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Dr. Olsen smiled, as if she already knew, and said, “I’ll need to get a pregnancy test first.”

The doctor slid a sheet across the desk tucked in a pamphlet. The pamphlet had an artist’s sketch of curved lines in blue, the outline of a pregnant woman. Inside were lists of clinics. Linnea accepted them into her numb hands.

She put her coat on and stepped outside into the sunlight. The snowstorm clouds were gone, revealing a completely different world now, one that was not the same as the one she’d belonged to an hour ago.

Her shift at Dairy Queen was soon. She thought about calling in sick. But that seemed like a very non-adult thing to do. What now? Burrow under her Strawberry Shortcake bedspread?

Linnea folded the paper and pamphlet into her purse. And walked. Slowly. It wasn’t an hour’s walk to Dairy Queen, so she made a loop of all the churches. First, the three Lutherans, then a few yards to St. Mary’s Catholic. She and her parents hadn’t been regulars at any church. Sometimes, in junior high, Sunny invited her and Ulla to youth group events that consisted of “ice breaker games,” making Linnea nearly erupt into nervous hives. Yet Ulla’s hand was always inside hers, her solid ground, her calm breath, the one who’d whisper in her ear what to say and what to do. It wasn’t Everett she thought of when Dr. Olsen told her she was pregnant.

She stopped outside St. Mary’s, begging that God would somehow be kind enough to exit through the doors and give her advice. But then again, he might also hate her as much as she hated herself right now.

Linnea was tired, and sometimes a surge of emotion would overtake her. Otherwise, time passed, and she felt no different, which meant she didn’t have to make a choice. Not yet. Safe in her comfort zone of indecision and inaction, Everett made up her mind. What he said, she agreed with, where he went, she gladly followed, what he liked, she liked. When he wanted sex—of any kind—she gave it to him. Linnea wondered if she’d ever be able to exist on her own, with her own beliefs, choices, and opinions. Isn’t that how she’d learned to survive? Yet here she was, supposedly the voice on behalf of a future human, when she’d never once been able to speak on behalf of herself. Was it horrible to wish for a miscarriage, allowing her to continue her life of indecisiveness?

It was a week before graduation, during a party at Fish Lake Resort, when Everett gave her an orgasm for the first time, something she thought could only be achieved with Ulla. She basked in the pleasant distraction as her climax wore off, so much so that when Everett pinched her waist and said, “Working on the fries again?” she walked past the insult and straight to, “I’m pregnant.”

He laughed and flopped back onto the pillow. She didn’t move, listening for his stillness to break. He sat up, not touching her. She knew he was waiting for the just kidding. Linnea hugged herself and whispered, “So . . . ”

Everett stood from the bed and faced her. She circled her eyes briefly to his narrowed ones and focused instead on his stiff jaw. “What the fuck, Lin.” The calm way he delivered those four words made Linnea wish he’d at least yelled. Yelling, insults, she could handle those. But not this. She slid off the bed to look for her clothes, but such a simple task seemed impossible.

“Are you going to get an abortion?”

Linnea found her shirt and held it over her breasts. It was a yes or a no. One easy syllable. In her immobilized state, she could utter neither, and remained mute.

Everett pulled on his boxers. While her mind remained frozen, it seemed his was a machine, making calculations. That much she could surmise from his tensed muscles and darting eyes. “Christ,” he finally muttered and yanked on his jeans. “Then we’ll have to get married.”

Her stupefied laugh escaped, and she looked at the alarm clock. The red digits said 12:24 a.m.

Like a hungry dog grateful for the scraps thrown under the table, Linnea accepted the proposal.

In three months’ time, the fall of Everett’s freshman year at the University of Minnesota, when the two of them would stand in front of a court commissioner with a tipsy Mrs. Barnes as the only witness, Linnea’s parents having disowned her, when the gossip about Everett and Linnea’s shotgun wedding lost its steam, the vows would emerge from her lips.

Linnea recited them not to Everett but to the living being inside her: From this day forward, for better or worse, to have and to hold, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God's holy ordinance; and therefore I pledge myself to you.

Chapter Fifty-Six

January 1987

Ronja

Ten years wasn’t enough. She’d been so foolish to allow her fear of him to settle into dormancy, to ignore that whisper when she spotted a Mercury Lynx lingering outside Curlers’ junkyard a handful of times the past months.

It was January twenty-seventh, Ulla’s birthday, eleven years to the day she’d last seen Peter, after a Dairy Queen cake and eighteen lonely candles, that Ulla answered the door.

They stared at Peter Johansson. He wore his yellow hair shorter than Ronja remembered. The laugh lines around the corners of his mouth were deeper, hardened. His eyes, with their icy blue color that stole her breath, softened at Ulla in awe. He had a birthday present for her, placing it gently into her hands.

“How did you find us?” Ronja hissed, prodding an immobile Ulla aside.

Peter shifted his gaze between the two women, mouth parted, as if he, too, were dumbfounded at arriving on their doorstep. Ronja didn’t wait for an answer, told Ulla not to say anything, not to talk to him, and went to the phone. She’d been told to call the federal marshals if Peter, or any of the men in Gabby’s regime located her. Peter followed her, taking off his gloves. She latched onto the receiver, and his hand enveloped hers, his skin cold, but his breath warm. He wasn’t gruff, threatening, or violent, because he didn’t need to be. They both knew she wasn’t going to call. The dial tone filled the silence. “I will always find you, min lilla fågel.”

The tinny operator’s recording cut through: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again . . . ” Peter guided Ronja’s hand to click the receiver into place. Her thoughts traveled backward in time, and it was Peter who spoke them aloud. “That was quite the long con you pulled off. I would’ve been so proud if I hadn’t been the target.”

“Are you alone?” Ronja asked, working to control the pace of her breathing. “No one else knows where we are?”

“Of course, I’m alone. After what those bastards did to you?”

“I was told they’re on parole now.”

“What did they tell you about me?” he asked.