I have never been so grateful for a ferry timetable in my life. There we were, my partner and I, standing at the Vaxholm terminal with our bags of shopping, watching the little boat to Ljusteroe pull away from the dock. We had misread the schedule by exactly twelve minutes. Twelve minutes! The next one was not for another hour and a half. I had insisted we stop for a cinnamon bun, you see. "We have plenty of time," I said, with the confidence of a person who has not checked the fine print. My partner gave me that look. You know the one.

When we finally boarded, I was still muttering apologies. The ferry itself was charming though, all wooden benches and salt-streaked windows, chugging past little islands dotted with red summer houses. A woman sitting opposite us had a cat in a wicker basket. The cat looked deeply unimpressed with maritime life. We got talking, as you do when trapped on a small boat. Her name was Inga and she had lived on Ljusteroe for forty years. "You are staying at the red one near the water?" she asked, somehow knowing exactly which property we had booked. "The English always book that one. The Germans prefer the yellow house on the hill." I was not sure whether to feel predictable or welcomed.

The house was indeed red, and indeed near the water, and absolutely freezing when we arrived. The key was in a lockbox with a code that made my partner laugh for reasons I still do not understand. Something about the numbers being significant in Swedish pop music history. I just turned the dial and prayed. Inside, everything smelled of pine and slightly damp wool, which I found oddly comforting. My partner opened every window immediately, muttering about "airing the place properly," while I stood in the kitchen and examined the coffee maker with the intensity of a person who has not had caffeine since morning.

Our first neighbour encounter happened within the hour. A man called Bengt appeared from the trees carrying a rake, which sounds threatening but was not. He wanted to know if we knew how to use the sauna. I said yes, which was a lie. He looked at me with pale blue eyes that suggested he knew this. "The wood is in the shed," he said. "Dry wood. Not the green wood. The green wood smokes." He said this slowly, as if speaking to a child. I nodded with great seriousness. When he left, my partner pointed out that I had agreed to something I did not understand in a language I barely speak. "He seemed nice," I said, which was true.

That evening we walked to the small shop near the harbour, the one that sells everything from fishing line to decent cheese. The woman behind the counter, whose name tag said "Lotta," asked if we were the ones in Sven's old place. I said we were in the red house. "Yes," she said. "Sven's." Sven had apparently died three years ago. Lotta told us this while weighing our tomatoes, as casually as if discussing the weather. "Lovely man. Terrible at card games." She said we should try the smoked fish from the man who comes on Tuesdays. "Not the man who comes on Thursdays. His fish is... okay. But Tuesdays, that is the good fish." I wrote "Tuesday fish" in my phone with the urgency of a person receiving state secrets.

Back at the house, we sat on the little wooden deck with mugs of tea and watched the light change over the water. My partner asked what I thought of the place so far. I thought about Inga and her psychic knowledge of booking patterns, about Bengt and his wood-related warnings, about Lotta and her Tuesday fish intelligence network. I thought about how I had nearly ruined everything with a cinnamon bun. "I think," I said, "that we are going to need more time here than we planned." My partner smiled, which meant agreement, or possibly just that the tea was good. Either way, I was already looking forward to Tuesday.