Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it. Years ago she’d wondered what, exactly, constituted love: the state of emergency she felt all ten years of their life together? Not that the building was on fire; not that the ship was about to sink; not that the hurricane was just off shore, pulling at the palm trees: the knowledge that, should the worst happen, she had no plan of escape, not a single safety measure, she was flammable, sinkable, rickety, liable to be scrubbed from the map. That feeling was love, she’d thought then, and she thought it now, too.

“My father died,” she said.

“Ah, Walter,” said Aksel, and he rubbed his jaw dolefully. “I am sorry. Recently?”

“A year ago. I have something for you. We decided—this is Leo—we decided it was a good time to come to Denmark, to deliver it.”

“Hello, Leo,” said Aksel, who looked half in dreamland, populated as it was by Ancient Danes, long-ago girlfriends, and preteen American boys. “I am very glad to meet you.”

“You know my mom?” said Leo.

“That friend I mentioned.” Then to Aksel: “I Facebooked your mom, but I guess you’re off the grid.”

“I am very much upon,” he said. “You just don’t know my coordinates.” He looked again at Leo and nudged the medicine woman’s back with his knee. “This is Johanna,” he said of Joanna. “This is Flora,” he said of the medicine woman. “Shall we go for a walk, Johanna? Just for a moment.”

The medicine woman turned to Leo. “Do you want to play a game? My son is doing so. Come, he will teach you.” She got up and ushered Leo through the front door, and Joanna and Aksel went out the back, the fire smoking, a hazard, but the Vikings must have known what they were doing.

“I’ve thought of you often, Johanna,” said Aksel. In the sunlight he was shaggy, his color was not so good, but he was beautiful, a beauty. His clothes smelled of smoke. He seemed a victim of more than recreational Vikinghood.

“You’re on vacation,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d become a professional Viking.”

“Ah, no. I am a software developer. Flora, she is a foot doctor. And you?”

“Bookkeeper.”

He nodded. “You were always a keeper of books. Let us discuss what you have brought me.”

The minute she pulled the watch from her purse she missed its weight. She opened the Ziploc bag, suddenly worried that watches were supposed to breathe.

“Ah!” said Aksel, mildly. He took the watch and put it instantly inside a pouch he had tied to his belt, as though any sign of modernity were shameful. “Walter knew I admired this watch. That is what you came to give me?”

“It’s what my father wanted you to have.”

“And only this.”