She wanted Mathis to touch the soft fleece of a lamb, taste an egg that wasn’t several weeks old. She wanted him to take off his socks and shoes and let his feet forget the hard streets and schoolyards of London for a day. And she wanted both him and John to meet her relatives so they could see for themselves that she was telling the truth about Aunt Ingeborg’s hands, so chapped they looked like fish scales, and Uncle Lars, so bowlegged he couldn’t herd pigs; Einar with the improbable gap between his front teeth, Odd with hair so red the locals not only doubted his paternity, but also wonder if the black-haired Ingeborg could really be his mother.

And Finn. Her oldest cousin with shoulders like a barn door and eyes as piercingly blue as her own. She wanted to show them the mountains, have them look up at the highest peak and then take them to down to the bay, make them understand why she sometimes found London too confining.

She has more memories of that summer than of the rest of her life put together. The visit to Noorö and Mathis’s smile when he finally did touch that soft lamb. She remembers calling her mother and Eleanor being in a huff when she realised they were putting off seeing her to visit the Noorö relatives first. She remembers her joy when they pulled up to her house in Langevik, one day later than planned. She remembers Mathis’s tears when he was stung by a hornet behind the annexe the next morning and holding him in her arms while John called the medical helpline and Eleanor calmly went to pick marigolds and fetch a sugar cube to put on the swelling.

She remembers their trip to Crete the week after. Mathis discovering olives for the first time and eating so many she and John couldn’t help but wonder if it might be bad for him. The sound of cicadas outside their open balcony door as she and John made love as quietly as they could so as not to wake Mathis. And she remembers the beach where they had fallen over themselves laughing, that day that’s still preserved in the photograph on her nightstand back in Langevik.

Every moment is still there, seared into her very core. Her last, most precious memories.