Chapter 6: The Boathouse

Nils's POV

I said she was a good girl, and I heard how it sounded the second it left my mouth.

It was my father's phrase, and I had used it to cover her.

I stood in the sauna with the phone dead in my hand and the sweat going cold, and I was ashamed.

Annika did not say anything.

She walked past me with her towel and went up the dock in the dark.

I slept in the boathouse that night, in the bunk over the workbench, because the house was hers.

That was the rule I had made for myself, and I liked having it.

I had always liked rules.

A bridge has a load rating, and you stay under it.

A man who wrote down what he would not do could mostly go on not doing it.

In February I had been a man with no rules at all.

I had woken in a hotel bed with the sun on the sheets and a woman gone.

There was a smear of lipstick on the pillow and a warm dent where she had been.

I had written my number on the pad in the dark, after she fell asleep.

I had known I would want her name.

I sat in the lobby until noon with a cup of coffee going cold, watching the elevator.

Then I called my father, and he told me his news.

"Her name is Birgit," he said. "She has a daughter. You'll like them."

And I went home and waited ten weeks, and she came down the hall in a cream dress.

I lay in the bunk and looked at the beams.

My father's voice was in my head.

What's mine, I keep.

He had said it at my mother's table, too, when I was nine, and I had thought it was a joke.

At three in the morning I heard the boards on the dock.

I sat up.

The door opened.

Annika stood there in a man's flannel shirt with the cold coming off her, holding a flashlight and nothing else.

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