Halfway to forever by Karen Kingsbury

Hannah pictured the basketball game when Tom first noticed her problem. A boy from two streets over
had beaten her at a game in Tom's driveway. Afterward he turned to her and told her, "You play basketball
like a girl."
209 The comment infuriated her. Years later the same boy was in a class with Tom and Hannah, and she
constantly fired rude comments at him.
"What's your problem," the boy shot back at her one afternoon.
Even now Hannah could feel the way her eyes narrowed at
the boy. "I play basketball like a girl, remember?"
Tom had witnessed the exchange, and later that day he
shoved her playfully in the shoulder. "When you're mad you
never let up, do you?"
Hannah remembered feeling somewhat embarrassed, but her
ability to hold a grudge came up a handful of times in the years
that followed.
Especially the year Tom began dating a girl at Oregon State
University while he was playing baseball there. Some of the biting
comments Hannah made about the girl were legendary even a
decade later. Comments they laughed about, but comments that
were wrong all the same.
At least for someone who professed faith in Christ.
Hannah had studied the Scriptures over the years and read
verses about mercy being better than judgment and how anyone
who judged another would also be judged. She read about forgiving
a brother not once or seven times, but seventy times that.
And still she straggled.
Of course the ultimate battle was really more of a war, one
that had been waged against Brian Wesley, the drunk driver who
killed Tom and Alicia. For an entire year Hannah could barely
think about anything but her determination to see Brian Wesley
punished. In the end it hadn't been a conviction or a Bible verse
or anything Matt said that helped her live again.
Rather, it had been Tom's dying words.
She leaned over her legs and dried her cheeks on her jeans. It
208
H A L F W A Y T O F 0 R E V E R
d been three years since Hannah had looked through Tom's
r1 able, the place where she kept the letter containing his last message to her. There had been no reason to
dig it out during that time. And now... now that there was reason, she wasn't sure she wanted to.
She stared out the opposite window at the still foggy coastline, trying to convince herself she didn't need
the painful reminder of Tom's last bit of wisdom to help her let go of Grace. But the more time that
passed, the more she knew she was wrong. Hadn't she kept the letter for this very purpose?
She moved from the bed into the hall closet and there, on the top shelf, pushed toward the back wall, was
the leather-bound, cracked blue Bible that once had been Tom's daily morning companion. Hannah took it
down and stared at it a moment. Thomas Ryan was engraved in the lower right corner on the cover. She
ran
her fingertips over the name and hurt with a sadness that hadn't
crossed her heart in months.