Read Chapter 26: The Aftermath of Exposure

The private investigator left the same way the guests did—through the front door, coat collar turned up against the wind, not looking back. Maren stood at the parlor window and watched his car crawl down the long drive, taillights bleeding through the snow. Behind her, the house was unnaturally quiet. Footsteps on the stairs, a suitcase wheel catching on the landing. The writers were packing.

By noon, they were gone.

The last one, a woman from Ohio who'd been working on a memoir about her mother, paused at the door and squeezed Maren's hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "The drama wasn't your fault. But I came here to write, not to—" She gestured vaguely at the empty parlor, the abandoned teacups, the air still thick with accusation.

Maren nodded and didn't argue. She took the woman's payment for the two nights she hadn't stayed, because she couldn't afford not to, and watched her go.

The inn fell silent around her. The kind of silence that had a weight to it. Maren walked through the downstairs rooms, collecting stray napkins and abandoned notebooks, stacking chairs that didn't need stacking. Busy work. The radiator hissed in the hallway like it was keeping her company.

Julian's door stayed shut.

She gave him the first day. She told herself he needed space, needed to process what the investigator had revealed—that his father had hired someone to find him, that the old man had been out there in the woods all along, close enough to touch, close enough to have walked up the drive on Christmas morning if he'd wanted to. Instead, Walter had left a trail of cryptic clues and then vanished again.

Day two, she knocked.

"Julian?" She pressed her palm flat against the wood. "I made soup. It's the good kind, with the barley. You should eat something."

No answer. She could hear him in there—the creak of the floorboards, the occasional rustle of pages. Maybe he was reading the journal again, staring at the burned edges like they might reveal what was missing.

She tried the door. Locked.

"Okay," she said softly. "It's on the stove when you want it."

She left it there. He didn't come down.

By day three, the soup had congealed. Maren threw it out and made bread instead, kneading the dough with more force than necessary, letting the repetitive motion smooth out the edges of her worry. He'd come around. He had to. They had a plan—she'd proposed it in the aftermath of reading the journal, reaching out to her mother to find Nora's original letters, unraveling whatever secret Walter had been chasing. But Julian had gone quiet instead of agreeing, had retreated up those stairs and taken the plan with him.

She tried once more that evening. Parked herself outside his door, back against the wall, and talked to the wood paneling.

"I know it's a lot," she said. "Finding out your father was here. That he hired someone to watch you. That he'd been planning something for Christmas." She paused. "My grandmother used to say that the hardest truths are the ones we almost knew already. That we spend our whole lives getting ready to hear them."

Silence. Then, his voice, rough from disuse: "I almost knew."

She waited.

"I almost knew he was alive," he said through the door. "Every Christmas, I'd catch myself looking at the door. Waiting. Like a dog." A bitter laugh. "And I was right to wait. He was here. He was—" The sentence broke apart. She heard him move, the floorboards complaining.

"Julian—"

"Just leave it, Maren." His voice had gone flat. "You don't have to fix this. You don't have to fix me."

The words landed like a slap. She opened her mouth to argue, to tell him that she wasn't trying to fix him, that she just wanted to help, that they could figure it out together. But he'd already gone quiet again, and she knew that door would stay locked as long as he wanted it to.

She slid down to the floor and sat there for a long moment, her forehead against her knees.

Fine. He wanted to push her away. She'd give him space. She had other problems.

The letter from the bank had arrived on day one, slipped under the door with the rest of the mail like it was nothing. Maren had read it standing in the mudroom, her coat still on, and felt her stomach drop through the floor.

By December thirty-first, the inn owed the bank a payment of eighteen thousand dollars. In full. Or they would begin foreclosure proceedings.

Eighteen thousand.

She did the math over and over, as if the numbers might rearrange themselves if she looked at them from a different angle. The revenue from the writers' retreat had covered the operating costs, the heat, the supplies. But it hadn't come close to the debt her grandmother had accrued in her final years—the new roof, the furnace replacement, the line of credit she'd drawn against the property to keep the lights on.

Maren thought about calling her mother. The woman hadn't spoken to her in years, hadn't come to Grandma Rose's funeral, hadn't acknowledged the inn's existence beyond a bitter remark about "Rose's little hobby." And now Maren needed her help, not just for the letters in Nora's archive but for money—or at least for a connection to someone who had it.

She picked up the phone twice and put it down both times.

There had to be another way.

She started with the town.

"Christmas Eve," she said, standing on a chair in the back room of the General Store, which doubled as the unofficial community meeting space. A dozen faces looked up at her—the Lamberts from the farm, old Mrs. Pemberton with her knitting, the young couple who ran the coffee shop on Main. "I'm planning something big. A feast at the inn, open to everyone. Mulled wine, a full turkey dinner, the works. Decorations everywhere."

"Sounds lovely," Mrs. Pemberton said. "But why are you telling us, dear?"

Maren took a breath. "Because I need your help. The inn's in trouble. If I can't make a payment by the end of the month, I lose it. And I've been thinking—this place has been part of this town for sixty years. Rose opened her doors to everyone. For weddings, for funerals, for the harvest dinners." She looked around the room. "I'm asking you to open your wallets."

A murmur rippled through the crowd. She'd expected resistance—this was a proud town, not a rich one, and everyone was feeling the pinch of winter. But instead of turning away, they started taking about how they could help in practical ways. The Lamberts would donate two turkeys from their farm. Old Mrs. Pemberton knew a baker who could do pies at cost. The coffee shop couple offered to spread the word and sell tickets.

"We'll do a raffle," someone said. "I've got a vintage snowmobile in the barn I've been meaning to part with."

Maren blinked back the sting in her eyes. "That's—that's more than I could have asked for."

"It's not charity," Mrs. Pemberton said firmly. "It's what neighbors do. Your grandmother would've done the same for any of us."

The meeting broke up with a plan taking shape—a community fundraiser, a Christmas Eve celebration to end them all, flyers and word-of-mouth and a jar on the counter at the General Store. Maren walked home through the falling snow with something fragile and warm in her chest. Not hope, exactly. But close.

The inn was dark when she got back. She moved through the hallway, hanging her coat, checking the thermostat, and then stopped at the foot of the stairs.

Upstairs, a light bled out from under Julian's door.

She climbed slowly, each step deliberate, and when she reached the landing she didn't knock. She just stood there, letting him know she was present.

"Julian." Her voice was quiet. "I don't know what you're going through. I can't pretend to understand it. But I'm not trying to fix you." A pause. "I'm just trying to make sure you're not alone while you figure it out."

A long silence. Then, so soft she almost missed it: "I know."

It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't open arms. But it was something—a crack in the door, a thread pulled taut between them.

Maren nodded to herself and went back downstairs. She had a feast to plan. She had flyers to print and calls to make and eighteen thousand reasons to keep moving.

And somewhere out in the snow, maybe still alive, maybe not, Walter Cole had promised to come home on Christmas.

She intended to make sure he had a reason to keep that promise.