Long before Clara Voss became the steady presence who quietly holds Rowanhollow together, she was a young woman returning to a place she'd loved as a child — arriving in the dead of winter to care for the aunt she hadn't seen in years, in a village she hadn't set foot in since she was a girl. Under the Chestnut Tree follows her first season back — evenings by the fire listening to Aunt Mae's stories, a watchful village elder who says little and means everything, a beekeeper whose hives go strangely calm whenever Clara's near, and a little girl who simply won't stop visiting. It's a story about grief sitting quietly beside comfort, about a half-remembered home becoming a real one, and about the exact moment a place stops being somewhere you're staying and becomes somewhere you're from. This is the one piece of Clara's history you won't find anywhere else — not even in Book One.

"Under the Chestnut Tree"

by Nora Fairfax