The Kind You Choose to Keep

The smell of pine resin and cold water has a way of arriving before everything else. I noticed it the moment I stepped off the ferry at Flåm — sharp, clean, almost medicinal — and it hit me somewhere behind the sternum before I even had time to think her name.
I had not thought about that smell in six years. Or so I told myself.
The cabin sat at the edge of the fjord like it had always been there, like the mountain had simply grown around it. Weathered red timber, a dock that tilted slightly to the left, a single lantern above the door that the rental listing had described as “charmingly rustic.” It was charming, I supposed. Mostly it was cold. The water below was the color of old pewter, and the mountains on the far side were already swallowed in low cloud.
I had booked it six weeks ago, on a night when I had drunk more wine than I should have and found myself reading old messages on my phone. Messages from Perla. Messages I had never deleted, though I had told myself I would.
The promise had been simple, the way promises always are before time gets to them. We were twenty-two, finishing our last semester at university, standing outside the library at half past midnight while snow fell on Cambridge and turned everything quiet and impossible. She had shown me a photograph — a postcard, actually, that her grandmother had kept — of a fjord in Norway. The mountains, the black water, the little red cabin.
“Someday,” she had said. “We should go there someday.”
And I had said, “We will.”
I had meant it. That was the thing I had spent years trying to explain to myself — I had absolutely meant it.
But then came graduation, and then came her fellowship in Barcelona, and then came the slow, grinding silence that follows two people who love each other but cannot seem to stay in the same city, the same time zone, the same version of their lives. And then came Viktor.
Viktor Fedorov. Her colleague, then her partner, then the man she had moved into an apartment with in Madrid. I had heard about it through a mutual friend, the way you always hear about the things that hollow you out — casually, over coffee, as if it were nothing.
I booked the cabin six years after that snowy night. I told myself it was just a holiday. I told myself I needed the quiet.
What I had not told myself was that I had sent her the booking confirmation.
She arrived on the second morning.
I heard the crunch of gravel before I saw her, and I was standing at the dock with a cup of coffee I had stopped tasting, watching the mist move across the water. I did not turn around immediately. I let the sound of her footsteps come closer, and I felt something in my chest go very still, the way it does just before something breaks or something mends — you can never tell which until it happens.
“Rafael.”
Her voice was the same. Lower than you expected when you first met her, warm and a little careful, like she was always choosing her words one beat before she said them.
I turned around.
Perla Cordero had cut her hair shorter since the last photograph I had seen of her. She was wearing a dark green coat and carrying a bag that looked too heavy for the distance she had walked from the road. There were shadows under her eyes that I recognized — not exhaustion exactly, but the particular look of someone who has been thinking too hard for too long.
“You actually came,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say. I had sent her the confirmation. I had known, on some level, that I was asking her to come without asking her directly.
“You kept the promise,” she said. “I thought I should too.”
We stood there on the dock for a moment that felt much longer than it was, the fjord doing what fjords do — sitting vast and indifferent and somehow making everything feel both enormous and very small at once.
I took her bag.

0 likes

About the Author

Lila Merrick — a Cambridge graduate writing first love and campus nights full of possibility. She organized foreign exchange students welcome parties for 3 years.

— Lila Merrick

Full author profile

Categories: Romances, Second Chance

Tags: 10min stories, contemporary romance, emotional fiction, fjord romance, Lila Merrick, Norway setting, second chance romance, short story, slow burn

September 2, 2026

10min-stories