‘Possibly,’ Tom says in reply to Dag’s stammered suggestion of a new crew, a team who won’t be subject to the wiles of spooky tales about ghosts haunting the site of their death. Or maybe it’s more than that, he thinks, looking out over the fjord. He’s standing directly over the spot to where Aurelia fell to her death. Where she jumped. As he looks down he spots a trickle of water snaking through the leaves and spilling over the edge of the cliff. The resurrected river, returning to its destination.

‘Ahoy there,’ a voice calls, and both Tom and Dag lean back from the platform strapped to the side of the cliff and look up where, a hundred feet away, an arm waves down. It’s Erik.

‘Hey, D-dad,’ Dag calls up. ‘Are you c-coming down?’

‘Send up the platform,’ Erik calls.

Tom and Dag tug the pulley to hoist the wooden platform upwards, and in a few minutes Erik is there, trying not to show how out of breath he is. He’s carrying a lunchbox and a flask, hands them both to Dag, who flushes with embarrassment – he doesn’t like Tom seeing that he’s a kid whose dad brings him lunch.

‘How’re you getting on?’ Erik says, grinning as he scans the scene. He slaps the rock with a large hand, pleased with the progress, pleased with his son. ‘Excellent work,’ he tells Dag, then Tom. ‘He’s done well, yes?’

‘Very well,’ Tom says. He’s pleased not only with Dag’s dedication and the progress of the project, but with the fact that these two men have remained loyal to him. They could have bowed to the pressure posed by their colleagues, made their apologies, which he would have accepted. But, when all the others left, Dag and Erik were two of only six men who remained tied to the project, and he senses their investment in the project stretches beyond Dag’s ambitions. Even so, he’s glad he heeded Aurelia when she urged him to take Dag under his wing. Had he gone with his own feelings on the matter, it is certain that neither man would be here, and the project would have stalled.

Later, once sheeting rain has made further progress impossible and he has insisted that Dag and Erik join him for a drink in the kitchen – how he wishes sometimes a pub was nearby; note to self: always make sure a project site has a local pub – he recalls again the moment when he met Dag, that he almost didn’t agree to allow him on the site. After all, getting consent for the build was hard enough. It took months, and a lot more money than he’d expected. The insurance costs for each additional man on site were a burden.