She still carries Kaja on her stomach when she works, it won’t be long before Ingrid has her on her back, and now Kaja only screams when she puts her down. Kaja likes movement.

~

They buy more barrels and salt, set a few more nets, and one afternoon while Suzanne and Ingrid are on the quay in their aprons cutting and carefully layering herring in the barrels, they hear the unmistakeable sounds from the north and see a white crow’s nest with the characteristic black ring around its middle slipping past Oterholmen, then the ship itself comes into view, it isn’t Barrøy II, which they have been waiting for since the decisive letter was sent, but the Salthammer.

Only Ingrid recognises it.

They have a wash and stand side by side on the quay, Ingrid with her hands beneath her shawl so that she can warm them on the baby, who gurgles and looks up at her through Rigel eyes.

Suzanne spots a familiar figure in the bow with the mooring rope at the ready, she starts jumping up and down and shout-ing, her hands funnelled to her mouth, Ingrid doesn’t move a finger, Lars throws the hawser onto the quay and Helmer slips the loop over the bollard, while Jørgen takes care of the aft mooring rope.

“Is it thi?” she yells down into the boat.

Lars walks down to the deck without answering her, a man in his best years, hair with a pronounced streak of grey, a body that is even more solid and stouter than she remembers, but he is agile and quick on his feet. He positions himself in front of the wheelhouse, where a window is lowered, and the captain, Magnus Mannvik, sticks out his head and casts a fleeting glance up at Ingrid, who nods briefly in response, listens to something Lars says, then disappears into the wheelhouse again, and the engine is turned off.

Lars lifts the companion on the bow deck and shouts down into the cabin. Two young girls in identical dresses, jackets and tights jump out, they also have the same hair and movements, and are the same height, at a sign from Lars they turn and look up at Ingrid and Suzanne, who wave down to them and smile. A woman dressed all in black follows them, a little taller than Lars, she has black hair, too, but with a yellow and white headscarf, which looks like silk in the autumn light. Two boys amble out of the bait house – Ingrid recognises one as Ole – and with them there is an eight- or nine-year-old boy who, she assumes, must be Lars’ son, Hans, she frees her hand and waves again, but he doesn’t wave back, and Suzanne shouts:

“Hvor’s our Felix?”

“Fishen’,” Lars says. “Longline fishen’.”