Prologue
Stella Parker had never burned a book in her life. Had never once thrown pages of text—much less handwritten love letters and poetry—into a fire. Yet there she was, purposefully setting fire to one of the most precious things in her life: words.
Wisps of smoke and ashes floated from the ancient flue on a blistering Saturday early evening breeze. The haze rounded corners, spiraled up tree trunks along the Main Street sidewalk, and lingered in pockets of shadow. The townsfolk in Blue Sky Valley, North Carolina, stumbled into the ashy air unexpectedly and were overcome with longing. Many were compelled to hurry home and hug someone or to buy a journal and write down their thoughts. Some wandered out into the mature pine forest until the soothing sounds of birds and the soft green blanket of grass beneath their feet helped lessen the ache. None were aware ofwhythey felt the unusual emotions or that their peace came at the cost of Stella’s heartache.
Deep inside the town’s library, where dust mites danced inthe slanted light and the walls hummed with the energy of a million stories, the words Stella sacrificed did not simply vanish—they would always belong to this town, to its magic, to the unseen force that wove Blue Sky Valley together. As the ashes faded into the dusk, the library listened, waiting, knowing that every story—especially the ones set free—would find its way home.
Chapter 1
Brilliant orange flames separated inside the decades-old furnace as Stella stared, mesmerized. The fire burned hot at its core, blackening the edges of the paper and ravenously consuming everything within its steel walls. Stella, frustrated and tired of her own heartache, waited for the pressure to release from her solar plexus—that spot just below her rib cage that ached every time something waswrong. But so far, the discomfort had only intensified.
Even as she watched her journal burn, along with every word she’d written over the past few months, her fingers itched to record this event, to detail the way the ink-stained pages writhed in the flames, the way flecks of paper lifted on pops of air and danced before shriveling.
Guilt planted a seed deep in her belly and started to grow something thorny and tangled. Her stomach clenched when three golden, shimmering words rose from the flames and slid out the open mouth of the furnace. They glittered against the black metal like stars in a midnight sky.Surrender. Anew. Forgiveness.
Was the journal forgiving her? Or were the words telling her she needed to extend forgiveness? But to whom? Nothim. No way did he deserve her forgiveness. The lines between Stella’s brows deepened. Didn’t surrender meangiving up? What was left to give up? As if life hadn’t asked her to give up too much already. The glowing words dissipated into the darkness of the basement.
There would always be another journal to fill. Because there would never be enough paper, enoughspace, to release all the words clawing, springing, secreting their way out of her. There would never be an end to smears of ink on her fingers or the phrases that trailed up the walls. She would forever see words slinking across floors and slipping into her room at night like best friends intent on keeping her company.
For as long as she could remember, Stella had seen words the same way someone might spot a bird or watch a dragonfly zipping through cattails. She saw words everywhere. Ever since she’d received her first pack of crayons, she’d been crowding white spaces with all the words pressing in on her heart. Stella captured words and poems and cataloged them in journals. She drew word maps in colored ink in her diaries and added special captions to photographs when words floated over images in a family album. She jotted down people’s names and the words that followed them like beloved pets. She made notes about places around town and all the words living there, even the haunted ones she sometimes saw ghosting around. Words likeeerie,bewitched, andphantasmic.
When Stella was a child, her mother had encouraged her to share the words, insisting her talent was a fantastical gift that would guide Stella toward her dreams. Desiring the special attention and wanting to please her mother, Stella kept, wrote, and cherished the words. But after her mother was gone, the idea that the words could lead Stella to her dreams seemed like a terrible joke. In what dreamsdid mothers leave? She tried to ignore the words. She wanted to refuse their neediness to be caught and loved.
But Stella quickly realized she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t neglect the words. She couldn’t stop their appearance or keep them housed inside her. Some days the words felt like a swarm of agitated bees living in her body, and to release their fury, she had to write. She worried she might implode if she didn’t free them, if she didn’t give them new life on the page. What if she kept them trapped inside and then suffocated beneath their creative weight?
Some days the words were delicate and soft like goose feathers floating through her. On those days she felt light and joyful, and her pen flowed across the pages like water easing down a river. She learned to pay just enough attention to the words to catalog them with the hope that they would eventually stop showing up when she grew up.
That had yet to happen, and today irritation stung her. Why hadn’t setting fire to her past—literally—soothed her? Why couldn’t she burn the words, theemotions, as easily as the flames destroyed the paper?
Maybe she was being dramatic. That was what her older brother, Percy, would say in his easy teasing way, but there was probably a whole lot of truth laced through his jokes. Where Stella was emotional, Percy was even-keeled. Where she was paralyzed some days by the frantic beating of her own heart, Percy appeared perpetually calm and peaceful.
The fire crackled, and Wade Haynes’s smiling face lurked in her mind. Her jaw clenched. The last time she’d seen him was when he walked out of her apartment six months ago, leaving behind a stifling feeling of failure, a fast-food receipt stained with the greasy fingerprints of his children, and two simple, charred-black words:passing time. She’d been all-in with that relationship, believing they were both in love. But his walking away and never contactingher again proved she couldn’t have been more wrong. The truth that he’d simply beenpassing timewith her filled her with shame and fury.
The rejection still pricked like she’d eaten stinging nettles. Stella had filled a journal full of letters and poems she would never send,couldn’tsend to Wade. Now, months later, on the anniversary of their first date, two cups of overly sweet coffee churned in her belly. She knelt in front of the wood-burning furnace in the library’s basement and tested Ray Bradbury’s temperature hypothesis. Did paper catch fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit? How could she even prove the author’s statement? The antique thermometer gauge didn’t register above 250 degrees. The more important hypothesis was: Would setting fire to words inspired by Wade set her free?
The answer was no.
She wanted to burn Wade’s memory from her heart, turn it all to ashes she could sweep up and dump into the garbage. But instead, a memory of Wade and her laughing surfaced. Followed by the memory of the afternoon she met him at the state park and he’d taken her in his arms and spun her around. Then the day he’d tried to waltz with her in the art gallery and they’d almost knocked over a porcelain vase. Next, the time they went to the movies, sat in the back row like teenagers, and he couldn’t stop kissing her. Then the day he’d texted her ten different haikus about his love for her and how they’d be connected forever.
“Enough!” she spat and squeezed her eyes closed as if that would stop the barrage. Her shoulders slumped. She and Wade had been happy.Reallyhappy—until they weren’t.
Stella glanced at the furnace. Words and books were some of the few things that understood her. How many times had she wished to disappear into a novel? Would the thousands of books in the library above her now chantmurderer? Would she walk thegauntlet of their disapproval, their condemnation? Warm tears of frustration left wet tracks on her cheeks. Tears heavy with sorrow splattered on the floor, and the ground trembled beneath her feet, sending out waves of disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as the thin journal cover shriveled in the furnace.
A sheet of paper, charred and brittle around the edges, lifted on a wave of heat and floated out of the furnace opening. Stella pinched it between two fingers. Burns like bullet holes marred some of the words, but she had memorized the poem.
The sky was endless,
the silence deep.
The sun dropped into the trees
and I never once tried to stop it,
only watched and shivered
in the wind,
