“I can’t stay much longer.”

I put the flowers in a vase on the table next to Anton. He was himself again; the fever was gone, his eyes were clear and it was raining outside for the fourth day in a row. A heavy rain that would take what hadn’t been saved of the farmers’ harvest, leaving it rotten on the fields in dark brown and gray and stinging green.

“Do you have to work?”

I shook my head.

“Just have to go home. To get my life in order.”

“And Anders?”

“He’s been released. Jette is taking care of him until you come home.”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

“Of course, we can’t keep going, Anders and I,” he said. “No one can. But it doesn’t matter. Not now. I’m glad you came.”

I leaned back, observing him. I could see he still looked like my father, and therefore me. But Anton had hung on to things. The farm, Anders. The backbreaking work, all by himself, with Anders sitting inside by the window.

“I knew it was you back then,” he said. His eyes still closed. “You and Sten Poulsen. And maybe Ellen . . . I knew it when none of you came back.”

“It was an accident.”

His hands that had carried out all the hard work were, for once, resting quietly on the comforter.

“If you had come back sooner, I could have told you I wasn’t angry. You were just big boys. Hopeless. I couldn’t do anything for Sten Poulsen. But I’d always hoped you’d come back one day. You just disappeared. Like her.”

I sat on a bench at the bus stop until I saw her come, walking through the rain.

A woman her age looked so much more incredibly alive than men who were just as old. There was that smile, still hidden in there in the blue eyes. The almost-dancing steps between puddles in the parking lot. Still light on her feet, because women died more slowly than men, and could move like dancers long into old age.

I looked down. I had all my stuff packed into two plastic bags and a backpack I’d found under my great-grandmother’s bed when I’d vacuumed. My old T-shirt and underpants, neatly washed and folded. The book about Eigtved and my old sketch pad. Pencils and eraser in my red leather pencil case. A piece of paper stuck among all my blurred and yellowed naked ladies.

She’d called the day before, and her voice was just like it had been then. Edged and hoarse.

“How about you?” I’d asked her.

“I stopped drawing,” she said. “Got married and divorced. No children. I thought of you all sometimes. Utzon and Anton and Anders, and how you all were, but not as much as I probably should have. Are you married?”

“Kind of.”

She laughed.

“That doesn’t sound good, but maybe not too bad. And all marriages of more than twenty years are worth working on. There’s usually something salvageable in the cinders. Did you like my gift?”

“What gift?”

“I put something small in your backpack for you, so you wouldn’t be so unhappy. I really liked you, Utzon. After that, too. Believe it or not.”

She walked past me, her long, bottle-green coat fluttering in the wind. It was already soaked in hot rain, flowers in her arms and the hint of a smile as she glided through the slowly circulating swing doors of the hospital, and a picture came back to me from that time on the farm. Anton and Ellen side by side on their way over the fields to find the hidden lark nests. Her laughter in the wind and him, standing straighter and happier and more alive than I’d ever seen him before.

It had been them all along, but it wasn’t something a fifteen-year-old boy could see—or understand, for that matter.

I opened my old backpack and pulled out the paper again. I held it gently under the bus stop shelter and unfolded it. A drawing of a boy—me—that she must have sneakily done while I’d been occupied with something else.

The profile was drawn in an almost-invisible line, the lips soft and slightly parted, like they are with children and young people who are lost to the outside world. Only the upward-turned eyes were drawn in dark, clearly marked lines. The light in the pupils was almost supernaturally brilliant, and every eyelash calligraphically accurate. You could tell I was fifteen years old, almost sixteen, but it was still a child that she’d drawn. A boy. In the right corner a soft, sweeping dedication: to my friend utzon. all is well! ellen.

There were seven unread messages from Kirsten on my phone. A picture of the living room, all the furniture gone, only bare walls and green trees in pots.

A selfie where she sat under a tree, looking down into the camera over the edge of her blue reading glasses, a book in her hand. Pouting. Divorce—the difficult choice.

A picture of her arm covered in water droplets.

Her again, wearing a yellow southwestern coat, looking distrustfully at the dark gray sky.

And finally, words. Scoured of “dear” and hearts and smileys, which she otherwise abused at every opportunity.

Ready to start again.

Kirsten