Page 47 of Where the Roses Bloom

I folded the letter slowly, careful not to damage the paper.

“She knew,” I said. “Hazel knew it’d be you.”

Willow didn’t answer right away. She just leaned into me, her cheek against my shoulder, heart beating steady through the space between us.

“She saw me before I even got here,” she murmured. “What do you think that means?”

“I think…” I cleared my throat. “I think maybe this wasn’t an accident. You coming here. Us. Any of it.”

She looked down at the stack of letters still wrapped in the linen, then slowly unbound the next one.

The paper was different this time—thinner, brown at the edges, the ink faded. Hazel’s handwriting was still there, but older.

“Looks like she wrote this one years before the last,” Willow said softly.

“What if…” I swallowed. “What if she spent her whole life trying to find a way to break the curse? And the closer she got, the more she saw of you?”

Willow glanced at me, her expression unreadable. “You think I’m part of the fix?”

“I think youarethe fix,” I said. “Hazel said you were the bloom that breaks the curse. That sounds like more than just metaphor.”

Willow ran her fingers over the edge of the next envelope, brow furrowed. “Then what’s in these? Instructions? Warnings? Visions?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’re supposed to find out together.”

I thumbed open the second letter, this onedated nearly twenty years ago. The paper had yellowed deeper at the edges, and Hazel’s handwriting looked a little shakier.

I began to read.

My dearest boy,

I don’t know how to talk about this without my hands shaking.

Your daddy used to say that grief was like a storm: sudden, loud, cruel—and then gone. But I know better. Grief is a seed. It grows. Twists itself around your ribs and finds ways to bloom when you least expect it.

They were good people, your mama and daddy. They loved each other so much it scared me sometimes, because I knew what that meant for a Ward. And now they’re gone. Taken in a way that feels too sudden, too cruel—even for this cursed bloodline.

The curse doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it just waits.

I stopped. Pressed the edge of the letter to my lips for a second. Swallowed hard.

Willow reached for my hand. “You don’t have to read the rest out loud.”

“I want to,” I said. “I think I need to.”

I kept going.

I should have done more. I should havetried harder to break it back then. But I was afraid. Afraid that digging too deep might wake something worse. That trying to lift it might shift it onto your shoulders too soon.

But now you boys are all that’s left, and I won’t let this thing take you too.

If the first letter had felt prophetic, this one felt like a confession, a wound torn open on the page.

Willow blinked hard, swiping at her cheek. “She was trying,” she whispered. “She didn’t know how, but she was trying. Maybe…maybe that’s why she told you magic was nonsense—because she was keeping you safe and doing the work in secret.”

I nodded, throat too tight to answer. I reached for the next envelope in the stack—older still, the ink almost sepia now. The seal wasn’t glued but tucked, like it had been reopened a hundred times.

On the front, in her familiar, looping hand: