“Bastiaan is angry with me.” I scraped ice from the tip of my skate lace.

“He’ll move past that. Bastiaan has strong emotions, but he has a stronger heart. It doesn’t take him long to find the truth through the muck of his feelings. Give him another chance.”

“If there is another chance.” When would I see him again? “He doesn’t know about my curse.”

“That secret is yours to keep or to tell. It should not be the reason people accept or reject you.”

I couldn’t believe she was here, right in front of me, sharing wisdom and love and words and life. My own mother. I wanted to say so much, to spill my soul on the snow and be fully hers. Her daughter through and through. My desires and hopes for family culminated in this moment. I felt my mistakes sliding from my shoulders the longer we spoke.

Urgency, panic, loneliness, my iced-over heart all turned to shadows in my mind. In their place came the freedom of unadulterated companionship. “Will you come to the Well with me?”

“Of course,” Mutti said, but she sounded sad. What was she leaving behind to be with me? To stay with me? I didn’t blame her for wanting to return to Windmill Cottage and the family and safety she had there. But it was such a long journey back. And I wasn’t sure I could continue forward without her.

I’d only just found her.

We laced our skates and shared a late breakfast. She didn’t eat much but declared herself ready to go as soon as I packed away the last of my dried meat.

The skating was slow, almost leisurely. No more fleeing. Even with a slower pace, Mutti struggled to keep up, so I slowed even more. I tried not to think of the chase I put her through and the toll it must have taken on her already-thin body. She didn’t seem to hold it against me.

I told her about the time I used to race on skates. I explained my limp from the pox and how skating was the only freedom from that pain. She pointed out her favorite type of shadows through the trees, and we even held hands for a time. I couldn’t get enough of her presence, her voice, her face, her words of wisdom. Her love.

It was everything I remembered about her but more.

All my life, she’d been searching for me. Wanting me. For me. Now that I’d experienced this mother’s love for her daughter, it compelled me further to break this curse and give Anouk a wish to find her son. So he could know what it was like to be truly and deeply and infinitely loved.