“Cass died, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” Her mom’s voice broke on the last word.

Miriam gasped, her heart clenching.

Despite not having seen her in ten years, Cassiopeia Carrigan was the North Star in Miriam’s life, her role model and hero. Her mother’s aunt was the gray sheep of her family. She’d walked away from the family’s booming bakery business to open, of all things, a Christmas tree farm. More than that, the property was a Christmas extravaganza, with a tree farm, a Christmas-themed inn, and a two-month-long festival full of every Christmas tradition ever invented. An immersive Christmasland experience.

“I’m still Jewish,” Cass would explain. “I just couldn’t find another job where I only had to talk to people two months out of the year.” Cass was An Eccentric. Every winter break, her parents had taken Miriam to Carrigan’s Christmasland for the world’s least traditional Hanukkah.

“Miri? You still there?” Her mother’s voice cut through her memories. She sounded exhausted and broken, two things Miriam would have said her mother was incapable of feeling.

“How?” Miriam asked, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of anything taking out the human tornado that had been Cass Carrigan as Miriam knew her.

Her mother took in a sharp breath. “She was sick for a long time, Miri. Years. We thought she was getting better, but she had a relapse, and she was gone fast.”

Cass Carrigan, her Cass, had been sick and no one told her, so that she could say goodbye. In the lifelong list of her mother’s betrayals, this one was worse than most.

“When is the service? I want to sit shiva. I’ll be there, even”—she tried not to choke on the words—“if Dad is coming.” Her mother was silent for a beat.

“I’ll text you all the details,” she said, finally.

Just like that, it was settled. Miriam would fly back to the place she’d been avoiding for a decade. She told the voice in her head screaming in panic that it would be fine.

She’d spent every Christmas, and some summers, at Carrigan’s. She’d thrived under Cass’s love—a heat lamp compared to the frigid conditions of her house—running wild through the trees with her cousin Hannah and their childhood best friend, Levi. Being safe, for little pockets of time, from the worst of her father’s behavior. Until her dad finally went too far, and she’d stopped going anywhere near her family—anywhere he’d ever been. There hadn’t been goodbyes or any explanation for the people she’d left behind.

Miriam had kept in touch, sort of, with a happy birthday text here, a letter there, sometimes sending a flower arrangement for the High Holy Days. Nothing that went past the surface. She’d never meant for her absence to be permanent. She’d just needed some time.