What good was being a man forged in the fires, a man whose blood cried out for battle if he could not fight for the one thing that mattered.
No matter the cost.
She was wretched. She had cried herself hoarse, and then gone to sleep in their bed.
Well, it had been their bed. What it would be next would be determined by what she did.
And she was waiting. Waiting for him to return. Waiting to see what her life would look like. She would have her child. So there was that. She had to cling to that.
“I am prepared to do this,” she said.
She stood up, and when she turned around, he was standing there. In the doorway, his eyes ice blue. And something in her shifted. She felt as if they were standing in a boardroom, ready and able to have the biggest negotiation of their life.
“I cannot stay if you don’t love me.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
“I’m no longer willing to sacrifice myself to the needs of others. I will not do it. I want to be loved. And yes, I want all of this for my child, but I want it for myself as well. I need it for myself. I need to have this.”
“I am willing,” he said.
And he said it as if it was a forfeited business. And her whole heart turned to stone.
“You see, I have focused on winning to make what I did worthwhile. Leaving my grandparents for as long as I did. I could’ve come back, much earlier than I did. Much, much earlier. But I didn’t, out of fear. I stayed away, and I kept working hard, and when I returned, they had... They had died. I waited too long. And so his success became everything. I never wanted to experience loss again. Ever. I could not face it. But what is the point of living if we are not trying, in all of our messy glory, to love? What is the purpose of it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Neither do I. Not anymore. Not now. For I have ascended to the heights professionally, I could’ve had my revenge on you, but none of it fixed who I am, what I was. Nothing has come close to fixing anything. But when I was with you in the hot springs, beneath the northern lights, I could nearly believe it. In miracles. In love. In a little house out in the country.”
“I love you,” she said.
And she ran forward, closing the distance between them, and kissing him on the mouth.
“I need to show you something,” he whispered against her lips.
“I’ll follow you anywhere.” She smiled. “Or you know, you could kidnap me.”
“Kidnap?”
“A little pillaging, a little ravishing...”
“Later, my love, later.”
Shortly after that, Olive found herself on a plane, bound for Iceland.
The cabin Gunnar brought her to was his home, she knew it, without him having to tell her.
“Oh, Gunnar...”
She walked through the little place, looking at the hand carved furniture. At the small, remaining signs of the lives that had once been here.
And then she saw something, just very small, beneath one of the little beds.
She bent down and discovered a small, wooden soldier.
“Gunnar.”
She turned and he was standing in the doorway.