Chapter 1 - Timber"Oops," my stepmother said as the Christmas tree struck the floor.
Twenty-three ornaments shattered at once. I knew the number because my mother had made every one of them, one Christmas at a time, before cancer took her. A blue glass moon rolled beneath the couch. The paper angel I'd painted with her when I was six split down the middle.
Vanessa stood in our living room with her hand on her hip, smiling as if she had merely spilled a drink. "The stand must've been loose. Hannah, don't look at me like that."
"I saw you push it."
"Careful," she said. "Your father works too hard for you to ruin Christmas with another scene."
I dropped to my knees among the broken ornaments. I was twenty-four, but the sight of my mother's handwriting on a smashed red bauble made me feel seven. Across the room, Grandma Pearl rose from her chair. She was seventy-six, small, and usually the calmest person in the county.
"Pearl, stay out of this," Vanessa said.
Grandma stepped carefully over the glass. She walked toward the kitchen island, where Vanessa's six-foot gingerbread mansion stood beneath a spotlight. She'd worked on it for three weeks, telling everybody it would win the First Methodist holiday contest. She even made a tiny sugar version of our house.
"Don't you touch that," Vanessa said, her voice suddenly thin.
Grandma put both palms against the cardboard display board and sent the entire confection sliding off the marble. Sugar windows broke. Icing walls folded. The roof cracked against the tiles.
"Timber," Grandma said.
I should have cheered. Instead, I stared at the two women, sick at what anger had made of us. Grandma's face changed too. She looked at the mess and whispered, "I shouldn't have done that."
Vanessa pulled out her phone. "You assaulted my property. I'm calling Robert. I'm telling the church."
She stepped around the broken gingerbread, snatched a cream envelope that had been hidden behind the display, and slipped it into her purse. Grandma saw the printed name through the opening.
WILLOW HOUSE WORKSHOP.
The workshop my mother had left to me.
"Why do you have a real-estate envelope with Leah's workshop on it?" Grandma asked.
May you like
Vanessa's smile returned. "Because by the twenty-sixth, it won't belong to your family anymore."
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