Not from cold—the quilt held enough warmth, and Ben's body against mine radiated heat. My hands shook because I was about to let my grandmother have the last word, and I wasn't sure I could bear whatever she'd chosen to say.
Ben's palm rested on my hip. He hadn't moved since I'd reached for the nightstand drawer. He waited.
"You sure you want to do this now?"
"Yes." I turned the envelope over. Cream-colored stock, my name in her looping script—the same handwriting that had filled margins of Playbills and annotated recipe cards. "I need to do it now. While I still feel..."
While I still felt held. While the armor was off and nothing remained to perform.
Ben pressed a kiss to the knob of my spine. "Take your time."
I slid my thumb beneath the flap.
The paper unfolded with a soft crackle. Two sheets, covered front and back in her careful cursive—the penmanship she'dlearned in a one-room schoolhouse and never abandoned, even when arthritis made her grip the pen like a weapon.
Something slipped free and landed on my bare chest. A photograph, faded to sepia. I set it aside without looking, not ready for more than one revelation at a time.
"Read it out loud?" Ben's request was barely a murmur. "I'd like to hear her voice through yours."
I cleared my throat. The first words came out strangled, so I started again.
My darling boy—
Already, my eyes burned.
If you're reading this, then two things have happened: I've finally stopped being stubborn enough to stay, and you've finally stopped being stubborn enough to come home. I suspect the second was harder than the first.
Ben's chest shook with a silent laugh against my back. I kept reading.
I need to tell you something I've kept to myself for sixty-three years. A secret that isn't mine alone, which is why I've waited until I couldn't do any more damage by sharing it.
I shifted the page to catch the lamplight better.
In the winter of 1962, my brother Daniel got lost in the worst blizzard Yuletide Valley had seen in decades. He was seventeen, and foolish the way seventeen-year-old boys are foolish. He'd gone into the woods after a deer he'd wounded during a hunt. By the time anyone realized he hadn't come home, the snow was three feet deep and climbing.
I didn't know this story. I'd never even known she had a brother.
A search party went out. My father, the sheriff, and half the men in town. They searched for six hours in whiteout weather and found nothing. My mother started wearing black.
Ben's hand tightened on my hip.
Then Ben Blitzen's grandfather said he knew another way to look. I was fifteen and should have stayed home, but I followed him into his workshop. I watched him carve something into a piece of pine. The marks glowed, Alex. Actually glowed, soft as foxfire, and when he held the wood up to the wind, it pulled toward the northeast like a compass needle.
My voice cracked. I paused, swallowed, and continued.
We found Daniel two hours later, hypothermic but alive, in a ravine no one would have thought to search. I was sworn to secrecy, never to speak of what I'd seen. I was told the magic only worked when it was protected, and that meant silence. I kept that promise for sixty-three years.
The letter continued onto the second page.
I've watched the Blitzen family from a careful distance ever since. Watched Ben's father take over the workshop, and then Ben himself. Watched young Ben grow into a man with sawdust in his hair and kindness in his hands. I've seen the marks he carves into his work, even when he doesn't know anyone is looking. The magic is real, my darling. As real as grief, love, and the forces that brought you home.
Ben froze beside me.
I knew you'd come back when you were ready. When the world stopped asking you to be everything for everyone, and you finally had space to remember who you were before Broadway. The valley calls its children home. It takes some of us longer to hear.
A tear dropped onto the paper, bleeding the ink slightly.
There's something else. Thomas Blitzen—Ben's great-great-uncle—didn't simply disappear. He found love with a man named Edward Marsh, a portrait painter who passed through the valley in 1895. They went west together, to San Francisco, where they lived as confirmed bachelors until Thomas died in 1952 and Edward followed three months later.
