauna. Jeppe dried himself and stuck his feet into the slightly too small sandals Johannes had found for him to use.

Johannes, renowned actor and one of Jeppe’s oldest friends, was renting the ground floor of an old brick house by the harbor in Snekkersten for the summer while he looked for a new place to live. His repeated attempts to save the marriage with his husband of twelve years had failed, and the inner-city condo they owned together was now for sale. Meanwhile Johannes was licking his wounds far from the prying eyes of the public in the old fishing village of Snekkersten, north of Copenhagen. The run-down house was leaky and the yard overgrown, but Johannes seemed to thrive in the makeshift chaos overlooking the waters of the Øresund. He had even begun attacking the yard with a hedge trimmer and loppers, stubbornly insisting that mowing the lawn and weeding the patio felt meditative.

“Ha, I think we lucked out. The sauna’s empty.”

Johannes held the door of the little black-painted building on the breakwater open for Jeppe. They made themselves comfortable on the sauna’s wooden benches and let the oven’s dry heat rise up through the wood and bring the life back into their cold bodies. The early spring weather had been unusually sunny and warm for Denmark, but there was still a bite to the air, and the water temperature hadn’t crept up above the midforties.