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I give Tuoni a faint smile. “This is it. Let’s hope he doesn’t want to kill you on the spot.”
I open the door and step out into the snow.
My dad comes forward a few feet, squinting at me, before pulling out a flashlight and shining it in our direction.
Then, he stops at the edge of the porch, still clad in heavy slippers, and the flashlight drops from his hands and into the snow.
“No,” he says. “Hellvete, no. It can’t be.”
I smile and walk carefully toward him, not wanting to scare him.
“Hi, Papa,” I say softly. “It’s me.”
“No,” he says with a shake of his head, and with a painful pinch, I realize how much older he’s gotten, even in the last year. Time hasn’t been kind while I’ve been gone. “No, it’s not…you aren’t.”
“I am.”
I pick up the flashlight from the snow and step up onto the porch. We stare at each other for a heavy moment, so many words unsaid, and my father blinks at me, face blanching as if he’s seen a ghost.
Because he’s looking at one.
“Hanna!” he cries out softly, his face crumpling, and suddenly, any anger I’ve had towards him over his lies, over Rasmus and Salainen, all dissolve as he pulls me into a hug.
It’s like I’ve brought my father back from the dead again.
Except I’m the one who died this time.
He holds me tight, sobbing softly, and I hold him just as tightly back.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” he cries into my shoulder. “I thought I lost you. It didn’t feel real, none of it felt real. I wanted to keep believing you were alive, that you would be found, and here you are.”
“Here I am,” I say. “And I have so much to tell you, so much to explain.”
He pulls away, sniffling, his eyes wet as he presses his hands against my cheeks, the way he used to do when I was a kid. My heart sinks, breaks, melts, until I’m just drowning on my feet.
“I have things to explain too,” he whispers, his eyes roaming my face. “Things I should have told you a long time ago. Come on in. I’ll get some tea going.”
He breaks away, and I think he notices Tuoni for the first time.
I expect my father to be scared or angry seeing him, but he just stares at him and gives me a shy smile. “And who is this man who brought you to me?”
I look at Tuoni, brows raised, both of us realizing that my father hasn’t just forgotten he was captured by Tuoni and held at Shadow’s End.
He doesn’t remember being in Tuonela at all.
Chapter 19
Death
The Father-in-law
Iwatch as the old man embraces his daughter, and I can’t ignore the guilt that I feel, the fact that I took him from her and was prepared to keep him for good.
I’m this close to apologizing, to doing something that might resemble groveling, but then Torben Heikkinen looks at me, and he doesn’t see me.
He doesn’t know who I am at all.
Then, I realize that when I sent him away from Shadow’s End with his memory erased, I didn’t just erase the part of Hanna taking his place in the Underworld—I erasedallof Tuonela from his existence, including myself.
