“What?” I protested, feeling like all the blood was leaving my body at once. “But you said until I was eighteen I could come to Berrydale—”
“You’re never coming back here,” she said.
“No,” I said, the word coming out more like a feeble whimper.
“The decision is made. And it should have been a long time ago,” she said. She shook her head, giving me a bitter glance. “What would your father think of all this?”
My chest was tightening more now, like it was slowly and relentlessly being crushed under a heavy weight. One that would never go away.
All I could think about was how wrong Henry had been.
None of this had been his fault. It was all me. Every part of it, from coming outside past curfew to kissing him on the ground.
It was my fault that I wouldn’t get to spend time with Henry anymore.
The castle loomed in the distance like a pitchfork jutting out of the mountain, gusts of wind blowing sheets of snow all around it.
I hadn’t been cold before, when I’d been so close to Henry.
But now, as I stared at the castle that would now become my permanent home, I finally started to shiver.
1
Henry
Eleven Years Later
They say you can never really come home, but they don’t know a damned thing about the village of Berrydale.
When I stepped out of my truck in front of my mom’s old beat-up cottage, eleven years after leaving Berrydale, it felt every bit like coming home.
My stomach churned as I looked at the house from the sidewalk.
Nothing had changed. There was still the broken shutter on my old bedroom window, hanging slightly lopsided, neglected for years. Mom’s old white Buick was still parked out front, paint chipping, the right-side mirror cracked. The place still looked more like a cabin than a regular house, wood stained from years of rain and snow, like the house itself was trying to give up.
Only one thing had changed. The tiny little pine tree that Sebastian and I had planted eleven years ago was fully grown now. It was a beautiful, lone tree, right on the line between his aunt and uncle’s property and my mom’s. On a snowy day like today, it almost looked too perfect, half covered in plush white snow.
“So all this is mine,” I said flatly, watching as a wind blew a pile of snow off of the dilapidated roof.
“Far as the eye can see,” Tracy Hershel said, putting a hand on her hip as she stepped out of the cab behind me.
I was numb as I looked at the front of the house from the sidewalk. The kind of numbness that sits on top of an ocean of feeling, stirring deep inside like a pressure cooker. I felt like I could blow at any minute, but all I could muster was a shrug.
“Well, my eye can see a lot of repairs that need to be made,” I said.
“I’m sure you’ll do a great job. You always were good at fixing stuff,” Tracy said.
Tracy was one of the only lawyers in town, and she took care of every tiny problem the Berrydale townsfolk had. She’d been the one who tracked me down and called me last month to let me know that my mother had passed away, peacefully, in her sleep, and that the house and the Buick had been left to my name.
Mom and I had barely spoken at all since she sent me away to boarding school in the mountains eleven years ago.
I’d been furious. I had never wanted to leave the village. But when the Queen of Frostmonte herself had given my mom a hefty sum of money to send me away to boarding school, far, far away, of course my mom had jumped on the opportunity.
That year, I was gone by the time January hit. And after a few years of boarding school in the mountains, with no communication from Sebastian and almost none from my mother, I vowed never to come back to Berrydale. I had been sent to the mountains, and that was where I stayed.
Off the grid. Away from anyone. Away from the home that had spat me out.
“This has got it all,” Tracy said, handing me a crinkled old yellow envelope. Inside were the keys to the house and car, complete with Mom’s old scratched up plastic Fish ‘n’ Tackle keychain. There was also a thick stack of paperwork that Tracy’d had me sign earlier this morning at her office.
“Keys to a new life,” I said, taking them out of the envelope.
“Or an old one,” Tracy said, giving me a wink. Her skin was wrinkled now, and her hair mostly dishwater grey. When I was seven, Mom had brought me along to Tracy’s office a few times to finalize papers after Dad had died.
Tracy had always been a kind presence back then. Kinder to me than my own mom had been. Once when I was in the general store all alone, on a night when Mom was out working overtime, Tracy had seen me in the candy aisle using my five-dollar allowance to buy a dinner of Snickers and Slim Jims. She’d taken me next door to the tiny Italian pizza shop and sprung for a large pizza and a container of marinara pasta to take home instead.
“Hey, is Rizzo’s Pizzeria still open?” I asked her now.
“Sure is,” she said, smiling.
“Maybe I’ll go there for dinner,” I said.
“It ain’t much, but it is tasty,” she said.
“I’ve been living off canned beans and homemade bread for years, now,” I said. “I’m sure hot pizza will be amazing.”
“You really were a mountain man up there, weren’t you?” Tracy asked, squinting at me.
“Not as fun as it sounds, I promise,” I said.
She smiled softly. “Never said it sounded like fun. You ready to settle in here in a real house?”
“My house in the middle of nowhere was real,” I protested. “It was just… tiny.”
“One room, you said?”
I nodded. “And an outdoor bathroom.”
“Yikes,” Tracy said. “Well, your old house here should feel like a mansion, then.”
Mansion wasn’t exactly the word I would have used to describe Mom’s old house.
Tracy left, and then I was on my own inside my childhood home. It somehow felt even smaller than my tiny little shack in the mountains had been. I was twenty-six now, but I felt fifteen again immediately as I made my way through the halls. I could remember how my mom screamed at me, how she’d told me one night that her pregnancy with me had been a regretful mistake.
Still, all I felt was numb.
The house was mostly empty. An estate sale had already happened. My childhood room was barren, and had long ago been turned into a dusty storage closet.
The first time I felt something was when I made my way to the den and pushed open the old blue curtains surrounding the big window.
There it was, far in the distance, capped in snow, big and towering above everything else. Frostmonte Castle imposed on the rest of the town from atop the hill miles and miles away. It looked small from down here, but as a kid, it had been easy to see through the half-functional telescope I’d snagged at the thrift store. Sure as hell had no clue where that telescope might be now.
I was looking at the castle, but all I could see was him.
Sebastian was the one person who had made me forget my home life. A person that loved me, as a given, unconditionally. I knew he loved me, even when I wasn’t sure anyone else did.
I could still remember the look in his eyes, the evening we had planted the pine tree. The look that I’d thought was sadness as we finished planting it, when in reality, Sebastian had been longing for me like I’d longed for him.