CHAPTER THIRTY *ALEXANDER*

CHAPTER THIRTY

*ALEXANDER*

She chose Iceland.

Told me on a Tuesday with a map pulled up on her tablet, pointing out a small coastal town I'd never heard of three hours from Reykjavik. No gallery connection, no business history, no reason except that she'd found it while looking for places that existed in neither of her lifetimes.

"There's a hot spring forty minutes from the town," she said. "And a photographer's residency nearby that's been running for twenty years. I want to see it as a visitor, not a professional."

"When?"

"End of June. Two weeks."

"Done."

She looked at me sideways. "You didn't check your calendar."

"I don't need to. Two weeks in Iceland with you takes priority over anything in my calendar." I looked at the map. "Do we drive?"

"We drive. I already looked at the roads."

She'd already looked at the roads. Of course she had.

We landed in Reykjavik on a Saturday evening in late June. The light was strange and extraordinary, the sun not fully setting, everything golden at ten at night in a way that made the whole country feel like it existed slightly outside of normal time.

She stood outside the airport looking up at it.

"I've never seen light like this," she said.

"Neither have I."

She turned and looked at me and smiled, open and unguarded, the way she did now regularly and that I still wasn't entirely used to. "Good start," she said.

We picked up the rental car and drove. She navigated, I drove, and we talked about nothing specific for two hours while the landscape changed around us into something that felt genuinely ancient. Black lava fields and distant snow and the occasional cluster of buildings that constituted a town.

The house she'd rented was small and right, a converted farmhouse with thick walls and large windows and a view of the water that changed color every hour in the impossible light.

We carried our bags in and she immediately went to every window and looked out of each one in sequence, methodical and delighted, which was the combination she had when something exceeded her expectations.

"Sophia."

She turned from the last window.

"Come here."

She crossed the room and I pulled her in and kissed her in the strange golden light, both hands in her hair, and she made a small sound against my mouth and kissed me back with the unhurried warmth that still did something significant to my ability to think clearly.

When she pulled back she stayed close, hands against my chest.

"We have two weeks," she said.

"Yes."

"No phones after seven."

"Agreed."

"No work conversations before coffee."

"Obviously."

She looked up at me. "I've never done this before. Just been somewhere with no purpose except being there."

"Neither have I."

"We're both very bad at rest."

"We'll figure it out," I said. "Together."

She settled against me, her head tucking under my chin, both arms around my waist. I held her and we stood in the farmhouse looking out at the water in the light that refused to become dark.

---

The first three days we drove.

No itinerary. She'd pick a direction in the morning and we'd go, stopping when something caught our attention. A waterfall she made us pull over for because the angle of it was compositionally interesting. A small museum in a building that had been a fishing collective for a hundred years. A cliff edge where we stood in the wind for twenty minutes saying nothing because there was nothing that needed saying.

She photographed everything on her phone camera, not professionally, just for herself. I watched her do it and understood I was seeing something she didn't show many people, the private version of her artist's eye operating without audience or purpose.

On the fourth day we found the hot spring.

Forty minutes from the town as she'd said, no infrastructure around it, just a natural pool in the rock with steam rising in the cool air. We'd brought towels in the car on the assumption we'd find it.

She got in first and made a sound of pure uncomplicated pleasure that I wanted to remember for the rest of my life.

I got in and sat across from her in the warm water, the landscape stretching out around us, nobody else for miles.

"This," she said.

"Yes."

She slid across the pool and settled against my side, her head on my shoulder, both of us looking out at the black rock and the silver water beyond. The steam rose around us.

"In the first life I never took a holiday," she said. "Three years married to a hotel magnate and I never actually rested in one."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It makes this better." She turned her face up and kissed my jaw. "You're different here."

"How?"

"Lighter." She considered. "You think differently when there's no performance required. I can see it." She looked at me properly. "This is who you actually are."

"I'm still figuring out who that is."

"I know. I like watching you figure it out." She settled back against me. "You drew this morning before I was awake."

"You saw that."

"I wake up early. You were at the kitchen table." She paused. "The building you were drawing. It had the hot spring in the foundation plan. I could see it."

I looked at the water. I hadn't realized she'd seen it. "It's just a sketch."

"It's a building designed around a natural feature. Integrated rather than imposed." She looked up. "That's a philosophy, Alexander. That's how you think about space."

I turned that over.

"The UW program," she continued. "When you start in September. That's what you bring to it. That specific way of thinking."

"You got all of that from a kitchen table sketch at six in the morning."

"I told you. I know serious work."

I pulled her close and kissed her temple, then her cheek, then turned her face up properly and kissed her mouth with the slow certainty that had become our particular register. She made no move to hurry it, just kissed me back in the warm water with the steam rising around us and the Icelandic light doing its impossible things to the sky.

When we broke apart she was looking at me with clear eyes and something that had stopped being new and started being settled.

"I love you," she said. Not weighted. Just true.

"I love you," I said back. Same register.

She smiled and leaned her head back on my shoulder and we stayed in the hot spring until the cold of the air finally outweighed the warmth of the water, and then we drove back to the farmhouse and she cooked something simple and we ate by the window in the late light and she told me about an artist she'd found in Reykjavik whose work she wanted to follow.

Not professionally. Just because it was good and she was allowed to love things without converting them into strategy.

After dinner she fell asleep on the sofa with her feet in my lap, book open on her chest, the light outside still refusing to become night.

I sat with my sketchbook and drew the view from the window.

Drew her sleeping.

Drew the hot spring from memory, working through the building concept she'd identified in the morning sketch, following the idea properly for the first time.

Two hours. Nobody watching. Nothing required.

Just a man in Iceland in the impossible summer light, drawing because he wanted to, loving someone who had told him to start again and meant it.