Chapter 32
I’m lying in the hospital bed the next afternoon, waiting for discharge papers, when Hunter texts me. I thought he understood I was saying goodbye last night—that the letter I wrote seven years ago would be my final gift to him: the knowledge that his tragedy was my miracle.
But instead, his text is like a grenade molded from words. It takes me several minutes to summon the courage to open it.
It’s a picture of a flyer with a message underneath that says, Surprise!
I spent a couple of hours going to elementary schools this morning, and four of them are going to do the free pepparkakor cookie initiative for their reading programs!
You should see a significant influx of business in the next few weeks.
And I guarantee when they come in for a free cookie, they’ll walk out with a lot more than that!
I pull up the picture of the flyer he made and press my fist against my mouth.
It’s simple but catchy, with beautiful pictures of our store, logo, and address, and a gift certificate at the bottom for the teacher to sign when the student reaches their reading goal.
I can’t believe he did this for us—for me. Why does he have to make this so hard?
It’s for the best. It’s for the best.
I’m doing exactly what Talia and Lou accused me of a couple of weeks ago, but not because I want to or because I’m scared.
It’s because I care for Hunter so much, and I know this is what is best for him.
He’ll move on soon enough—after all, we’ve barely even begun to fall for each other.
He’ll find another girl who will see the kind, wonderful man he is, who won’t care about his scars, and fall in love with him.
They’ll get married, have babies, and someday sit side by side on matching rocking chairs, waiting for their great-grandkids to stop by . . . many, many decades in the future.
And I will have been gone a long, long time.
I close my eyes and summon the courage to do what I know needs to be done. That’s really great, thanks for doing that. I’ll let my mom know.
The three dots appear. Stop. Appear again. My heart is in my throat.
Yeah . . . I thought YOU would be excited.
I can picture the confusion—the hurt on his face. And it hurts me. But I double down. I’m doing this for you, I think before I type, We all appreciate it. Every new customer will make a difference. I’ll make sure my mom finds a way to recompense you for your time.
My stomach clenches into a tight ball of anxiety when the three dots move across my screen for so long I’m afraid he’s about to send me a book. Instead, when his text pops up, it’s only one line: Is this really what you want?
He knows me so well. Too well. And he got the not-so--subtle hint. I should be relieved. Instead, I want to cry.
It’s for the best, I tell myself.
Before I can respond, my phone rings. My mom’s contact picture lights up my screen.
“Hey, Mom. Sorry, I’m still waiting for—”
“She’s awake!” Mom’s exultant cry cuts me off.
“What?”
“Farmor woke up.” I can hear the tears in Mom’s voice. “And she’s still with us—it’s still her.”
I clutch a fist to my chest, my heart squeezing to the point of pain. It’s the best possible news . . . and of course, I am still stuck at this hospital instead of being there by her side. “Stay with her. I’ll find someone to come get me.”
“I can’t make you do that. I’ll come.”
“Mom,” I say, patient but firm. “Farmor has been in a coma. She needs you a lot more than I do. I’m fine. I’ll get over there as fast as I can.”
It takes some convincing, but I finally get her to agree to go back into the room with Farmor, and we hang up.
I sit on my bed, head bowed, partially in shock and partially overcome with gratitude. It came so much later than we hoped, but we got miracle number two after all.
I leave Hunter’s text unanswered as I gather my things and pull up Uber. Maybe it’s better to never respond again. He got the message. Now I need to leave him alone so he can move on.
Even though it’s unbearably painful, in the long run, I know it’s for the best. Better to hurt him a little bit now than to destroy his life in the future.
When I open the door to the room where Farmor was transferred, my heart hammers against my rib cage. Nothing can prepare me to see her sitting up in bed after all this time, her eyes open and alert, holding my mom’s hand in hers.
I burst into tears.
“Oh, sotnos. Come here,” she says; I’ve never heard a sweeter sound in my life.
Her speech is slightly slurred because, apparently, there is some paralysis on the right side of her body—mostly in her face and right hand.
But to have gone through what she did and come out with so few complications truly is a miracle—an answer to our endless prayers.
I rush to her bed but force myself to be gentle as I sit beside her to hug her for the first time in weeks.
In that moment, as Farmor wraps her arms around me as best she can, nothing else matters.
Everything—all the worry, the anger, the questions, the heartbreak—all of it drains away, leaving only a relief so overwhelming that it feels like falling.
“I love you,” I blurt out. “I love you so much.”
Farmor’s left arm tightens around me. “Jag ?lskar dig, ocks?, sotnos.”
There will be plenty of time to ask her my questions, to find out the truth of why she stayed with my grandpa, and to tell her what happened with Hunter, but for now, we hold each other and cry.
For that brief moment, Farmor’s lilting voice, telling me she loves me in Swedish, her soft arms around me, is exactly what my wounded heart needs. For the first time since the horrible realization at my New Life party, a wave of peace washes over me, gently carrying away the pain.
That reprieve is almost as miraculous as her waking up—proving that perhaps it is possible to survive the devastation of losing Hunter and having to carry the burden of knowing his sister’s life was the cost for mine.
I may never find happiness like Hunter and I had again, brief as it was, but at least I know there is hope for healing—hope of not always feeling as though I’ve been cleaved apart.
“Now, tell me: What’s happening at my bakery?”
I pull back with an unsteady laugh, trying not to let my mind go to Hunter’s texts from earlier, echoed by my mom’s much more effulgent laughter from her chair beside the bed.
“There’s the Siv I know and love,” Mom says.
And then we’re all really laughing, even me—laughter that feels cleansing, somehow. An acknowledgment that this is real. That she’s really okay and life with Farmor really is going to keep going.
“I’m serious,” Farmor says when our laughter dies down into giggles. “Tell me everything I’ve missed.”
It’s not until the next day when I’m alone with Farmor in her hospital room, helping her finish her dinner, that she peers up at me and says, “What is it?”
I startle and look around the room. “What is what?”
“What’s bothering you?”
My gaze comes back to hers, to her sharp eyes that have never missed anything before—and apparently still don’t now, even post-major stroke. “What are you talking about?” I hedge.
“Something is different. And I’m not talking about what happened with Hunter.” Farmor, though awake and fully cognizant, still looks more frail than I’ve ever seen her, sitting up in her bed, her head half shaven, her cheeks sunken from lack of real food for so long.
For a moment, I consider playing it off, pushing this conversation to another day, when she’s had time to recover longer. Telling her only some of what happened with Hunter, mostly the part about me getting his sister’s heart, upset her so deeply last night I was afraid she would need diazepam.
But then she says, “Tell me, sotnos. What is different between us?”
And it all comes spilling out. I admit that I read her journal entry and that I’ve been trying to ignore how betrayed I felt finding out the truth about her marriage.
“You made me promise to keep trying to find a love like yours—but it was all a lie.” I thought that when I confronted her, I would be angry, that I might even yell.
Instead, the words come out barely above a whisper.
“Oh, my sweet girl.” Farmor’s voice is shaky, her expression crestfallen when I dare to glance up. “I wish you had kept reading. That you hadn’t carried this hurt with you all these weeks.”
“Well, I didn’t. And I don’t understand. Was it all a lie?”
Farmor’s blue eyes are watery but piercing when she takes my hand in her good one, the left hand that she can still grip mine with.
“No, it wasn’t a lie. A love that can last a lifetime is never going to be as simple as happily ever after without any bumps in the road.
We went through a hard time. We were under enormous pressure in a foreign land, away from everyone and everything we knew.
And for a while, we turned against each other instead of to each other, as we should have. ”
I thread our fingers together and wait, as she slowly tells me why she stayed.
“You said something last night: How could God do this to you and Hunter? And I am here to tell you that God’s ways are not our ways.
I don’t believe He makes bad things happen, but He doesn’t stop them from happening either.
What He does do is turn the pain in our lives into blessings . . . if we let Him.”
“Now you sound like my mom.”
“Where do you think she learned such wisdom?” Farmor grins, the left side of her mouth higher than the right, a hint of her former fire shining through the weakness of her still--healing body.
But then it fades into a frown. “That baby you read about, your dad’s younger brother .
. . Something went wrong about a month before he was supposed to come.
I nearly died during the birth, and in their effort to save me, my baby boy didn’t make it. ”
Her words are a knife to the gut. I grip her hand tighter, the only way I know how to convey the depth of my sorrow for her.
“It was . . . grief like I’d never known.
But that tragedy was the turning point in my marriage.
We had two choices: be driven apart forever by our pain or finally choose to fully turn to each other to help us heal.
It took time and a lot of work, patience, and forgiveness for both of us.
I wasn’t without blame, as much as I wanted to believe our struggles were all your grandpa’s fault.
“And I will forever be grateful that when our love reached that potential breaking point, we chose to fight for what we had. It was no longer the consuming fire of desire that had driven us to marry after only a month. What we found instead was the steady warmth of the Arizona sun, always there. Sometimes hotter, sometimes cooler but reliable. Different, yes. But I found out different could be better . . . with the right perspective. We chose each other that day and every day after, and that’s what made our lives so happy from that time on. ”
Her eyes are unwavering on mine, clear and insistent.
“What you saw between us was very real, Livvy. But it was something we fought for. Something refined in the fire of suffering. When I tell you not to give up on your chance for happiness and love, I’ve never meant for you to think I was talking about a fairy tale.
I have always meant real love, the kind that can be strong enough to bend but not break when the storms of life hit.
The kind of love that is worth fighting for.
” She reaches up with her partially paralyzed right hand to let her frozen fingers brush against my cheek.
“That is the happiness I want for you. That you deserve.”
The truth is far more overwhelming than I ever could have expected.
And of course, my mind goes to Hunter. To my desperate wish that we could be together .
. . but knowing deep in my heart that it’s too much to ask of him.
Choosing to endure pain together is one thing; asking him to endure it alone once I’m gone is another.
“I’m sorry, Farmor,” I say at last. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. ”
“My sweet girl, that’s the point. It was one of the most painful trials of my entire life, but it also saved my marriage.
I had to learn a long time ago to be grateful for the good that came from our loss.
Your grandpa and I created a love and friendship so powerful nothing else ever came between us again.
And I’ve spent the rest of my life with a guardian angel watching over me and my family. You don’t need to be sorry for me.”
Before I can say anything else, a nurse comes in and announces it’s time for physical therapy, and she’s there to transport Farmor to her appointment.
I have no choice but to stand and let them take her away.
But before she’s wheeled out the door, Farmor twists in her wheelchair and says, “You have nothing to be sorry for either, Livvy. Not even being the recipient of Hunter’s sister’s life-saving donation.
The paths of our lives take us where we’re supposed to be. You’ll see it’s true . . . in time.”
I’m left standing in her empty room, my arms hanging heavily at my sides, my mind a tumble of confusion, pain—
And longing.