The Fjord Between Us

The invitation had arrived in my inbox with a subject line that read “YOU HAVE TO COME” and a body text from my colleague Beata that was essentially a hostage negotiation.
She’d booked the cabin. She’d arranged the ferry. She’d told the bride—her cousin—that I was coming. And then, almost as an afterthought buried in paragraph three, she mentioned that Tanvi Trivedi would also be attending.
I’d almost said no anyway.
Almost.
—
Here is what I knew about Tanvi before that weekend: she was a senior analyst at the same Oslo-based logistics firm where I worked as a project lead. She had a habit of annotating shared documents in red ink—digital red ink, which somehow felt more aggressive. She had corrected me in a Monday briefing in front of eleven people and had not apologized. And she made the best coffee in the office kitchen because she’d once told the facilities manager that the current machine was “an insult to the concept of caffeine” and somehow got it replaced.
I respected her. I also found her exhausting.
Beata, who had worked with both of us for three years and claimed to understand us better than we understood ourselves, had a different theory.
“You two are the same person,” she’d told me once, over lunch. “And you both hate that.”
I’d told her she was wrong.
She’d smiled into her soup.
—
The cabin sat on the edge of a fjord in the Hardanger region, about two hours from Bergen by ferry and winding road. It was the kind of place that made you feel like the world had a different resolution out here—sharper, colder, more honest. The water was so still it looked painted. The mountains across the fjord were the dark green of old glass.
I arrived Friday evening. The wedding was Saturday. I had planned to spend the intervening hours being politely invisible.
Tanvi was already there.
She was standing on the narrow dock that jutted out from the cabin’s back garden, still wearing what looked like travel clothes—dark trousers, a cream blouse with the sleeves rolled up—holding a glass of white wine and looking out at the water. She didn’t turn when I came through the gate.
“Nikhil,” she said.
“Tanvi.”
We hadn’t spoken outside a professional context in three years.
The silence that followed was the specific kind that knows it has history.
—
Beata appeared ten minutes later with a bottle of aquavit and the energy of someone who had engineered every detail of the next twenty-four hours.
“Good. You’re both here,” she said, as if she’d been worried we wouldn’t be. She hadn’t been worried. Beata was never worried. She was strategic. “Dinner is in an hour. We’re sharing the cabin with the bride’s family, so I’ve put you two in the east wing. It’s quieter.”
“The east wing,” I repeated.
“Two separate rooms,” she said, already walking back inside. “Obviously.”
She said “obviously” the way people do when they mean the opposite.
Tanvi turned and looked at me for the first time since I’d arrived. Her expression was unreadable in the way her expressions often were—not cold, exactly, but controlled. Like she’d decided what to show and what to keep.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” she said.
“Beata buried the information,” I said. “Paragraph three.”
Something shifted at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile.
“Paragraph four for me,” she said.
—
Dinner was loud and warm and crowded with people I didn’t know. I sat across from Tanvi and spent most of the meal pretending I wasn’t aware of exactly where she was.
She was good at dinner parties in a way I hadn’t expected. Easy with strangers. Funny in a dry, precise way that made people lean toward her. The bride’s elderly uncle told a story in Norwegian that Tanvi translated for the table without missing a beat, and when she got to the punchline, she glanced at me—just for a second, just to check if I’d caught it.
I had.
I looked away first.

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About the Author

Clara Vance — a former corporate strategist, expert in the tension that builds between two desks. Her hobby? Morning coffee chats in the office where she collects ideas for her stories.

— Clara Vance

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Categories: Contemporary, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Clara Vance, contemporary romance, fjord, forbidden attraction, Norway, office romance, second chance, short story, slow burn, travel romance, workplace romance

September 5, 2026

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