THERE WAS FLOUR all over the kitchen. Flour on the kitchen table, flour on the floor, greasy doughy flour on one tap, and even a few floury footprints in the hallway.
“What are you doing?” asked Morten, putting down his laptop bag.
“Making pasta!” said Anton enthusiastically, holding aloft a yellow-white floury strip of dough.
God help us, he thought. Nina must be having one of her irregular attacks of domesticity. And it was typical of her that she couldn’t just buy a package of cake mix and have done with it. He still shuddered to recall the side of organic beef that had appeared in the kitchen one day. The flat had looked like a slaughterhouse for the better part of twenty-four hours while Nina carved, filleted, chopped, packaged, and froze unsightly bits of bullock—or attempted to, because in the end they had to persuade his sister to take most of it. She lived in Greve and had an extra freezer in the shed.
Now here she was, hectic spots in her cheeks, running ravioli through a pasta machine he had no idea they possessed.
“Good job,” he said absently to Anton.
“Hey you,” said Nina. “What did they say?”
“Esben does it this time. But I’ve promised to take his next shift. I have to leave on the twenty-third.”
Normally, his job required him to do a two-week stint on the rigs in the North Sea every six weeks, but this time he hadn’t wanted to go. What he really wanted was for all of them to go on holiday. He had already managed to swap his way to a week’s leave from the mud-logging. But Nina refused.
“What I need is a big dose of normal everyday life,” she had said.
He had finally managed to drag her to the clinic so that Magnus could look at her. Magnus had stitched up the cut above her hairline, probed her battered skull with his fingers, and sent her on to the National for further check-ups.
“At the very least, you are concussed,” he had said, shining his penlight into her eyes. “And you know as well as I do that we have to make sure it’s nothing worse. What the hell were you thinking?” He looked at Morten. “If something like this ever happens again, don’t let her fall asleep. People can slip right into a life-threatening coma without anyone noticing.”
Dry-mouthed, Morten had nodded. Even though the doctors at the National later pronounced her skull uncracked, Magnus’s words stuck in him, and it was more than a week before he could sleep normally beside her. It felt like the times he had needed to look in on the children when they were tiny, just to make sure they were still breathing.
Less than two weeks later, she was back on the job. And he had a strong feeling that Operation Ravioli had a lot to do with her need to prove that she was on top of it all. Could manage the job and her family, could be a Good Mother, could do it all and be here again.
He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary. That it was okay if she was feeling irritable and tired, that it was okay to resort to easy fixes. If she had anything to prove, it certainly wasn’t as a pasta chef.
He had been looking at her for too long. Caught, as he often was, by the sheer vitality and intensity of her eyes. He had once found a chunk of dolorite that reminded him so much of the stormgray color of her eyes that he had dragged it all the way back from Greenland in his pocket.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked.
“No.”
She held his face between her wrists so as not to get flour on his office shirt and gave him a kiss.
“We’re making three kinds of ravioli,” she said. “One with spinach and ricotta, one with prosciutto and emmentaler, and one with scampi and truffle. Doesn’t it sound delicious?”
“Yes,” he said.