She was in shock. But it was a slightly different kind of shock than the others on the dinghy assumed. It wasn’t the shock of having been close to death. It was the shock of realising she actually wanted to live.

ey passed a small island, teeming with nature. Green lichens spread over rocks. Birds – little auks and puffins clustered together – huddled against the Arctic wind. Life surviving against the odds.

Nora sipped the coffee that Hugo handed her, fresh from his flask.

Holding it with cold hands even under three pairs of gloves.

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.