A bitter little laugh escapes me, too sharp to be amused.
“Weird. This is weird.”
Thunder rumbles faintly in the distance, as if answering.
My first instinct is to crumple the letter and toss it in the trash. Anonymous notes with ominous hints and no name are the stuff of cheap dramas and bad ideas, not real life.
But this isn’t generic.
It’s specific. Too specific.
Aunt Mara.
I haven’t thought about her in years. Not really. She’s more of a ghost than a person in my life.
My mother’s younger sister, the one who moved away after the fire. After that, she was just a name mentioned occasionally in arguments and then not mentioned at all.
She left because of “disagreements.” That’s how my grandmother always phrased it.
Disagreements.
I never asked what that meant. I should have.
My fingers rise, almost by instinct, to the silver bee pendant resting against my collarbone. I rub my thumb over its tiny wings, the familiar motion soothing and unsettling all at once.
“What are you supposed to save me from?” I whisper into the empty hallway.
The pendant, of course, doesn’t answer.
The letter crackles softly between my fingers.
I swallow hard.
My gaze drifts almost automatically toward the living room doorway, where I know, on the bottom shelf of the old bookcase, my grandmother’s journals sit in a neat row.
They’ve been there since the day she died. I packed them in boxes when we cleared out her room, then unpacked them here, in this same house, because I couldn’t bear to put them somewhere I couldn’t see them.
For years, I’ve read them in pieces.
Some pages are purely practical: notes on weather patterns, hive health, crop yields. Others are more personal, little comments about neighbors, scraps of prayer, half-finished sentences about missing my mother.
I’ve never read them looking for secrets.
Now, I can’t think about anything else.
The letter’s still in my hand when I walk into the living room.
The house shifts around me, old wood creaking in the heat. The curtains are half drawn, letting in enough light for everything to look grayish and a little faded. Dust motes drift lazily.
The family portrait hangs where it always does. Mom in her yellow dress. Dad with his quiet smile. Me, small and freckled, holding a honey jar as if it’s the most important thing in the world.
My chest aches.
“I don’t know what you were looking for,” I tell her photo under my breath. “But if you died for it, I think I deserve to know what it was.”
The bookshelf sits beneath the portrait, sturdy and scarred. The bottom shelf holds three thick journals, each bound in plain brown leather, corners worn soft from years of handling.
My grandmother’s life in three volumes.
