Ari struggles to lift her arm and runs her fingers through Olive’s hair. “Do you know how happy I am that I met you?” Ari says to her.
“Yeah, I’m pretty cool,” Olive jokes.
“I have something for you,” Ari says, reaching over to take a small gift off of her nightstand.
“What is it?” Olive asks, her eyes wide and full of excitement.
Ari offers a weak smile and watches as Olive tears open the gift. She opens the box and pulls out an old-fashioned, large, fat gold key. I’m wondering what it’s for but I’m sure Ari has a reason. “This is really cool,” Olive says, admiring both sides of it. “Where does it go?”
“Some day, your dad is going to show you, but right now it’s a secret. So for now, I need you to hang on to the key and keep it safe because you are the only one who is allowed to hold it.”
“Is it magic?” she asks, totally enamored by Ari’s explanation.
“Definitely,” Ari says through a struggling laugh. “It brings people together and keeps them surrounded by love for all eternity.”
Olive throws her arms around Ari’s neck and kisses her cheek.
I’m looking at Ari with question, wondering if she’ll let me in on the magical explanation of the key since I know Olive will be asking me what it unlocks until the dayIdie.
“You’ll see,” Ari mouths to me.
Thirty minutes filled with corny “you’re dying” jokes, cake, and sympathetic looks come and go, and now Charlotte is suggesting that we let Ari rest. She collects the girls, and AJ and Tori follow them out the door after a slew of goodbyes, leaving me standing here staring at Ari.
With just the two of us in the room, I can’t help but allow the pain to re-enter my chest. I can sit here and try to believe she’s not dying and I’m not actually looking at a person deteriorating by the second, but I can’t lie to myself.
Ari’s slim smile reappears across her dry lips. “This is it, isn’t it?” I ask.
“You never know,” she sighs. “A miracle might happen.” I can only assume that she’s trying to convince herself, but just as I can’t lie to myself, I can assume it’s the same for her.
Tears fill her foggy eyes and she looks through me as if I were a window. The unbreakable demeanor everyone thinks she has is shattered into millions of pieces right now and this time, there’s no way to put them back together. It’s the first time I’ve seen her face shadowed by fear, accompanying the sorrow and sadness. “I guess I can say I’m dying of a broken heart now.”
Her statement is not funny; it’s hurtful. I don’t know if her words have a double entendre but there is guilt brewing within me like I should have done something different—I’m just not sure what that would have been.
“I thought Ellie’s heart would survive a longer measure of time when I met you,” I tell her.
“Our hearts determine our paths, the distances we’ll go, the direction, and the length of our stay,” she says.
She reaches for me and I take the couple of steps over to her bedside, giving her my hand. She places it on her chest, over her heart. I feel the rhythm below my palm and the thick scar lining her nearly bare chest. The beat is slower than I remember from the last time I placed my hand on her chest, which was months ago. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“We both know this is Ellie’s heart, and we both know this is why you and I are connected, but what you have failed to realize is that sometimes our hearts walk around on the outside of our bodies.”
I feel my forehead crinkle and strain as I let my head fall slightly to the side, waiting for clarification. “What do you mean?”
“Olive is Ellie’s true heart,” she explains. “Olive is a part of Ellie. She will go on to have kids of her own, who will have kids of their own, and Ellie’s heart will go on for infinity. Olive is Ellie’s heart. She has a heart made of time that will forever live on.”
Her words are like hands reaching into my chest to wring the pain out of my heart. All of these years I have been chasing Ellie’s last remaining organ when all along, a part of her was left with me for my forever. “I get it,” I tell her.
“Hunter,” she says, closing her eyes for a long blink. “I love you for being a part of my life and I love you for sticking by my side when I told you not to.”
“I love—“
“Don’t,” she says. “I don’t need to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. You didn’t have the chance to fall in love with me. I didn’t give you a chance and I’m glad I didn’t because I’m not the one for you.”
“Then how can you say you love me?” I ask.
“When time is borrowed, you live fast, you love hard, and you put everything on the line knowing that tomorrow you might wake up with nothing— or you might not wake up at all.”
“I see,” I say, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “Ari. Thank you for caring for her heart, protecting it, and for treating it like it was a gift. Your letters kept me going through those years—like really kept me going, knowing how lucky Ellie’s heart was.”
