As the Canary Contract Expired, I Left New York Carrying My Father’s Ashes Chapter 08
Six months later, I opened a flower café in a small town in Northern Europe.
The shop was tiny, with a blue wooden door at the entrance.
Winter brought heavy snowfall. Every morning, I cleared a narrow path through the snow before placing freshly baked cinnamon rolls into the glass display case.
The beginning wasn’t easy.
The language, the lease agreements, the permits.
Everything I once handed over to Caleb had become something I had to figure out on my own.
The first rental contract I received contained an unfair repair clause. I didn’t understand it and almost signed.
In the end, the elderly woman who owned the bookstore next door helped me contact a local legal aid organization.
She asked why I didn’t call my family.
I thought about it for a moment.
Then I said, “From now on, I’m my own family.”
I scattered my father’s ashes across a sunflower field outside town.
The wind was strong that day. His ashes drifted away beneath the sunlight.
I buried the repaired wooden carving at the edge of the field.
I didn’t take it with me.
Some things couldn’t return to the way they were just because they had been repaired.
But that didn’t mean the cracks had to follow me for the rest of my life.
News from New York occasionally reached me through David.
Caleb had bought the old rental apartment.
He restored every piece of furniture to how it had looked three years ago.
Even the chipped coffee cup on the table had been replaced with an identical one.
He had suffered a severe stomach perforation and lost half his stomach in surgery.
After being discharged, he still drank bottle after bottle of whiskey.
The housekeeper prepared meals for three people every day.
On the dining table sat lemon herb grilled fish, the dish my father used to love.
David once sent me a video.
[Mr. Johnson, I put less sea salt in the fish today.]
In the video, Caleb sat at the old dining table, speaking to an empty chair.
I watched for seven seconds before turning it off.
That night, I dreamed of Caleb from three years ago for the first time.
He had been sitting on a bench at the family hospital, placing his coat over my shoulders.
“Nancy, don’t be scared.”
When I woke up, snow was falling outside the window.
My hand had already opened my contacts and stopped on that familiar number.
But I had deleted Caleb’s number long ago.
I still didn’t call him.
The next day, I signed up for skiing lessons.
I fell more than a dozen times. My knees were covered in bruises.
The instructor asked if I wanted to continue.
I climbed out of the snow, tightened my bindings again, and kept going.
That afternoon, when I returned to the café, a message from Carol arrived through an overseas email.
[Caleb has gone insane.]
She wrote that the wooden carving, the one I had taken away after it was cracked under someone’s foot, had been recreated by Caleb using old photographs.
He had forced her to kneel on the floor of the rental apartment and pick up every piece of sawdust one by one.
Carol wrote angrily in the email:
[He asked me which foot I used when I stepped on it. He also said that if the Foster family didn’t donate the entire three million dollars to the kidney foundation, he would destroy my family.]
I didn’t reply.
Carol taking that money was her choice.
Caleb allowing it, silently approving it, and using that money to humiliate me was his choice.
How they settled their debt with each other had nothing to do with me.
Later, David only told me that the Foster family returned the three million dollars and added additional compensation.
Caleb donated all of it to a community retirement home.
He had finally done one thing right.
But I didn’t need to know.
When spring arrived, I planted the first row of sunflowers outside my café.
They never looked back for the sunlight they had lost the year before.