My mother called my six-year-old daughter “a burden” at Christmas dinner, so I took her presents and walked out—but by New Year’s, Grandma was begging for a second chance.

By four in the morning, the snowstorm had turned into an ice storm. The branches of the hemlock trees along Lake Memphremagog groaned under inches of clear, heavy glaze, snapping like rifle shots in the darkness.

Campbell was running a fever. His head bobbed against the headrest, his breathing shallow and rattling. I took the wheel twenty miles ago, guiding the heavy four-wheel-drive through abandoned logging trails until the headlights caught the silhouette of an ancient stone cottage buried in the drifts.

This was Claire’s cottage—the one place Arthur had never listed in the estate probate, the one piece of land Eleanor had never managed to sell because the deed was registered under an old Montreal holding company.

I turned the engine off. The silence was immediate and terrifying.

"Lily," I whispered, unbuckling her from the back. "Time to wake up, honey."

She rubbed her eyes, shivering. "Are we at Grandma's?"

"No, baby. We're at Aunt Claire’s house."

I draped Campbell’s good arm over my shoulder, holding Lily’s hand with my other arm, and dragged him through the waist-deep snow to the porch. The lock was rusted solid, but one hard kick with my winter boot shattered the rotting pine jamb.

Inside, the air smelled of seventy years of damp wool, cedar, and dried lake weeds. I laid Campbell down on an old horsehair sofa near the fieldstone fireplace, wrapping him in three musty quilts from the chest.

"Campbell, stay with me," I said, checking his pulse. It was fast and thready.

"I'm... I'm okay," he lied, his lips blue. "The ledger... Emma, look under the hearth. Claire told Arthur... 1985... before she left."

I didn't waste time. I grabbed an iron poker from beside the grate and wedged it beneath the massive slate hearthstone. With all the strength in my back, I levered the stone upward. It shifted with a grinding shriek, revealing a square recess lined with lead sheeting.

Inside sat a small, heavy steel lockbox.

On top of the box was an envelope, the paper yellowed and brittle with decades of damp cold. Written on the front in elegant, hurried script was a single sentence:

*For my daughter, Emma. When the wolves finally arrive.*

Lily came over, sitting on the cold floor beside me, her small fingers touching the brass clasp. "Mommy, whose name is that?"