Firefly Nights

CHAPTER 20.50

    Christmas morning came in soft, like breath against glass.

The windows were glazed in frost so fine it looked brushed there on purpose—delicate as lace, woven from cold and memory. Beyond them, the pasture still held to shadow, the snow untouched but for the mess their dog had made before dawn. But in the kitchen, the air had weight. Not heavy, not sharp. Just full—the kind of full that settled into the walls and warmed the floorboards. Cinnamon. Butter. The slow hiss of something thick and sweet cracking beneath a lid on the stove. And flour, fine and floating, clung to every surface like it belonged there. Like it had waited all year just to dust this morning.

Laney stood at the counter, elbow-deep in a mixing bowl, her wrist snapping with the kind of precision that only came from doing something too many times with no one watching. She was silent, focused, like the sugar had wronged her and she meant to punish it.

"You're using too much," I said, not looking up from the pan I was greasing. "That's not how Mama did it."

She didn't glance over. Just kept stirring, jaw set like she'd already lost this argument in her head and was too stubborn to let me win it again out loud.

"You don't know how Mama did it," she muttered. "You were always off chasing calves or hiding in the tack room writing bad poems."

I smiled without meaning to. "And you were too busy trying to grow up in her mirror."

That earned me a pause. Just long enough for the whisk to still and her spine to shift. Then: a breath, a small smirk, the kind you don't give unless you've bled with someone. "You remember everything wrong."

"Maybe," I said, brushing a thumb along the edge of the pan to catch the slip of butter pooling there. "But I remember her saying not to pack the brown sugar. You're packing it."

"She guessed at everything. Half the time she didn't even check the oven."

"She didn't have to. She could feel when it was done."

Laney's eyes flicked toward me then, just briefly. Something passed between us—not sharp, not soft. Just old. Worn in. The kind of look only sisters knew how to give.

"She thought she'd have more time," I said quietly, not meaning to say it out loud.

She didn't answer. Didn't have to. We both knew what wasn't being said.

That Mama thought she'd see Piper's curls bouncing in front of the tree. That she'd be here to argue over molasses and oven temp, to wipe James's nose with the sleeve of her sweater and kiss the top of his head like she always did to ours. That she'd watch Laney get married. That she'd see me fall in love without warning.

That she'd get more Christmas mornings.

But she didn't. And the recipe was just one more thing she'd carried in her hands and never passed down.

From the living room, Piper's voice rang out, high and full of that particular kind of delight only five-year-olds seem capable of. Like her heart didn't know how to hold back. "Auntie Lem! You did find the unicorn glitter pens!"

Her feet thudded against the old wood floor a second later, socks slipping, curls bouncing, and I could already see the way her cheeks would be flushed from excitement, not the cold. That kind of joy was loud, and it filled the room like light cracking through old shutters.

Beside me, Laney let out a breath that caught somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, brushing a speck of flour from her knuckle. "You spoil her," she said, but the edge in it was dulled. Worn smooth with something softer.

"She's five," I murmured, turning back to the stove, though my voice didn't carry the defense it used to. "Let her think magic's still real a little longer."