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He raised his head, arms still wrapped around me. “It’s Gleðileg jól. And Happy New Year is Hamingjusamur Nýtt Ár.”
I hesitated a moment, then giggled. “No, I’m not even going to try that one.”
Neil’s life in Reykjavik was completely different from his life in New York or in London. At the Belgravia house, we had a staff of five people. On his country estate, well, I had no idea. There were too many to count. And in Manhattan, he just had a housekeeper and a driver. Here, things seemed so…normal. Nobody waited on us, apart from stocking the kitchen and cleaning before we arrived. Nobody cooked our meals, and if I put down a dirty cup and walked away, it would still be where I left it when I returned. It was like real life, and I could have found myself getting used to it.
After we cleaned up our breakfast, Neil showered while I put on my makeup. It was almost eleven-thirty before the sun rose, and I watched the sky lighten over the bay as I dressed.
“Can you zip me?” I asked Neil as he emerged from the bathroom, a towel riding low on his hips. I held my hair up so he could pull the zipper on my red lace Dolce & Gabbana A-line dress. At my throat, I wore the diamond necklace Neil had given me for Christmas the year before. “This isn’t too much, is it? I don’t know how fancy your family is.”
“It might be too much, but don’t let that stop you,” he said, leaning to kiss the back of my neck before I let my hair down. “This is the first time they’re meeting you. Let me show you off a bit.”
Neil drove us to his brother’s house, about an hour outside of the city. Neil looked amazing in a dark berry-colored sweater and brown corduroy trousers. Our parkas were tossed in the backseat of the Range Rover, and I relaxed into the ride, eager to see some of the sights.
What I could see from the car, anyway. One minute, we were in the city suburbs, the next, scattered industrial buildings. We took the highway past a huge lake, and then we were off on some alien planet. The countryside outside of Reykjavik was a snowy white wonderland dotted with brown grasses, black rock, and rolling gray hills.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I marveled, gazing out at the dim white horizon. “It’s beautiful. You’re right, it looks nothing like where I grew up. It looks…totally bizarre.”
“Fewer trees,” he said, and it made such perfect sense, I wondered how I’d missed that detail in the first place. But there really weren’t as many trees as I was used to seeing from the highway in the US, where they kind of blocked the view. I felt like I could see forever from the car windows.
Though we arrived just a few minutes late, the sky had already started to dim when we pulled up the long, two-track drive to the house.
“It’s getting dark,” I said with a frown, gazing at the sky above the pines. There were more trees here, practically a forest. Probably because of the small, private lake Neil had told me all about. His brother Runólf owned seventy acres in a sprawling plot. “His only neighbors are some archaeologists working on a Viking settlement on the other side of the lake,” Neil had told me. “Runólf is very private.”
Since he lived out in the middle of nowhere on way too much land, I’d expected Runólf’s house would be a log cabin or a sod house. But we parked on a circular drive paved with cobblestones, in front of a house with an A-frame center and two long, half-sunken wings. The exterior was sided with cedar set at angles toward the apex of the roof, and large windows revealed a warmly lit interior.
“This is the place,” Neil said as he turned off the ignition. But he didn’t get out of the car. He sat for a moment with the keys in his lap, totally zoned out.
“Are you okay?” I had a weird, queasy feeling suddenly. Was he embarrassed of me? Did he not want to introduce me to the rest of his family?
He looked over to me with a benign smile. “Yes, absolutely. Perhaps a touch jet-lagged.”
That didn’t set my mind at ease. I knew him too well.
We grabbed our parkas and pulled them on, then went to the back of the vehicle and unloaded the duffel bag full of presents we’d brought. He had gifts for Emma and Michael, and for his new niece, but he and his brothers didn’t exchange presents.
Neil and I had made the same agreement this year, as well, but I’d totally cheated; I just hadn’t given him his gift yet. He’d probably cheated, too.
He knocked on the door, and a man about as tall as Neil, with the dirty blond hair color Neil had before the chemo, answered the door. Same green eyes, same elegant facial features, the only real physical difference between Neil and his brother was that Runólf was a bit pudgier around the middle and in the face.
A difference Neil must have pointed out a time or two, because Runólf grabbed Neil’s midsection and said something in Icelandic that I couldn’t understand. But it carried the universal tone of big brother fat shaming.
Neil swatted his brother’s hands away and pulled me forward. “Þetta er unnusta mín—um, kærastan, Sophie.”
Runólf’s eyes went wide as he looked from Neil to me. Neil looked like he was swallowing a really big pill. What had he just said about me?
Then Runólf said, “Sophie, it’s nice to meet you.”
“Hi!” I reached out and shook his hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak—”
“Not at a
ll, not at all.” Runólf’s posh English accent strongly matched Neil’s. “Come on inside. Emma’s already here.”
We took off our coats and hung them in the small coatroom off the wide, open, octagonal foyer. To the left and right, hallways led off in opposite directions, and a staircase swooped in a graceful arc down to the lower level, where a Christmas tree that had to be eighteen feet tall stood in front of an all-glass wall that faced the lake. The house was built into a hillside, I realized.
“Dad!” Emma called as she thundered up the stairs. She threw her arms around Neil’s neck before he could get a word in. “I missed you. Christmas wasn’t the same without you.”
“I missed you, too.” He kissed her forehead and set her on her feet. “And I suppose Michael had to come along?”
