The ferry from Kalmar was meant to be the easy bit. I had checked the timetable twice, packed the car with unnecessary layers, and even remembered to download a playlist for the twenty-minute crossing. What I had not remembered was which side of the car the fuel cap lived on. Cue me performing an elaborate three-point turn at the petrol station in Kalmar, blocking a Volvo driven by a man whose expression suggested I had personally insulted his grandmother. By the time I reached the ferry terminal, I was that person: the one sprinting from the car deck with a carrier bag of snacks, hair horizontal in the Baltic wind, arriving precisely as the ramp began to lift. A deckhand called Lars watched this performance with the weary patience of someone who had seen it all before. "First time?" he asked, though it clearly was not a question.

Oeland materialised through the mist like a watercolour someone had left out in the rain. Low and flat and impossibly green, it looked nothing like the dramatic Scottish islands I was used to. This, I would learn, was part of its trick. The Boeda cottage sat down a track that my sat nav confidently described as "unnamed road," which felt less like directions and more like an admission of defeat. I found it only because a woman in wellingtons was leaning on a gate, waiting for me it seemed. This was Ingrid, the neighbour, who had apparently watched my approach from half a mile away and diagnosed every wrong turn before I made it.

"You took the left at the birch," she said, not quite accusingly. "Everyone takes the left at the birch."

The cottage itself was red, obviously, with white trim that someone had recently repainted with the particular optimism of early spring. Ingrid handed me a key attached to a wooden fish and explained the boiler, the bins, and the neighbour's cat, who was not to be fed under any circumstances despite his persuasive manner. She said all this while examining my hire car with visible scepticism, as if it had disappointed her personally.

Inside smelled of pine and something else I could not place. Lavender? Old books? The particular absence of central heating? I later discovered it was the neighbour's woodpile, stacked against the far wall with Swedish efficiency, each log cut to precisely the same length. Ingrid had followed me in without invitation, which I found oddly comforting. She opened cupboards, demonstrated the coffee maker with the reverence of a priest handling communion wine, and finally produced a jar of something orange from her coat pocket. "Cloudberry jam. My husband picked them. He is dead now, but the jam remains." She said this with perfect practicality, and I found myself nodding as if this were a normal conversational conclusion.

That evening I walked to what Ingrid called "the proper shop," a twenty-minute stroll that took forty because I kept stopping to establish that yes, everything really was that flat, and yes, the light really did hang in the sky like that, pale and endless and slightly accusatory. In the shop, which sold everything from wellingtons to what I believe was pickled herring in suspicious quantities, I encountered a man called Sten who was buying precisely seven potatoes. He explained this was his system. "One for each day, then I return. Otherwise I forget I have them and they become sad in the drawer." We discussed the weather, which had not changed, and the ferry, which he understood I had nearly missed. News travelled, apparently, even across unnamed roads.

Back at the cottage, I sat with Ingrid's jam and no bread, having forgotten to buy any, and watched the light finally drain from the sky around half past ten. The boiler made a noise like a disappointed sigh. Somewhere, presumably, the neighbour's cat was being unfed with theatrical suffering. I thought about Sten's potatoes, and Ingrid's dead husband, and Lars on the ferry who had seen absolutely everything before. The mishap with the fuel cap felt already like someone else's story, a comedy performed for an audience who had kindly pretended to notice. I was, I realised, going to like it here, even if I never quite understood the rules.