Chapter Six

Ispend the remainder of the day on my back with my leg elevated. Oskar brings me food and ice packs and eventually, as darkness falls early outside, he finds an ancient set of playing cards and we teach each other our favourite games. I teach him Staffordshire rummy, which is the game Mum always used to play with us when we went on holiday, and he teaches me mattis, which unfolds in two stages.

Suffice to say I'm bad at his game, which was to be expected, but I also lose at my game.

"It's not so hard," he says, smirking a little as I scowl.

"You just got lucky." I twist, my leg still awkwardly propped up above me, and shuffle the deck. "Best of seven?"

He just grins, revealing his dimple, and it's awful, terrible, wonderful. I can't look away.

"Do you really want to lose that badly?" he asks.

I splutter. "I might not this time."

"You just lost three in a row."

"Yeah, but this next one? I'm going to destroy you."

He snorts. "You won't if you don't start taking risks. You play too safe."

I gesture around us at the cabin, which is bathed in soft, flickering light. "This was a risk. Care to tell me how well it's going?"

"A disaster," he says, a smile hidden in his eyes.

"Exactly. And this is the better of the possible options."

"Is it?"

"I could have died, which would have obviously been the worst-case scenario, or you had a horrific accident while rescuing me and I would have been forced to eat your corpse to survive."

He wrinkles his nose. "Forced? It will only take a few days for your leg to recover."

"A few days or weeks," I point out. "Probably. It's already been two days and there's no way I'm making it down to civilisation."

"It would only take you two days to give in and eat my corpse?" he asks, and I can't tell if he's intrigued or horrified.

"Well, if you were already dead . . ." I shrug. "And as corpses go, I think you'd be one of the tastier ones."

Way to go, Lucy. Excellent flirting technique. Talk about his dead body some more.

It's horrific, really, the way my ability to talk to men has waned over the period I've been single.

He shakes his head, another smile at the corner of his mouth. "You truly are disturbing."

"Could be more disturbing," I point out. "I could be eating people for fun."

"People who do that go to jail."

"They do if they're caught." A thought occurs to me, or really, it's more of an image. Jeffrey Dahmer-esque. A woman—let's defy the norms and make her a woman—following a young man down the street. For sex, he thinks, but she has something darker in mind.

It's just a flash, but for the first time in a long time, there's something inside me that wants to be let out. A burning pull, the urge to bring the scene into life.

Maybe it's a twisted romance exploring the far reaches of morality. How far does the law allow consent to extend?

My agent wants me to write the book I've painstakingly outlined. The one I've come here supposedly to research. This is decidedly not that. A whole different genre, even—slightly. Enough that my usual readership might even be a bit disturbed by it.

I put the cards down, staring into space. Really, I shouldn't be even contemplating the idea. But damn, it's been so long since I've even felt like I want to sit down at my computer and write. Never mind this, this feeling like something inside me will curl up and die if I don't breathe life into it.

Was it the corpse conversation? This was not where I expected inspiration to stem.

Then again, maybe it's just the magic of being here. I've already committed to not making my flight. Push aside the feeling that I should want to go home, and there's just this left. A slightly distressing attraction to the man opposite me, weightless anti-expectation, and peace. There is nothing have to do here but while away my time with Oskar and attempt not to jump his bones. Even if my ankle was healed (and it's not), it's dark out and no sensible person would be venturing down the mountain like this.

With no obligations comes no responsibility. No children to get to bed or wake up or cook for. No brother who's battling his own problems.

The first time I started writing anything more than a diary was after Mum died. I guess it was a way of processing my grief. Not that I saw it that way as a kid, but you never see things the way they are as a kid.

Battling someone else's grief as an adult was different, though. Ana was lovely, but she wasn't my wife. I didn't love her the way Thomas and the girls did; losing her was a blow for them, not for me. Their emotional burden became my emotional burden—not because I was feeling it, but because they didn't know how to carry it.

I wasn't writing to find a way of surviving; I was helping them survive. My writing didn't have space to coexist with that—and I understood it would take time. Grief and tragedy always do. There's no shortcut when it comes to human emotion.

But with that, with suddenly being thrust into motherhood I'd never asked for, I'd lost the will to write. In an abstract way, of course I wanted to continue my career as an author. Just in every way except putting words on the page.

Now I do. Now I want to write, with a hopeless, futile, feverish intensity I haven't experienced in years.

"What is it?" Oskar asks, and I get the impression it's not the first time he's spoken to me. I'm still staring at the cards, lost in thought and my own overwhelming epiphany.

All these years, I've been slowly smothering my muse. It's only being away from home that has her sparking back to life.

I look up at him, still shellshocked. "I . . . want to write."

He blinks. There's a dark ring of navy around his iris and it draws me in like a honey trap. Maybe I could write about a woman meeting a man whose gravity is so immense, it pulls her into his orbit. "Okay," he says. "There might be a pen and paper somewhere."

Tempting, but I shake my head. "I . . . can't."

"Why? Do you need a laptop?"

"No, I—" I'm still having an emotional breakdown over what this means. What this urge to write in a Norwegian hut miles above civilisation means. "I haven't written anything worth reading in two years."

Oskar tilts his head, absorbing the information in the calm, steady way he has. It's simultaneously reassuring and terrifying. "Why is that?" he asks.

"Well, that's the question, isn't it." I lay my palm flat against the wood and look at my neat, short, half-moon nails, the blueish veins just visible under my skin, the lines across my knuckles. "Why do I want to write here?"

The obvious answer lies in the chair opposite me, tall and alarmingly godlike. But even though there is no denying that my hormones are going wild, I don't think that's the entire answer.

"Because there are no distractions?" he suggests. "When I compose, I sit with sound-cancelling headphones on."

Of course he composes. This man is not familiar with the concept of not being good at something. I dig my hands into my hair and form a fist. "The reason I came out here was because it was this last-ditch attempt to kickstart my writing. I was in a rut, not getting anywhere, and my agent suggested I take some time out for research and reconnecting with myself." A suggestion Thomas thought was crazy, because he's repeatedly gone out of his way to make sure I have time and space in which to write. For him, the idea of writing is much like the idea of going out to work—it's a necessity, something that is done in its allocated time. I used to think like that, too, especially when I made this my career. Like any person can just sit down at a computer and write something good no matter what else is going on in their head and heart.

Thomas didn't even realise I was lacking anything. In his world without colour, how could he ever imagine me missing the rainbow?

Oskar frowns, and I can practically see the cogs turning as he tries to understand my crisis. "So, the trip worked?"

"That's the thing—I think it did."

"And that's . . . bad?"

I lean down and let my forehead clunk against the table. "I think I'm having a midlife crisis."

"So I can see," he says, amused. "How old are you again?"

"I'll have you know a person can have a midlife crisis at any age."

"Mm. Do you want to know what I think?"

I scowl at nothing, because I have no doubt that what he thinks is going to hit the nail right on the metaphorical head, and I don't know if I'm emotionally ready for hard truths. "What?"

"Your brother needs to figure out how to live without you."

And there it is, plunked into my lap like a bowling ball made of lead.

"What are Melody and Layla going to do without me?" I mumble.

"Your brother's kids? They'll be fine. You can still be in their life without acting like you're their mother." He trails his fingers across the back of my hand and I feel it everywhere, sparking like electricity under my skin. "You need to start putting yourself first."

"That's what made me come on this trip and look how that turned out."

"As you said before, it could have been worse. And your ‘last-ditch attempt' worked." His fingers reach my wrist and I have to hold my breath, willing my heartbeat to slow. "Maybe all you need is space to learn how you want to live."

I laugh, groan, raise my head so I'm looking directly into his face. "I'm almost thirty. I should know how I want to live."

"I don't think anything is ever that simple." Oskar's eyes search mine, and it's like he can see all the hidden parts of myself I keep tucked out of sight. A beam of light straight into my soul. No one else has ever looked at me like that, like he isn't just observing but seeing. "One thing I've learnt is that no one else is going to do it for you," he tells me. "If you want to be happy, you have to take it."

There's no denying Thomas has his faults. He does take me for granted sometimes—I've become the way his life operates, and he won't want to lose that. He can also be shortsighted, led by his lived experience and no one else's.

But he has never, not once, wanted to stand in the way of my happiness. He buys my favourite brand of coffee because he knows it makes me smile, and on the weekends he takes the girls out to buy me an outrageously large slice of cake from the Polish bakery down the road. He's adjusted his life so that I can find a way to write while being in it, and even on the bad days when he visits Ana's grave in the rain and misses her so much I can see how it hurts, he takes the girls and sends me to a coffee shop so I have a chance to write undisturbed.

From the very beginning, he's supported my career to the best of his ability. No one is perfect, but he's promoted my happiness in a thousand different tiny ways. And once he understands that I need space in order to thrive, I know he'll support that, too. Our joy is a shared thing, not something we have to scrabble in the dirt for, fingernails splitting.

My heart breaks at the thought that no one has ever fought for Oskar's happiness.

"What about you?" I ask. "What about your happiness?"

He looks at me for a long moment, the firelight softening the lines of his face. The sound of burning wood is the only thing between us, and for a moment, I don't know if he's going to answer. Maybe he's like me and he hasn't figured it out yet. We're both in the throes of a crisis, after all. Both dealing with it in our individual and slightly flawed ways. In that way, we're more similar than different.

Then he smiles and his eyes are warm and I am lost. "I guess I'm learning about that too," he says.