The following morning, Astrid stood in front of the cellar door holding two things: a warm cup of chicory coffee… and a question.
She hadn't slept much. Not from restlessness, but from stimulation. Her body still pulsed with the memory of Ida's mouth, the echo of Elin's fingers, and now — these sketches, this archive, this proof that the blood in her veins carried a history of longing no one had ever dared name.
She hadn't expected inheritance to feel like this — not heavy, not oppressive, but erotic. As if the walls of this cottage had always known her, even before she arrived.
At 9:12 a.m., Ida arrived barefoot and damp from the lake, a plum in one hand and her hair braided wet down her spine.
Astrid held out the coffee.
"I want to show you something."
The cellar was different with someone else in it. It no longer felt like a tomb of secrets. It felt like a stage — and Ida moved through it slowly, reverently, trailing her fingertips along the pinned sketches.
She stopped in front of one. A charcoal drawing of two women, one lying across a chaise, legs spread, the other kneeling with her face buried between her thighs.
"I know this stroke," Ida murmured. "The way she draws hips. Your mormor had a trained hand. Did she ever study art?"
"I don't know," Astrid whispered. "I barely knew her."
Ida crouched beside a low table and picked up a thick sketchbook bound in cracked leather. Inside: more women. More intimacy. Some erotic. Some tender. Many drawn with captions. Names.
One sketch stopped them both.
It was of Inga again — unmistakably so — her bare back arched, head thrown back, mouth open.
The caption beneath read:"Siv — 1:43 a.m., Blotnatt. I couldn't stop drawing her."
Ida's eyes narrowed. "Siv."
Astrid looked up. "You know the name?"
Ida stood, slowly. "Everyone knows the name."
They walked to the greenhouse in silence.
There, beneath the low canopy of cucumbers and grapevines, Ida sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, her dress hitched to her thighs. Astrid sat across from her, breath still shallow.
"Siv never belonged to one person," Ida said finally. "She arrived one summer in the late sixties. No partner. No explanation. She just appeared. And for two summers, she moved through everyone. Not like a tourist. Like a… force."
Astrid swallowed. "And then?"
"She disappeared." Ida plucked a vine leaf and traced its veins. "One morning, she was gone. No ferry. No luggage. Just… not here."
"Did she die?"
"No one knows. But the older women, the ones who remember her? They still speak of her like a goddess. Or a storm. As if she wasn't quite real."
Astrid's skin prickled. "But she was."
"She was," Ida said softly. "And from the way your grandmother drew her… she wasn't just a muse. She was the muse."
That night, Astrid opened the sketchbook again, alone in her bed.
She found page after page of the same woman: wide-hipped, mouth lush, eyes half-lidded. Sometimes she was sketched mid-climax, hair tangled, hands grasping sheets. Other times she was standing still, wrapped in a sheer shawl, looking out toward the fjord.
Every drawing of her radiated hunger.
And love.
And something else: obsession.
Astrid could feel it under her grandmother's strokes — the way the lines deepened around the hips, the tenderness in the curve of the fingers, the reverence in every crease, dimple, shadow.
She imagined Inga, alone in this room, sketching by candlelight. Naked. Wet. Aching for someone she couldn't keep.
Siv.
The next day, Astrid returned to the community sauna just before dusk.
This time, she didn't wrap herself in a towel. She entered nude, confident, her breasts soft from sleep, her inner thighs still faintly pink from Ida's stubble the night before.
Ase sat waiting.
"You're shining now," Ase said, her voice like firewood cracking.
Astrid sat beside her. "Tell me about Siv."
Ase was silent for a long time.
Then, in a slow voice that burned with memory: "She made you believe you could die with someone's tongue in your mouth and be reborn with their teeth in your thigh."
Astrid inhaled. "Were you with her?"
"I watched her," Ase said simply. "She never took me. I think I was too… still. Siv liked movement. Chase. Mystery. Inga gave her that. Gave her everything."
"Did she leave Inga?"
"No," Ase whispered. "Siv never left anyone. She just moved through them. And if they broke afterward… that wasn't her fault."
Astrid closed her eyes. "My grandmother never spoke about her. Not once."
"Because the body remembers what the mouth doesn't dare say."
Later that night, Astrid lay awake, thighs pressed together, one hand lazily stroking the skin beneath her navel. Her other hand gripped the edge of the sketchbook.
She imagined Siv — not as myth, not as symbol — but as flesh.
What would it be like, she thought, to be wanted by a woman like that?
To be made into memory.
To be drawn again and again by someone who ached with the need to remember you.
The next morning, Astrid awoke to a note at her door.
Folded. Brief. No signature.
She's still here. In the stones. In the water. Come to the jetty at midnight. And don't wear anything.