Prologue
Snow drifts outside The Letter Bookshop in that overly poetic, winter-wonderland way that makes me feel like the universe is personally directing a Christmas movie about my life. Which, honestly? Valid. I deserve a little cinematic sparkle after everything I’ve survived.
Inside the shop, my children, ages five and two, are currently reenacting what appears to be a high-speed chase scene between the romance aisle and the poetry shelf. Their tiny boots thump across the floor, their giggles ricocheting off the walls in glorious surround sound. Five years ago this place echoed like an abandoned cathedral. Now it sounds like joy… and mild chaos.
I lean against the counter with a dreamy sigh, watching them sprint and shriek. “Look at them,” I whisper to myself. “Living their best feral winter lives.”
If someone walked in right now, they might think, Wow, what a warm, wholesome little family moment. But if you zoomed in on my brain, you’d find a dramatic montage playing: me five winters ago, clutching a cocoa mug like it was life support, wondering if Damien even liked me, wondering if I even liked myself, wondering if curses were a valid excuse to never leave my bed again.
Back then everything felt fragile. Tentative. Like happiness was this delicate snowflake that would melt under too much warmth.
Now?
Now my life is children screaming gleefully over used book displays and a man who keeps rotating the shop’s Christmas playlist because “Elara, we cannot listen to the same song seventeen times in a row.” (He’s wrong, by the way. We absolutely can.)
A thud sounds from the mystery section.
“Everyone alive?” I call out.
“Yes!” my five-year-old, Elise, shouts back. “But the dragon book fell!”
I wince. “Rest in peace, dragon book. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”
Behind me, the stairs creak, and I catch Damien’s reflection in the shop window before he reaches me. He’s holding a box of ornaments, his hair dusted with bits of tinsel like the festive angel he is. He gives me that soft, bewildered smile he always wears when the kids are doing something mildly dangerous but adorable.
“You’re grinning again,” he says.
“I can’t help it.” I gesture dramatically at our children, who are now rolling across the floor like two cinnamon buns possessed by sugar spirits. “Look at them! They’re thriving.”
“They’re definitely something,” he mutters, but he’s smiling too.
I rest my chin on my hand, sighing the way heroines sigh in chapter twenty of a romance novel. “Do you ever think about our first Christmas?” I ask him.
He glances at me, eyes softening. “All the time.”
Because back then, everything felt paper-thin. I tiptoed around the shop as if joy would shatter if I made one wrong move. The curse still clung to me like a second shadow. Damien and I were trying to rebuild with hands that still trembled.
But the funny thing about love?
It grows roots when you’re not looking.
Now, five winters later, I watch my children chase each other under the archway of books Damien and I built with our own chaotic, love-struck hands, and I swear my heart expands like one of those dramatic Victorian heroines who faint on sofas.
“This place used to be so quiet,” I murmur.
“It did,” Damien agrees.
“Honestly,” I whisper conspiratorially, “I think the silence might’ve been haunted.”
Damien snorts. “You can’t say everything is haunted.”
“One: I can. Two: I have evidence. Three: your denial is suspicious.”
He laughs, shaking his head. He always laughs, even when I’m being extra. Especially when I’m being extra.
Outside, snow thickens, each flake drifting past the windows like a tiny blessing. Inside, the children squeal as they run under the glowing garlands and fairy lights. This shop, once a hollow shell, is pulsing with life.
With our life.
And suddenly, I feel… overwhelmed. In the good, dramatic, main character energy way. Five winters ago, I never imagined this. I never imagined peace lasting long enough to become routine. I never imagined Christmas becoming something warm instead of something I survived.
Damien slips an arm around my waist. “Penny for your thoughts?”
“Oh, you know,” I say lightly, “just thinking about how we’ve defeated darkness, built a business, created two gremlins- ”
“Children,” he corrects.
“ -gremlins,” I repeat firmly, “and still somehow look stunning while doing it.”
He presses his forehead to mine, laughing under his breath. “You’re impossible.”
“And yet,” I whisper, leaning into him, “you’re still here. Fifth winter in a row.”
The children collapse into a messy pile of giggles near the front window, snow still melting in their hair. And just like that, the past no longer aches. It just reminds me how far we’ve come.
This fifth winter is proof of everything we rebuilt.
Proof of everything we survived.
Proof that love, messy, loud, ridiculous love, was stronger than anything that tried to break us.
I take a deep breath of cocoa-and-paper-scented air and smile.
Christmas used to mark endings.
Now, it marks how beautifully we’ve begun again.
