Lennart walks into our lives one ordinary day when I am fourteen. His physical presence is startling: he is a tall, blond seaman, with aquamarine eyes and a soft, easy manner. His merchant ship has just berthed at Hamilton Wharf.

Our father explains briefly: Lennart is his son from an earl ier marriage, he says, just before Lennart arrives. We know nothing of him, or of his life on the other side of the world. We know nothing of our father’s earlier life, or that it was sealed off by a promise our parents made to each other, long before we were born. We don’t know about the letters Dad and Lennart exchanged, the late-night calls, the plans hatched and abandoned to bring him to Australia as a child. School, the language barrier, fear – all had prevented it. So this new information, the details, the history, can’t feel real to a fourteen-year-old, not like the flesh-and-blood man here in our kitchen, an exotic bird blown in from the sea.

So even as Lennart walks through the door, shakes hands, and sits down at the table to drink coffee with Dad, my teenaged heart takes over. He’s so handsome. So grown-up. So big-brotherly: he bends to talk to me in that familiar accent, he ruffles my hair. Calls me by my full name: Kristina. I swoon. The knowledge that we’re siblings is too new, I can’t absorb it and I can’t calculate this supposed earlier life of our father at all. The facts feel faulty. I stare and stare at him, searching for clues, for connection, some verification of my father’s words.

He takes us all down to his ship, where we scramble around decks and narrow passageways while he and Dad drink a toast to reunion in duty-free akvavit. But back at home, all of us around the red Laminex table, I’m mute. The others shyly answer his questions and ask their own, about Sweden, about life at sea. I lower my eyes if he looks in my direction, blush fiercely if he says my name. Just before I fall head over heels, he leaves. I watch him farewell our father, a lingering embrace, the soft sound of the word Far, and I remember. He’s my brother.