SALTFAT, OSLO
(THIRD DRAFT IN PROGRESS)
(THIRD DRAFT IN PROGRESS)
In a tidy Nordic capital where feelings are folded away like winter linens, an American caterer starts to come undone following a betrayal, one dry observation and improvised recipe at a time with a simmering need to stir something up.
CHAPTER ONE: The Egg Salad
The thing about finding out your husband is having an affair is that it never happens the way you think it will. You expect lipstick on a collar, a second phone, or a poorly hidden receipt for a weekend in Copenhagen. What you don’t expect is a lost AirPod, a sticky-fingered toddler, and a coat pocket filled with infedility.
It was a Tuesday. Cold, flat light, the kind that makes Oslo look like it was built out of milk cartons and expensive regrets. My son Gus was in the corner of the kitchen pulling apart a small packet of salted butter because in Norway, they don’t believe in capping butter containers like sane people and I was plating egg salad on rye for a corporate lunch order. I’d just swirled on a little mustard aioli when I heard him say it: ‘Sun-ee-va’.
He pronounced her name with the kind of round vowels reserved for poetry or passwords. I froze, half an egg in hand, and turned around. He wasn’t talking to me.
Gus had pulled Aksel’s coat off the hook, and while rummaging through the pocket, had pressed the button on a lost AirPod case. The disembodied voice came through like a ghost in a Bluetooth machine.
‘…so when are you telling her?’
I could still hear the newly unshelled eggs hissing slightly on the counter. The audio had stopped. Gus looked up at me with his usual smudged face and absolute innocence.
I didn’t cry. I wiped my hands. I turned the egg salad into open-faced tartines and added a little dust of paprika and a sprig of dill on the side, because the show must go on. Because I’m Ellis, and I make food for a living, even when my heart is actively splitting down the middle like an overboiled yolk.
The dill, I should say, was operative. I hate dill. It’s Norway’s favorite herb, and I’ve spent the better part of a decade avoiding it. You can’t throw a fish in this country without it coming back covered in dill and smugness. I once catered a wedding where the bride’s aunt told me she could taste my “American-ness” in the vinaigrette because there was no dill in it. As though restraint were a flaw. I decided to take it as a compliment.
Dill is how you ruin something you once loved. Dill is Sunniva in herb form.
And yet, there it was, delicately laid beside the tartines, because the client had requested something “classic.” Sometimes survival means playing along.
That afternoon, I delivered lunch to a law firm in Bjørvika where everyone smiled at me like I was a lifestyle choice. One woman asked if I could recreate the egg salad for her baby shower in May. I smiled back, handed her a card, and said I’d love to. I wanted to say, ‘Egg salad is how I found out my marriage is over’, but that seemed like poor marketing.
When I got home, I put Gus down for his nap, closed the kitchen door, and made a pot of tea. I poured it into a mug I didn’t like, one of Aksel’s, too pale and modern, then sat down at the table.
On the windowsill was the little saltfat Aksel had brought home from his grandmother’s hytte. A low silver-rimmed dish, etched with tiny blue flowers and paired with a spoon the size of a fingernail. We were supposed to save it for the cabin dinners. Linen napkins, candles, me in a wool dress. The fantasy of domestic permanence.
It was never used. Just sat there, a relic of intention. Something to look at instead of deal with.
I got up and filled it with Maldon because it was finally time to use the damn thing. The grinder was jammed anyway. At least this way, the salt was where I could see it...
Would you like to read more? Reach out.
© 2025 Edee Carey. All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or distributed without the author’s written permission.
The thing about finding out your husband is having an affair is that it never happens the way you think it will. You expect lipstick on a collar, a second phone, or a poorly hidden receipt for a weekend in Copenhagen. What you don’t expect is a lost AirPod, a sticky-fingered toddler, and a coat pocket filled with infedility.
It was a Tuesday. Cold, flat light, the kind that makes Oslo look like it was built out of milk cartons and expensive regrets. My son Gus was in the corner of the kitchen pulling apart a small packet of salted butter because in Norway, they don’t believe in capping butter containers like sane people and I was plating egg salad on rye for a corporate lunch order. I’d just swirled on a little mustard aioli when I heard him say it: ‘Sun-ee-va’.
He pronounced her name with the kind of round vowels reserved for poetry or passwords. I froze, half an egg in hand, and turned around. He wasn’t talking to me.
Gus had pulled Aksel’s coat off the hook, and while rummaging through the pocket, had pressed the button on a lost AirPod case. The disembodied voice came through like a ghost in a Bluetooth machine.
‘…so when are you telling her?’
I could still hear the newly unshelled eggs hissing slightly on the counter. The audio had stopped. Gus looked up at me with his usual smudged face and absolute innocence.
I didn’t cry. I wiped my hands. I turned the egg salad into open-faced tartines and added a little dust of paprika and a sprig of dill on the side, because the show must go on. Because I’m Ellis, and I make food for a living, even when my heart is actively splitting down the middle like an overboiled yolk.
The dill, I should say, was operative. I hate dill. It’s Norway’s favorite herb, and I’ve spent the better part of a decade avoiding it. You can’t throw a fish in this country without it coming back covered in dill and smugness. I once catered a wedding where the bride’s aunt told me she could taste my “American-ness” in the vinaigrette because there was no dill in it. As though restraint were a flaw. I decided to take it as a compliment.
Dill is how you ruin something you once loved. Dill is Sunniva in herb form.
And yet, there it was, delicately laid beside the tartines, because the client had requested something “classic.” Sometimes survival means playing along.
That afternoon, I delivered lunch to a law firm in Bjørvika where everyone smiled at me like I was a lifestyle choice. One woman asked if I could recreate the egg salad for her baby shower in May. I smiled back, handed her a card, and said I’d love to. I wanted to say, ‘Egg salad is how I found out my marriage is over’, but that seemed like poor marketing.
When I got home, I put Gus down for his nap, closed the kitchen door, and made a pot of tea. I poured it into a mug I didn’t like, one of Aksel’s, too pale and modern, then sat down at the table.
On the windowsill was the little saltfat Aksel had brought home from his grandmother’s hytte. A low silver-rimmed dish, etched with tiny blue flowers and paired with a spoon the size of a fingernail. We were supposed to save it for the cabin dinners. Linen napkins, candles, me in a wool dress. The fantasy of domestic permanence.
It was never used. Just sat there, a relic of intention. Something to look at instead of deal with.
I got up and filled it with Maldon because it was finally time to use the damn thing. The grinder was jammed anyway. At least this way, the salt was where I could see it...
Would you like to read more? Reach out.
© 2025 Edee Carey. All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or distributed without the author’s written permission.
THE HOUSE AT ELDER FERRY
(UNDER STRUCTURAL EDITS)
When a magnetic artist reunites with her former lover, their affair threatens to expose her scandalous past in France and unravel the carefully curated image she’s created in a small Southern town where even the smallest secret can destroy lives.
CHAPTER ONE
The tide had been pulling out all morning, leaving ribbons of seaweed and the split armor of mollusks glinting in the sun. I arrived just as the ferry road turned to gravel, the heat clinging low to the earth like breath on a mirror. The town was Elder, and the house that was next to the inn, as I would come to know, was simply 'Mazelle's'.
There are certain homes that never settle into the land. They hover above it: too white, too vast, too sure of themselves. Mazelle’s was like that: set back from the coast, crouched in a copse of live oaks, wrapped in porches that leaned in slightly as though listening. It was not new. In fact, it had once been a boarding school for girls whose families could no longer “keep them at home”. Even from the outside, it carried the air of inheritance, as though its very frame remembered other lives. What waited inside, though, belonged only to her.
I hadn’t come to Elder for Mazelle. I didn’t know her name when I arrived. I’d come south from Boston, where everything had gone a little too cold and a little too clean. I was writing again. Profiles of places for glossy magazines, pieces meant to sell yearning disguised as travel, and I needed something green and strange to shake the winter off. The south would have that, surely. Elder had been recommended by a woman I had once wanted to love but couldn’t afford to need. I didn’t know which I wanted...
Read the rest of the first chapter by clicking the PDF File below.
© 2025 Edee Carey. All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or distributed without the author’s written permission.
The tide had been pulling out all morning, leaving ribbons of seaweed and the split armor of mollusks glinting in the sun. I arrived just as the ferry road turned to gravel, the heat clinging low to the earth like breath on a mirror. The town was Elder, and the house that was next to the inn, as I would come to know, was simply 'Mazelle's'.
There are certain homes that never settle into the land. They hover above it: too white, too vast, too sure of themselves. Mazelle’s was like that: set back from the coast, crouched in a copse of live oaks, wrapped in porches that leaned in slightly as though listening. It was not new. In fact, it had once been a boarding school for girls whose families could no longer “keep them at home”. Even from the outside, it carried the air of inheritance, as though its very frame remembered other lives. What waited inside, though, belonged only to her.
I hadn’t come to Elder for Mazelle. I didn’t know her name when I arrived. I’d come south from Boston, where everything had gone a little too cold and a little too clean. I was writing again. Profiles of places for glossy magazines, pieces meant to sell yearning disguised as travel, and I needed something green and strange to shake the winter off. The south would have that, surely. Elder had been recommended by a woman I had once wanted to love but couldn’t afford to need. I didn’t know which I wanted...
Read the rest of the first chapter by clicking the PDF File below.
© 2025 Edee Carey. All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or distributed without the author’s written permission.
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