Chapter 12: The Ingenuity of the Castaways

Chapter 12: The Ingenuity of the Castaways

The pizza was ready, steaming on the kitchen table, and the red wine was already resting in my glass. I was about to take the first bite when a cheerful metallic sound startled me: a bell rang insistently on the outside of the cabin.

I frowned, intrigued, and looked out the window that looked out onto the hillside. I laughed out loud at the display of his wit. Tied tightly to one of the poles on my deck, there was a thin rope that went diagonally up straight to his cabin, transforming into a homemade zipline. At the end of the rope hung a small wicker basket with a bell attached to the handle.

I opened the terrace door, pulled the rope towards me and lowered the basket. As I opened it, a delicious aroma of baked dough and spices hit my face. Inside were two generous slices of pizza perfectly wrapped.

Immediately, I grabbed a plate, placed two large pieces of my own steak and paprika pizza, and tucked them into the basket. Before closing it, I tore out a piece of paper and wrote a quick note where I thanked him for the detail and, letting myself be carried away by the impulse of complicity, I added a question: Shall I have an American breakfast tomorrow at 9?

I put the note next to the food, rang the bell loudly to give him the signal, and let go of the rope. From my porch, I watched in the distance as he began to pull the rope from his own terrace, climbing the basket up the hill under the Norwegian moonlight.

That's how we spent Saturday night. Each one dined in the privacy of their own cabin, sheltered from the cold of the North Atlantic, but deeply accompanied by the other through that invisible thread of wicker and rope.

As I savored his pizza and sipped my glass of red wine, I stared at the wooden ceiling of my cabin. It was at that very moment that I noticed a silent miracle: for the first time in weeks, my failed marriage hadn't come to mind. I didn't think about Anthony's betrayal, I didn't think about the younger woman, I didn't think about the deception or the heartbreaking pain she had brought me dragging to this corner of the world. All that had evaporated. At that moment it was just me, Astrid, inhabiting my own body and experiencing an inner warmth that I hadn't felt for a long, long time. She was alive, and the future no longer seemed hostile territory.