The suitcase wheels caught on the porch step, and I remember thinking that was the first bad omen of the night, though I didn’t know yet how bad it would get. Lucas was already halfway up the walkway, jogging toward his mother’s front door with the easy, boyish excitement he always had when we pulled into Rosemary’s driveway on Christmas Eve. Seven years of marriage, and he still turned into a twelve-year-old the second he smelled his mother’s cinnamon and clove candles through the mail slot.
I hauled the suitcase up myself. Nobody came back to help. That wasn’t unusual. I was used to being the one who managed the bags, the coolers, the gift bags stacked three deep in the trunk, the diaper bag for Kara’s youngest, the casserole dish wrapped in three towels so it wouldn’t slide on the seven-hour drive. I didn’t mind, not really. I told myself I didn’t mind. That had become something like my personal motto over the years — I don’t mind — and I said it so often that I’d stopped noticing when it was true and when it wasn’t.
Rosemary’s house smelled exactly the way it always did in December: pine, sugar, the particular mustiness of a hundred-year-old farmhouse that had been in the family since her husband’s grandfather built it. Garland wound up the staircase banister. A fire crackled in the front room. Kara’s kids were already tearing through the hallway in their pajamas, shrieking about the Christmas Eve box that Rosemary left on every bed — a small tradition of new pajamas and a book, one for each grandchild, one for each of Rosemary’s children, and, I had always assumed, one for me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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