a little sometimes, right?’
He nodded in agreement as if they had just made a pact.
*
It was totally dark when they left the pub. A half-moon shined down on them from the clear sky. They could see their breath, and the chilly air nipped at their cheeks. She flipped up her collar and buried her hands in her jacket pockets. Benjamin put his arm around her shoulders again.
The walk to ViaTerra was long, but it passed quickly. She leaned against him, snuggling into his chest now and then.
Sten was on guard at the gate, and he waved them in distractedly. The wind was still beyond the thick walls.
The windows of the manor house were bright in the darkness. When Sofia looked up, she thought she could see a light on in the attic — then she remembered that the attic was unfit for use. A moment later the light had vanished and she decided she must have been seeing things.
*
They bent the rules just a few weeks later. They never discussed it, but the tension between them had risen until his visits to the library became unbearable.
It was their day off, and he met her by the gate. They didn’t even talk about where to go — their feet just carried them to the cottage and their hands were linked as if frozen by a constant electric current. She moved right up next to him for the last little bit of the journey and noticed that his breathing was already faintly erratic and heavy.
She’d had good and bad sex before, but never forbidden sex, so this was something new. She walked ahead of him into the cottage and right away he grabbed her from behind, lifting her loose hair and kissing her tenderly on the back of the neck. He nibbled at her earlobe and tried to get his hands in under her clothes, but one hand got stuck between the buttons. She pulled him to the kitchen bench and they collapsed onto it, eager but awkward in all their outerwear. They rolled onto the rag rug on the floor. On the way down she accidentally grabbed hold of the lace tablecloth and a candlestick came flying by, narrowly missing Benjamin’s head. They burst into laughter but managed to pull off each other’s clothing: jackets, boots, gloves, pants, and sweaters ended up in one big pile that grew as they gasped and howled in amusement.
This is how it should be the first time, she thought. Wild and joyful. Then she thought about what would happen if someone came into the cottage and discovered them on the floor — but it wouldn’t have mattered, not even if it was Oswald himself. It was like they were a runaway train, and no one could stop them.
Afterwards, as they lay twined together on the rag rug, she decided that forbidden sex blew everything else out of the water.
She rested her head against his shoulder and they lay like that for a long time. Completely devoid of energy, drained.
‘What’s the punishment?’ she asked.
‘The punishment?’
‘Yes, for what we did.’
‘What do you mean, what we did?’
‘Stop messing with me!’
‘Well, it’s pretty bad. I mean, you get shunned from the group. Dismissed. Sent back to the mainland.’
‘No way! Just for having sex without living together?’
‘That’s right. But we don’t have to tell anyone, do we? It’s between us.’
She thought of the library, her dream for the future. How would it feel to tell her family and friends that she couldn’t hack it? That she had been fired?
‘Exactly. It has nothing to do with anyone else.’
I’m sitting on the cliff and staring into the fog.
It seems strange that the fog lingers even though spring is here. Maybe it’s a sign, calling me to leave.
You can hardly see the water, only hear the waves crashing against the rocks. A few ducks fly down and land on the surface, where they turn into little brown balls of feathers. Too bad I left my rifle at home. I toss a rock at them and they flap their wings and fly off.
The wind is picking up and the fog is scattering farther out at sea; I can see the lighthouse out there, a dot floating in the mist. It’s a peculiar sight. Not beautiful — because beauty is a concept I never make use of, an expression used by the weak to show how sensitive they are.
But it’s calm here by the sea, maybe even peaceful.
I haven’t received a response to my letter, but it doesn’t matter. Now he knows.
Everything is ready. I’ve pawned my mother’s jewellery, things she won’t miss until I’m long gone from the island.
The ticket is safely tucked in my trouser pocket. My backpack is under my bed, the diary and other important documents inside. I think about my exodus. How I will disappear. How it will feel when I come back once it’s all done.
One last night with Lily is all I need now, a ceremony and an acknowledgement.
Then I hear a sound. It floats in from the sea and echoes off the rocks. A dull, monotonous bellow from the old lighthouse.
The foghorn.
My first thought is that it can’t be true. That the message is for someone else, an old person in the village or some suicidal idiot roving through the forest.
Because I know what that howl means.
It’s a warning to someone who’s about to die.
A storm followed on the heels of the fog in early November. The weather service had issued a Class 3 warning, so everyone scrambled to prepare the property. They secured anything loose, brought the animals into the barns, piled sandbags where the water might rise, and tested the generator.
Sofia looked online to see what the warning meant. ‘Considerable damage to property, considerable disruption to crucial public services, danger to the public.’ She had never experienced a big storm on an island before. Bosse told her about last fall’s storm, how the water level had risen over a metre, and how no one could go outside — the trees had fallen like bowling pins. They’d been without power for a whole week.
‘They were too busy fixing the electric lines on the mainland, so we had to wait. But now we have our own backup generator,’ he said proudly.
The wind began to whine and howl late in the afternoon. Sofia sat in the library, putting the finishing touches to her list of books. She’d poured her heart and soul into that list. Oswald had said he wanted to see it, but she was well prepared. She knew exactly how many shelves the books would take up, how they should be categorized, and why she had chosen each one.
She also had another, shorter list of books with controversial or erotic contents, which Oswald probably wouldn’t approve of if he’d read them. But he hadn’t read them — she was almost certain of it. She would put the two lists together once she was finished, letting the controversial books mix in with the others. This project had taken up all her attention and she often thought about how good it would look on her CV when she was done.
But now the storm was raging. It was already dark; it was five o’clock and the wind was supposed to peak around midnight. The aspens behind her building bent in the gusts that rattled the windows. The gale had found every crack in the old building, making it raw and cold inside. She turned up the thermostat before she headed over for dinner. As she crossed the yard, the wind tore at her down jacket and she had to stop and catch her balance to keep from being tossed forward. A branch came flying through the air and landed on the ground as a flowerpot rolled across the yard. She hunched over against the whipping wind.
Bosse stood up during dinner to give a speech