Astrid had intended to stay three weeks. A retreat, she told herself — just enough time to reset, refill, return to London with some half-draft of a novel and a few strange memories she could fold into fiction.
But it was now Day Fourteen, and she hadn't opened her laptop once.
Her body had changed. Not in shape, but in texture — looser, more sun-warmed, aware. She moved through the cottage in less clothing each day, her bare feet mapped the woodgrain like familiar roads, and her nipples no longer recoiled at the chill. She didn't hide when walking to the fjord. She anticipated it — that cool, aching kiss against her thighs, the taste of mineral wind.
And Ida.
Ida was no longer just the woman who kissed her in the greenhouse. She was now the one Astrid waited for — in glances, in dreams, in the hum between breaths when the village slept.
It began with a touch of fingers during bread kneading.It deepened when Astrid found herself half-naked on Ida's lap during a thunderstorm, hips grinding slowly, the kitchen windows steaming.And it ruptured quietly — not violently — one afternoon when Astrid followed Ida to the shed to fetch firewood.
The shed was dark and close. The wood stacked neatly, the scent of cedar and sweat thick between them.
Ida pinned her there, against the wall, hands on either side of her head. She didn't speak. Just leaned in and exhaled against Astrid's collarbone.
"You smell like moss," she murmured.
Then she sank to her knees.
Later, Astrid trembled beside the hearth, her dress inside out, her thighs still sticky with Ida's name. They didn't speak much afterward — they rarely did. The conversations between them were physical, paced by breath, broken by soft whimpers and the occasional hiss of "please…"
But that night, Astrid couldn't sleep. Something itched under her skin — not regret, not guilt.
Curiosity.
She hadn't gone through her grandmother's things. Not really. Just the kitchen, a few drawers, the old tin boxes of recipes. The bedroom had remained untouched — like a mausoleum of undone intimacy.
At 2:30 a.m., barefoot and half-covered in a linen sheet, Astrid lit a candle and walked into the bedroom.
The air was stale but not dead. The curtains, yellowed with age. The dresser still held its ivory-handled brush. And the mirror — long, antique, gilt-framed — reflected her body in flickers of gold.
The third drawer stuck halfway.
Inside: silk.
Dozens of folded pieces. Not clothes — slips. Robes. Sheer scarves. And under those, an envelope, aged to the color of bone, marked in her grandmother's hand:"Til min elskede — June, 1974."To my beloved.
Astrid held her breath as she opened it.
Inside: a photograph.
Two women. One was unmistakably Inga — her silver braid then dark and long, wound over a naked shoulder. The other woman's face was obscured, turned to kiss Inga's collarbone. Both were nude. Both were smiling. A smile not of posing — but of post-climax softness.
Astrid stared at it for a long time. Not in shock. Not in judgment.
But in recognition.
Her grandmother had been loved like this.
Not hidden. Not apologized for.Loved in the open.Loved by a woman.
And somewhere — under London's guilt, under years of ambiguous shame — something inside Astrid cracked wide and began to bloom.
She didn't tell Ida about the photo right away.
Instead, she tucked it into her journal and wandered down to the lake the next afternoon, letting the sun burn her shoulders, her back, her thighs. Ida joined her later, both of them naked under the open sky, reading aloud to each other from old poetry books found in the attic.
Ida leaned over her shoulder and murmured:
"You are not a girl who needs to be hidden.You are the kind of storm a fjord holds its breath for."
Astrid closed the book.
"Who wrote that?" she asked.
Ida touched her neck. "You did. Just now. I heard it in you."
That evening, Astrid lit candles in every room of the cottage. She ran her fingers along the window frames, breathed in the old smoke and dust of a house once silenced by loneliness.
Then, on impulse, she opened the cellar door.
The air that greeted her was cooler — not moldy, not dead. Just waiting.
She descended the stairs, barefoot, and found the small room below not filled with old boxes, but with drawings.
Dozens of charcoal sketches. Pinned to beams. Laid out on workbenches. Bodies. Poses. Lovers. All women.
Some kissed. Some touched. Some danced with shadows around them, blurred limbs and open mouths. The signature on many read: IH.
Inga Hammar.
Astrid felt her knees weaken.
This house had never been just a cottage.
It had been a sanctuary.
A secret archive of a woman's desire — protected, preserved, passed down.
When Astrid returned to her bed that night, she lay with the photograph on her chest and whispered aloud:
"I see you now."
Outside, the fjord rippled once — as if nodding.