A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they were all the same: Make me someone new.

The storm has brought Ulla to the cold shelter of the northern islands, to the darkened caves and flat black pools where she remains to this day, waiting for the lonely, the ambitious, the clever, the frail, for all those willing to strike a bargain. She never waits for long.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.

Sometimes when we find love we pretend it away, or ignore it, or tell ourselves we're imagining it. Because it's the most painful kind of hope there is. By indifference . By death.

Hope was tricky like water. Somehow it always found a way in.

They had an ordinary life, full of ordinary things-if love can ever be called that.