Chapter 46: Nordic Welcome
The Nordskov family estate didn’t look like a home. From the backseat of the sleek, silent car Callum had sent for her, it looked like a corporate headquarters accidentally built in a residential neighborhood—all sharp angles, reflective glass, and imported slate. Aurora fidgeted with the cuff of her best sweater, a deep emerald cashmere that felt suddenly insubstantial. This wasn’t a Sunday roast.This was a deployment.
“He said casual,” she muttered to herself, watching the geometric structure grow larger. “This is not casual.”
The car whispered to a halt. Before she could even reach for the door, it was opened by a smiling woman in practical, expensive-looking trousers. “Miss Bellweather.Welcome. They’re all in the kitchen.” Her English was flawless, her gesture towards the colossal front door effortless. Aurora murmured thanks, her boots crunching on the pristine gravel.
The inside was worse. Soaring ceilings, a minimalist staircase that seemed to float, art that was probably worth more than her entire street. It was stunning, and cold as a museum. The silence was profound, broken only by the distant, rhythmic thud of a ball against a wall. Then, a burst of laughter, sharp and real, echoed from somewhere deep within the steel and glass.She followed the sound.
The kitchen was a shock of life. It was still vast and modern, all marble and professional-grade appliances, but it was littered with the evidence of people. A half-chopped salad on an island, three phones charging by the sink, a discarded pair of designer trainers kicked under a stool. And people. A tall, willowy woman with Callum’s green eyes was pulling a tray of kanelbullar from a vast oven, the smell of cardamom and sugar cutting through the sterile air. Two younger girls—early twenties, one with pink-tipped braids, the other with a severe, chic bob—were arguing over a tablet, jabbing at the screen.
“He looks constipated in that one!” Pink Braids insisted.
“He’s concentrating, you philistine!” Chic Bob shot back.
Aurora hovered in the doorway, a trespasser in a cashmere sweater.
The woman at the oven turned, spotted her, and her face—a more elegant, feminine version of Callum’s—lit up. She didn’t walk, she flowed, wiping her hands on a linen towel. “Aurora,” she said, and her voice was warm, melodic. “I am Linnea.” She took Aurora’s hands, not shaking them, but holding them. Her palms were warm, dusted with flour. “We have heard so much. You are exactly as he described.”
Before Aurora could process that terrifying statement, Linnea had drawn her into the room. The two girls looked up. The argument died. Four eyes, the same intense Nordskov green, appraised her with unnerving bluntness.
“This is Kaja,” Linnea said, gesturing to Pink Braids. “And Mette.” Chic Bob offered a small, cool smile.
“We are settling a very important dispute,” Kaja announced, abandoning the tablet. She came closer, circling Aurora with a curious, feline intensity. “You have known him for, what, four months now?”
“Three and a half,” Aurora corrected, her voice sounding small.
“Perfect.Fresh eyes. Unclouded by a lifetime of trauma.” Kaja planted herself in front of Aurora. “Objectively. Was my brother a more insufferable creature when he was fifteen, with acne and a truly tragic peroxide phase, or is he more insufferable now, with his ‘legacy’ and his ‘brand integrations’?”
Mette snorted. “The peroxide phase was an act of war against the family. But the current insufferability is more... structural. Global, even.”
Aurora’s panic melted, replaced by a giddy, unraveling sense of recognition. This wasn’t an interrogation. It was an initiation. She pushed her glasses up her nose, buying a second. “I haven’t seen the photographic evidence of the peroxide,” she said carefully. “So I can’t fully adjudicate. But I have seen him attempt to use his ‘brand influence’ to get a faster table at a fully booked restaurant. It was… a spectacle of misplaced confidence.”
A beat of silence.
Then Kaja shrieked with laughter. Mette’s cool smile cracked into a real one. Linnea shook her head, her eyes sparkling. “He tried that here, once. The chef told him to wash dishes or get out.”
“And?” Aurora asked.
“He got out,” Mette deadpanned. “He cannot wash a dish to save his life. You’ve seen him try, yes?”
The dam broke. They pulled her to the island, pushed a still-warm cinnamon bun into her hands, and launched into a relentless, affectionate evisceration of Callum Nordskov. Stories of his teenage melodrama, his on-field triumphs reframed as familial inconveniences (“He broke his arm before Mette’s confirmation, the drama queen, we had to hear about his ‘sacrifice’ for weeks”), his dubious taste in music. It was a peeling back of layers, a reduction of the global icon to a little brother who once cried because he couldn’t get his hair to look like David Beckham’s.
Aurora listened, adding small observations of her own—his frighteningly specific knowledge of 90s football trivia, his secret love for truly terrible reality TV, his habit of buying every exotic plant at the market only to watch it die within weeks. Each revelation was met with nods and barks of “Yes! Exactly!”
She was in the middle of explaining his failed attempt at making gravy—a callback that made her own heart twinge—when she felt a presence in the doorway.
Callum leaned against the frame, dressed in a simple grey henley and dark jeans, his hair damp from a shower. He’d been watching. For how long, she didn’t know. His usual easy smile was absent. In its place was something raw and unguarded, a softness around his eyes as he watched his mother laugh, his sisters gesture wildly, and Aurora, flushed and animated, utterly at the center of it.
“He’s here,” Mette sang. “The man of the hour. We’re telling her about the pony.”
“There was no pony,” Callum said, his voice a low rumble. He pushed off the doorframe and walked in, but his eyes were on Aurora. “You surviving?”
“They’re very thorough,” Aurora said, holding up half a bun.
“They’re terrors.” He came to her side, his hand finding the small of her back. A simple, possessive touch. “What’s the verdict? More insufferable then or now?”
Kaja and Mette leaned forward, waiting.
Aurora looked at him, at the faint scar through his eyebrow from a long-ago match, at the genuine apprehension in his green eyes. This wasn’t just about her meeting his family. It was about him showing her the origin of everything—the drive, the loneliness, the need for a space that wasn’t made of glass and expectation. The kitchen, for all its grandeur, was the only room that felt lived in.
“I think,” she said slowly, “he was probably a perfectly reasonable teenager who was cruelly maligned by his sisters. And now, he’s a perfectly reasonable man who occasionally has to use his powers for evil to get a decent reservation.” She took a bite of the bun. “But his taste in plants is still criminal.”
Linnea laughed, a beautiful, echoing sound. Callum’s tension broke. He dropped his forehead to Aurora’s shoulder for a second, a gesture of such pure relief it felt private, even in the crowded room. “Thank you,” he murmured, his breath warm through her sweater.
The afternoon unfolded in a warm, noisy blur. They ate in a sun-drenched dining nook overlooking the manicured lawn where a young Callum had undoubtedly drilled for hours. The conversation meandered from football to Linnea’s sculpting to Mette’s law studies to Kaja’s sustainable fashion line. They asked about her book, not as a polite hobby, but with pointed, intelligent questions about structure and character motivation that left Aurora stumbling over her answers in the best possible way.
Later, as the weak Scandinavian sun began to dip, Callum led her away from the others, up the floating staircase to a long, glass-walled gallery that overlooked the harbor. The water was a sheet of dark steel.
“This is the quiet part,” he said, his hand still in hers. “Where they put all the expensive, breakable things no one is allowed to touch.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “And a little terrifying.”
“It’s just a house. The people downstairs are my home.” He turned to her, leaning against the cool glass. “You were amazing. You are amazing. My mother is already planning what to knit you for Christmas. My sisters will probably text you horrible pictures of me before I get home.”
“I hope they do.”
He looked out at the view, but his mind seemed elsewhere. “Coming here… it’s complicated. The success, the money, it’s what they wanted for me. What they sacrificed for. But sometimes it feels like I built this…” he gestured at the grandeur around them, “…and locked myself inside it.They visit the museum. You walked right into the kitchen.”
Aurora thought of her father’s nod from the living room window. Two different tests, two different languages of approval. “Your mom said you described me. What did you say?”
A slow smile touched his lips. “I said you were the first person who felt real to me since I was seventeen years old. And that you have terrible handwriting and a scary understanding of defensive formations.”
She laughed, the sound swallowed by the vast space. He reached out, tracing the line of her jaw with his thumb.
“Stay with me tonight,” he said, the question soft in the twilight.“Not here. At our place. The normal one.”
Our place. The words hung in the cool air between them. Aurora thought of the borrowed sweater on her chair, the mismatched mugs in his dishwasher, the easy silence that felt like a conversation. She nodded, unable to speak.
Downstairs, a peal of laughter echoed up the stairwell. The sound of a family, of her phone buzzing in her pocket with a new message—likely from Kaja with photographic evidence. Callum leaned in, his forehead resting against hers, and in the reflection of the endless glass, Aurora saw not a fortress, but a threshold. And she was already on the other side of it.