I haven’t spoken to her since she left, since the phones have been down and the road blocked. But we’re used to winter storms. To being cut off. And although maybe I should feel alone, isolated and afraid without her, I don’t. She and I have always been more opposite than alike. I am the daughter who wants to be a Walker, and she is the mother who pretends she isn’t: a Walker or a mother. She feels betrayed by my curiosity, my need to know our past—to know who I am.

To understand the darkness that lives in my veins.

And I feel betrayed by her: her silence when she’s home, her refusal to talk about Grandma or about the Walkers who came before us.

I prefer it when she’s away, when I can be alone in the old house.

Mom has never been one to worry about me anyway—she knows I can take care of myself until the road thaws. I could take care of myself even if she never came back.

Inside her room, I kneel down on the floor and reach my arms beneath the bed, past a discarded, half-burnt candle; past dust bunnies that skitter away; and past a pale-yellow sock missing its mate, until I find the wooden box she keeps hidden.

I slide it out, resting the box on the floor in front of me, then quietly open the lid.

Inside rest an assortment of keepsakes: old photographs and family letters kept safely inside their envelopes, my grandmother’s pearl necklace, an old music box once owned by Henrietta Walker. Family heirlooms tucked away beneath a bed where they will eventually be forgotten. Things that remind me of who I am—that make me feel less alone.

And under it all, I find the book.

I touch the faded words handwritten on the front: Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine. And sketched below it is a compass with the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.

But I don’t open the book—not here in my mother’s room, where I fear she might sense it once she returns, sense that I sat on her floor with the book fanned open in front of me. So I tuck it under my arm, the weight of my family history inside its pages, and leave the honey-scented room before I leave too many clues that I was here.