Winter Garden

by Kristin Hannah

“What will we be without him?” Meredith whispered, clinging to her. “Less,” was all Nina could think of to say.

“He is my home,” her mother said, shaking her head. “How will I live without him?”

There is a feeling in your heart when you meet the boy you’ll love. It’s like . . . drowning and then coming up for air.”

She hadn’t been where it mattered, making memories with her husband and children. Maybe she’d thought time was more elastic, or love more forgiving.

“I would not love him again, not a poet who cared more for his precious words than his family’s safety. Not if I had known how it would feel to live with a broken heart.”

“I think maybe love can just . . . dissolve.” “No, it does not,” her mother said. “So how do—” “You hang on,” her mother said. “Until your hands are bleeding, and still you do not let go.”

“Promise you’ll come back to me,” she says. “I promise,” he says easily. But Vera knows: there are some promises that are pointless to ask for and useless to receive.

“I love you, Mama,” I say. It is not enough, those three little words that suddenly mean good-bye, and I am not ready for good-bye.

She didn’t want to go back and be young again, either, not with all the uncertainties and angst. She just wanted to feel young again. And she wanted to change. “I’ll be naked more. I promise.”

When I first came to the United States, I could not believe how free everyone was, how quick to say what was on their minds.

“He is Leo.” “My son was Yuri.” I nod in understanding. Sometimes a name is all you have left.

that all I will ever have of my son now is a date on the calendar and the stuffed rabbit that is in my suitcase.

I hear the bomb falling too late. Did I think it was my heart, that whistling sound, or my breathing? Everything explodes at once: the train, the tree beside me, a truck off to the side of the road. I see Sasha and Anya for a split second and then they are in the air, flying sideways with fire behind them. . . .

I take the tiny scrap of paper with her name on it and hold it in my hand. How long do I sit there in the snow, stroking my baby’s coat, remembering her smile? Forever.

I walk up to the Germans and stand in front of their guns. “Shoot me,” I say, and I close my eyes.

And then she was holding something out to Mom: a small jeweled butterfly.

think, Good-bye, my girls. I love you. I have always loved you. And I go.