Read Chapter 27: The Christmas Plan

The call to her mother lasted four minutes and eleven seconds. Maren counted them in her head while her mother talked over her, asking about Arizona weather she wasn't even in, about a cousin's wedding Maren hadn't attended, about anything except why Maren might actually be calling. When Maren finally got a word in and asked about Nora's letters—the originals, the ones stored in some box or trunk or attic—the line went quiet in a way that felt physical.

“Why do you want those?” her mother asked. Not suspicious. Afraid.

“Because I think they might explain what happened to a man,” Maren said. “To Julian's father.”

Another silence. Then: “I burned them. After Mom died. I didn't think anyone would want—they were just old letters, Mare. I didn't know.”

Maren hung up feeling hollow and furious and strangely relieved. She stood in the kitchen doorway, watching frost spiral across the windowpane, and thought about the journal's last line—*I'll tell him everything. Christmas. She has to understand what her mother did.*

Julian's father hadn't needed the letters. He'd planned to come to the inn on Christmas and tell Julian everything himself.

Which meant he'd planned to be alive on Christmas.

Maren moved before the thought finished forming. She grabbed her coat from the hook by the back door and crossed the yard to the barn, where the ladder stood propped against the hayloft where she'd stored the Christmas decorations two years ago—no, three, when Gran was still alive and the inn still had reason to celebrate.

She dragged the first box down, sneezing in the dust, and carried it inside. Then another. And another. By the time she'd hauled all five boxes into the great room, she was sweating through her sweater, and the afternoon light had started its grudging November fade.

The parlor door stayed closed. It had been closed for four days.

Maren set three boxes on the floor outside Julian's room, wiped her hands on her jeans, and knocked.

No answer.

She knocked again. “Julian. I need your help.”

The silence stretched so long she thought he'd gone back to ignoring her—and then the door cracked open. Julian stood behind it, unshaven, wearing a shirt that looked like he'd slept in it. His eyes were red-rimmed and sharp at the same time, like he'd been crying and thinking and crying again.

“What kind of help?”

She didn't mince words. “Your father's journal said he was coming here on Christmas. He wrote that he wanted to tell you everything about Nora, about the secrets she kept. He made that plan a year ago. What if he's still planning to keep it?”

Julian stared at her. Something flickered in his expression—hope, then immediately crushed under what looked like exhaustion. “He abandoned me in the woods, Maren. He faked his own disappearance or let it happen. He's been gone for a year. If he was coming back, he would have come back.”

“Unless he couldn't.” Maren stepped closer. “The journal said he was being watched. Hunted. The last entry is December 18—six days before Christmas. What if something happened to him in those six days? What if he's been waiting for the right moment this whole time, and the right moment is Christmas?”

Julian shook his head slowly, but he didn't close the door.

“I'm doing a Christmas Eve dinner,” Maren said. “The whole town's coming. We're raising money to save the inn. We're going to fill this place with light and noise and life.” She swallowed. “And if your father is out there—if he's alive and he meant to come home—I want him to have somewhere to come home *to*. I want this to be a reason for him to show up.”

Julian's jaw worked. “You don't even believe he's alive. You said the search party—the hypothermia, the terrain. You said most people don't survive a night out there.”

“I said the sheriff told me the odds. But your father survived in those woods for months, Julian. He had a cabin. He knew the terrain. And he made a promise to be here on Christmas.” She met his eyes. “I think you should stay close to a promise like that.”

He was quiet for a long, painful moment. Then he said, “So you want me to what? Help you hang tinsel while we wait for a ghost?”

“I want you to be here. At the dinner. With me.” Maren took a breath. “I want us to show him—whoever he is, wherever he is—that the inn is still standing. That Gran's place is still a place people come home to. That Christmas still means something in Vermont.”

Julian ran a hand over his face. When he dropped it, some of the hard edge had gone out of his eyes. “You really think this is going to work.”

“I think it's the only thing I can think of that might.”

He looked past her, at the boxes stacked outside his door, at the dust motes swimming in the pale corridor light. Then he stepped out of his room for the first time in four days.

“Fine,” he said. “But if I'm doing this, I'm doing it right. You can't have a Christmas Eve dinner at an inn called The Winter Guest without an actual winter guest. I'm making the mulled wine.”

Maren blinked. “The what?”

“The mulled wine. It's a tradition.” He brushed past her, heading for the stairs. “My father used to make it every year. He said it was the only thing he learned from his own father—that and how to disappear.”

His voice cracked on the last word, but he kept walking, and Maren followed him down the stairs into the great room, where she'd stacked the boxes and scattered them across the floor like an offering.

What followed was a blur of three days that felt like one long exhale. Julian, once he committed, turned out to be ruthlessly competent. He climbed on ladders to hang garlands along the beams while Maren unboxed Gran's ornaments—the hand-blown glass finches, the crocheted snowflakes, the wooden soldier with the paint chipped off one eye. He built a fire in the hearth and made his mulled wine from scratch, the whole kitchen filling with the scent of star anise and orange peel and something darker, smokier, that made Maren think of winter cabins and old secrets.

Lucy arrived on the second day with a truck full of donated table linens and said, “So the prodigal writer finally emerged from his cave,” and Julian had actually laughed—a rough, rusty sound, like an engine turning over after a long cold.

By December 22, the inn was unrecognizable. The great room glowed with warm light. A spruce tree stood in the corner, decorated with Gran's old ornaments and strings of cranberries that Maren and Julian had threaded together the night before, sitting close enough that their shoulders brushed.

“We still don't know what he was going to tell me,” Julian said quietly, watching the fire. “About my mother. About the secrets.”

“Maybe it doesn't matter,” Maren said. “Maybe what matters is that he was coming to tell you at all. That he wanted to do it here.” She paused. “That means this place mattered to him. You mattered.”

Julian didn't answer, but he didn't move away either.

The phone rang at 9:47 PM on December 23. Maren answered it in the kitchen, expecting Lucy with another donation question or the church volunteer coordinating the fundraiser.

It was a voice she didn't recognize. Male. Low. The line crackled like he was calling from somewhere deep in the woods.

“Is he there?” the voice asked.

Maren's grip tightened on the phone. “Who is this?”

“The writer. Hale. Is he at the inn?”

“Who's asking?”

A pause. The line hissed and popped. “Tell him his father asked about him. And tell him—the cabin. The one off Ridgeline. He needs to go back before the storm.”

The line went dead.

Maren stood there, the phone still pressed to her ear, listening to the silence where a voice had been. Her heart was hammering. She thought about the journal. The threat. The note that said *You should have stayed away*.

She hung up and turned to find Julian standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her.

“Who was that?”

Maren opened her mouth. Closed it. The plan was supposed to be simple—fill the inn with Christmas, make it a beacon, hope his father came home. But the voice on the phone had just told her something else entirely. That Julian's father was asking about him. That he was still out there. And that something was coming.

“Wrong number,” she said.

Julian didn't look like he believed her.