The Worship

Chapter 1: The Invitation

The envelope sat on the kitchen counter for three days before James noticed it. Not a proper envelope—a folded sheet of handmade paper, cream-colored with flecks of something dark pressed into the fibers, sealed with a disc of black wax. No return address. The stamp was Icelandic, bearing the image of a puffin.

Kate had already opened it. He could tell because she'd resealed it poorly, the wax cracked along one edge. He found it on a Tuesday evening after coming home from the architectural firm where he spent his days designing extensions for houses that didn't need them. Kate was upstairs, running a bath. The pipes groaned in the walls of their Hackney flat like something trying to speak.

He broke the wax and unfolded the letter.

The handwriting was small and precise, almost mechanical in its regularity. It was from Katrin Egilsson—a name James hadn't heard in at least four years, though Kate still mentioned her occasionally, always with a particular softness in her voice, the way people speak about friends they've disappointed.

*Dear Kate,*

*I know it's been a long time. I know you probably thought I'd disappeared completely, and in some ways I have—the old Katrin, anyway. I left London because I was drowning there. I think you understand drowning.*

*I'm writing because I've found something. Not a religion, not a philosophy—something real. I live on a farmstead in the Eastfjords now, in a community of people who've learned to listen to the land. I know how that sounds. I would have laughed too, three years ago. But the land here is different, Kate. It's alive in ways that matter.*

*Come visit. Bring James. Stay a week. The summer light never fully dies here—it just dims, like a lamp being turned down. You'll sleep differently. You'll feel differently.*

*I heard about what happened. I'm sorry. Come and let the land hold you for a while.*

*Yours always,*
*Katrin*

James read it twice. The phrase "I heard about what happened" sat in his chest like a stone. He knew what it referred to. Everyone knew, or seemed to. The miscarriage had happened seven months ago, and their world had quietly rearranged itself around the absence of the child who would never arrive. Friends brought casseroles they didn't eat. Kate's mother called every Sunday with a voice like she was visiting a hospital. The therapist James had found—Dr. Cavanagh, a measured woman with a corner office in Marylebone—had been seeing Kate alone for two months before Kate stopped going.

James hadn't gone at all. He told himself he was being strong. He told himself someone had to keep working, keep the flat clean, keep the bills paid. He told himself grief was something Kate owned more than he did, because it had happened inside her body, and who was he to claim equal devastation?

He folded the letter and put it back on the counter.

Kate came down twenty minutes later, her hair wet, wearing the oversized cardigan she'd lived in since November. She saw him standing by the counter and her eyes went to the letter.

"You read it," she said.

"I did."

"And?"

James leaned against the counter. The kitchen was small—they'd bought the flat in a fever of optimism five years ago, when property in Hackney was merely expensive rather than obscene, and they'd told each other the kitchen was "cozy" rather than admitting it was too small to cook in together.

"Iceland," he said.

"The Eastfjords. It's supposed to be beautiful."

"A commune, Kate."

"She doesn't call it that."

"She calls it a community of people who listen to the land. That's a commune with better marketing."

Kate pulled out a chair and sat at their small table. The table had been set for two since they'd moved in, but for a brief period—maybe three months—there had been a high chair catalogue sitting on it, bristling with Post-it notes. That was gone now.

"Katrin was my closest friend at university," Kate said. "She was brilliant. She got a First in anthropology. She's not the type to join a cult."

"I didn't say cult. I said commune."

"You were thinking cult."

He had been thinking cult. "I was thinking it's a long way to go to visit someone you haven't spoken to in years."

Kate looked at him with an expression he'd come to recognize—not anger, exactly, but a kind of tired clarity, as if she could see all the way through him to the wall behind. "I want to go, James. I need to go somewhere that isn't here."

"We could go to Portugal. We could go to the Lakes. We could—"

"I want to go there."

The emphasis was quiet but final. James thought about the therapist's office Kate had stopped visiting, the running shoes she'd bought and never worn, the pottery class she'd signed up for and attended once. This was the first time in months she'd wanted anything with conviction.

"Fine," he said. "A week."

"A week."

"And if it's weird, we leave."

Kate smiled. It was a small smile, careful, like something she was testing to see if it still worked. "It might be weird. That's sort of the point."

They booked flights for the following Thursday. James told his firm he was taking holiday. His boss, a man named Geoffrey who wore the same blue jumper every day and had the emotional range of a filing cabinet, said, "Good. You look terrible." James supposed he did. He'd lost weight since November, not deliberately, just through the slow erosion of appetite that comes with living in a house where no one cooks anymore. They ate toast. They ate takeaway from the Thai place on the corner. They ate cereal at odd hours, standing at the counter, not speaking.

The night before they left, James couldn't sleep. He lay in bed listening to Kate breathe beside him—she'd started sleeping on her side, facing away from him, and he'd started sleeping on his back, staring at the ceiling, and the space between them in the double bed felt like a country neither of them had the visa to enter.

He thought about the letter. Something about it bothered him beyond the obvious. The phrase "the land here is different" stuck in his mind. And the last line before the sign-off: "Come and let the land hold you for a while." It was a strange choice of words. Not "let us hold you" or "let this place hold you." The land. As if the land itself had agency. As if it could reach out and take.

He told himself he was overthinking it. Katrin was an anthropologist. Anthropologists talked like that—everything was alive, everything had meaning, every rock was a symbol. It was just language.

But lying there in the dark, listening to his wife breathe in the bed they shared but no longer inhabited together, James felt a premonition he couldn't name. Not fear, exactly. Something lower and older than fear. A sense that they were about to cross a threshold, and that the crossing would not be reversible.

He fell asleep sometime after three. He dreamed of black flowers growing through the floorboards of their flat, pushing up through the gaps in the hardwood, their petals slick and warm to the touch. In the dream, Kate knelt among them, pressing her face to the blooms, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were full of soil.