When I finished, she let out a long, slow breath. “Your father is a fool,” she said bluntly. “And that woman is a monster. But you are safe now. You don’t ever have to go back there.” And we didn’t.

Martha, it turned out, lived a quiet, solitary life on the edge of the county line, selling herbs and trapped furs in a town further north.

She was a widow with no children of her own, and she took us in without a second thought. When the local authorities eventually got involved weeks later, my father tried to claim we had simply run away. But Martha was a force to be reckoned with.

She threatened to expose the sheer neglect and cruelty to the entire town, ruining whatever reputation my father had left. He backed down, signing over guardianship and walking away. We never saw him or Bernarda again. Years later, when I was grown and Violeta was a healthy, vibrant teenager, I asked Martha about that cabin.

I told her I knew those woods, and I knew there had never been a cabin in that clearing. She just smiled, a knowing twinkle in her eye. “Sometimes, child,” she said softly, “the world provides exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

You just have to be brave enough to walk through the dark to find it.” I still don’t completely understand how we found that cabin. I don’t know if I was turned around in the woods and stumbled onto a different property, or if something unexplainable happened out there in the freezing dark.

All I know is that my stepmother tried to bury us in the winter woods, but instead, she forced us to walk directly into the home we were always meant to have.