Coffee in Trondheim

The evening softened into something easier once the wine came out and Erik’s jokes got worse and Britt taught everyone the second verse of the folk song whether they wanted to learn it or not. Nadia found herself on the cabin’s long porch with a blanket and a glass, watching the fjord go dark. The mountains across the water held the last of the light long after the sky had given it up. It was the kind of beauty that made her reach for her camera, and she had left her camera inside.
She heard the door behind her.
Anders sat down in the other chair without asking. She didn’t tell him to go back inside.
For a while there was only the water sound and the faint warmth from the cabin windows and the cold coming off the fjord, which smelled like rain and stone and something green she had no name for. Then Anders said, quietly, “I found the letter once. The one you wrote. It was in your old journal, I think. I was going to return it.”
“I found it yesterday,” she said.
“And?”
She thought about it honestly. “I think I was right,” she said. “Then.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You were,” he said. “I was stubborn and I was careless and I didn’t understand what I was asking you to stay for.”
It was not the response she had braced for. She had braced for argument, for the old friction that had always lived between them like a third presence, the thing that had made every conversation feel like a negotiation. This was different. This was someone who had spent ten years arriving at something.
She had spent ten years arriving somewhere too.
“I photographed the Hardangerfjord two summers ago,” she said. “For a travel piece. I kept thinking it looked wrong.”
He glanced at her. “Wrong how?”
“Like I was looking at a copy of something.”
The fjord lay dark and enormous in front of them, patient as geography always is. Inside, Erik launched into another joke and Britt’s voice rose in theatrical protest and Sten laughed his big, uncomplicated laugh. The sounds came through the cabin walls warm and muffled, like something remembered.
Anders did not reach for her hand. She did not lean toward him. But the distance between their chairs was different now from what it had been, charged with something that was not quite resolution and not quite beginning, but somewhere in the tender, uncertain space between.
“I’m in Trondheim until November,” he said finally. “For a project.”
“I know,” she said. “Ingrid mentioned it.”
A pause. “Ingrid mentions a lot of things.”
“She really does.”
The wedding was the next morning, small and bright, held on the cabin’s dock with the fjord behind them and Britt crying before the vows had even started and Erik making a toast that somehow managed to be both ridiculous and genuinely moving. Nadia stood beside Ingrid and felt, for the first time in longer than she could measure, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Across the dock, Anders caught her eye.
He didn’t look away first. Neither did she.
After, when the photographs were done and the cake was cut and Sten and Ingrid had disappeared into the golden chaos of their own happiness, Nadia walked to the end of the dock alone. The fjord was calm now, silver-blue, the mountains reflected so perfectly that the world seemed doubled. She heard footsteps on the boards behind her and knew them without turning.
Anders stood beside her. Their shoulders were almost touching.
“Coffee in Trondheim,” he said. “If you’re passing through.”
She looked at the fjord. At the doubled mountains. At the water that remembered everything and gave nothing away.
“I’m probably passing through,” she said.
The fjord held them both in its grey, patient gaze, and the morning light moved across the water the way light moves when it has nowhere else to be.

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About the Author

Amelia Shorewell — a former travel photographer, in love with chance encounters in beautiful places. Each of her partner was found by sharp eye of her camera.

— Amelia Shorewell

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Categories: Enemies to Lovers, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Amelia Shorewell, cabin romance, contemporary romance, enemies to lovers, fjord, Norway, second chance, short story, slow burn, travel romance, wedding weekend

September 23, 2026

10min-stories