“Nope, she sure ain’t,” Sharon said, her voice a lot more frank and Tennessee, now that my mom wasn’t there to correct her grammar and use of colloquial language.

“Aunt Minerva keeps sending me potions to put in her breakfast. They have labels like Joy, Clarity, Wish Fulfillment—no telling what’s inside. Nothing the FDA would truck with, I’m sure. At first, I was like, I’m not going to drug her. Plus, she’s still writing, just not the tenth book. But she’s been crankier than usual lately. I’ve got half a mind to put one of them vials in her oatmeal just to mellow her out.”

I was still chuckling as I rowed across the river.

Technically, I could have taken my car to the little cabin in the woods. But that would have required driving nearly sixty miles back south to the only bridge over the Connecticut River in these parts, then driving back up the New Hampshire side of the state to get to the cabin.

Besides, paddling across the river reminded me of my summer and holiday visitations during my youth, when I made sandwiches for Mom’s lunch and dinner and would row them over. Sometimes, I’d leave them like offerings at my mother’s back door when she didn’t answer my soft knock. But sometimes, she’d let me in, and we’d eat them together while she told me about what she’d written that day.

I tied the boat to the dock just like I did back then, but this time instead of leaving sandwiches at the back door, I schlepped my suitcase, the records, and all the groceries I’d bought up the hill to the cabin and walked right on through the back door.

My mother never bothered with locking the place up. Even if it wasn’t located in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire, it wasn’t like there was much in the one-room cabin to steal.

Just a bed, a little table, a few milk crates filled with records, and a 90s-era Brother WP-80 word processor. The vintage typing machine sat on top of a desk with one chair, which was the only designated sitting surface in the entire place.

My mother had become an aggressively solitary writer for her fae series. And she’d made it abundantly clear that no one else was invited to hang out in her writing cabin for too long—even children who’d made her lunch had to sit on the floor or eat standing up.

But she hadn’t returned to her fan-favorite series for over a decade now. Everything in the cabin was covered in a thick layer of dust.

I threw open the windows to clear out the musty smell of disuse. Then I opened one of the many cartons stacked beside her desk, which contained the A5 paper Mom preferred over the standard letter-size.