People always ask me how Nadia and I ended up together. I tell them it started with a broken roof, a February that refused to quit, and a cabin neither of us wanted.
That’s true. But the real answer is simpler.
It started because I never stopped loving her. Even when I thought I had.
—
The cabin belonged to my grandfather. A low timber structure perched at the edge of a Norwegian fjord, two hours north of Bergen, where the water sat so still in winter it looked like poured glass. He left it to both of us — me and Nadia — in a will that no one saw coming.
We hadn’t spoken in four years.
His attorney explained it with practiced calm. Grandfather had always adored Nadia, even after we split. He wanted the cabin restored before it was sold, and he wanted us to do it together. One month. Both names on the deed until the work was done.
I remember sitting in that Bergen office, staring at the paperwork, and thinking: the old man always did have a sense of humor.
Nadia was already in the hallway when I walked out. She had her coat buttoned to the collar and her dark hair pulled back, and she looked at me the way you look at a door you’re not sure you want to open.
“You knew about this?” she asked.
“No.”
She studied me for a second, then nodded once. “Fine. Let’s get it done.”
That was Nadia. Efficient, decisive, always three steps ahead. It was one of the things I’d loved most about her. It was also, if I’m being honest, part of why we’d fallen apart.
—
We drove up separately.
The cabin was worse than either of us expected. The porch railing had rotted through. A window in the back bedroom was cracked and letting in the cold. The kitchen faucet dripped in a slow, maddening rhythm that I could hear from every room.
Nadia walked through it with her arms crossed and her mouth pressed flat.
“Three weeks,” she said. “If we’re organized, three weeks.”
She’d brought a spreadsheet. Of course she had.
I took the structural work — the porch, the window, the roof tiles that had shifted over winter. She handled the interior: the kitchen, the waterlogged bathroom floor, the ancient radiators that hadn’t been bled in years.
We were polite. Professional, almost. Like two colleagues on a project neither had chosen.
The fjord sat outside every window, patient and enormous. In the mornings the mist came in low and soft, and the pine trees on the far bank disappeared into it completely. I’d stand at the kitchen window with my coffee and just watch it, and sometimes Nadia would come in behind me, reach past me for the kettle, and neither of us would say anything.
Those were the moments that undid me, a little, each time.
—
The first sharp thing happened on day five.
I was up on the roof, working on a section of damaged tile near the chimney. The temperature had dropped overnight and the surface was slick with frost I hadn’t noticed. My boot went out from under me. I caught the edge of the chimney stack with both hands, hard enough to feel it in my shoulders, and held on.
I heard her below before I saw her.
“Igor.”
Just my name. But the way she said it — sharp and low, like something in her chest had seized — told me everything about the four years she’d spent pretending not to care.
I got myself down. She was standing at the base of the ladder, one hand still raised like she’d been about to climb up after me. Her face was very still, the way faces go when someone is working hard to keep them that way.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I know,” she said. And walked back inside.
I stood there for a moment in the cold, my heart going faster than it should have been.
—
We found a rhythm after that. Easier, somehow, like the near-miss had broken some invisible tension between us.
She’d cook in the evenings — simple things, pasta, soup, bread from a bakery in the nearest village — and I’d clean up, and we’d sit at the old kitchen table with whatever wine we’d found at the village shop, and we’d talk. Carefully at first. Then less carefully.
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