Where Frost Meets Bloom
Iris Carmichael pressed her forehead to the bus window and watched Coldwater Cove assemble itself from the grey, population one thousand two hundred and forty-seven, all of it hiding under a fresh sheet of snow. She hadn't come back for the town. She'd come for the will. Eleven years after the night that shattered the Carmichael and Frost families, Iris is summoned to the reading with one stipulation: she must spend the winter in the old house on Linden Street, the house Lucian Frost has maintained in her family's name for over a decade. The man who was there when everything broke. The man who never once called to ask if she was still alive. What the will promises as a simple inheritance is actually a trap, or a gift, depending on who's holding the pen. Margaret Carmichael left more than property. She left a ledger of debts, a second key to a locked room in the house, and a condition that binds Iris to every decision made in Coldwater Cove for ninety days. Victor Hollis, the town's quietest man, knows which signatures are missing from the original deed. Eleanor Carmichael, Iris's mother, has been keeping a journal no one else is meant to read. And Jasper Vance has been watching the property lines from across the cove, waiting for the snow to melt enough to see what's buried under the dock. The Frost family, Owen, Naomi, and Margaret, have guarded the house with a loyalty that borders on obsession. Lucian is the last of them to still knock on Iris's door without anger in his hands. But the will's final page names a beneficiary neither family expected, and when the name is read aloud, the winter stops feeling like a season and starts feeling like a verdict. Iris can leave. The bus runs south on the first clear morning. Or she can stay through the frost, let the thaw come in its own time, and see what grows in the ground her family poisoned long ago.