“I’m just worried, I guess,” I finished quietly. “This stuff is confusing.”

Mom and Mormor shared a look.

Mormor turned on her heel to pull plates from the cabinet. “Are you hungry?”

I glanced over at the stairs and considered. My room was clean-ish, and there was time yet to tidy up before Leaf came over. I didn’t really want to do a feelings fest, but Mormor was a great cook and I was willing to take comfort in the false promises of Swedish meatballs. I claimed a stool at the kitchen island. Mom sat next to me. A minute later, we were merrily stabbing gravy-covered meatballs with toothpicks and rifling them into our mouths.

Mormor turned on the electric kettle and sat across from us, her gray hair pulled back, a smudge of blue paint on her upper cheek. “You do not love this boy, right?”

“No,” I said. “I met him the night of the party.”

She nodded. “That makes it easier. Sometimes people meet and they immediately fall in love and manage to keep the flame burning forever, but that is rarer than the storybooks will have you believe, Serendipity. Relationships take work.” She doctored her teacup with honey and set her bag, her fingers idling while she talked. “I told you I had an abortion in Sweden when I was younger. I did not, perhaps, tell you about the baby’s father. I loved him dearly. More than I’ve loved anyone else in my life. You will notice he is not here with me. He’s in Stockholm with his wife, whom he met years after he and I fell apart. They had six children together. We exchange letters sometimes. And sometimes, it still hurts.”

Mormor assembled two more teacups for me and Mom. I knew she was in serious mode because she never mentioned our sugar-and-milk pollution of perfectly good Earl Grey. “But, back then, we were inseparable. Until the pregnancy. Hardship can destroy new love. It can whittle it down, until there is nothing left. The good is harder to see when you are expecting a baby and your parents will not support you. When there is no money or place to go. When work is not so accessible because people dismiss you because of your age. That shiny love dims in the face of so much adversity.

“It is not impossible, mind you,” she said, “but you need to be realistic, too. If you want to be serious with this boy, or any boy, including your Leaf, it is something you work toward. Slowly. Together. I think when you are young, it is easy to fool yourself that ignoring problems is okay because everything will mystically work itself out. It doesn’t. Problems come back to bite you later on.”