Chapter 11 - Winter's Arrival
December arrived with a fierce, blinding blanket of white snow that buried the Elm Ridge estate in absolute silence.
Unlike the artificial white of Vivienne's aesthetic, this white was wild, chaotic, and alive. Icicles hung like crystal daggers from the eaves, and the driveway was a maze of deep drifts that required a snowplow to clear twice a week.
Inside, the house was a carnival of warmth. We hung strings of popcorn and dried cranberries around the living room fireplace. Maren insisted on decorating our Christmas tree—a massive, imperfect Fraser fir we chopped down ourselves at a local farm—with every handmade ornament, mismatched ribbon, and crooked paper star she could craft.
"It looks ridiculous," Nana Bello laughed one evening, stepping back to admire our lopsided masterpiece while holding a mug of hot cocoa.
"It looks magnificent," I corrected, wrapping my arm around Maren as she pointed proudly at a glitter-crusted paper angel dangling precariously from the lowest branch.
ColeCorp was coasting smoothly through the holiday season. With the new co-CEO handling daily operations, I had taken the entire month of December off—the first time in my career I had ever stepped away from the corporate grid for more than a long weekend.
One snowy afternoon, while Maren was taking a nap wrapped in her favorite yellow blanket, I walked down to the basement storage room. I hadn't opened the back boxes since the great purge, but something drew me down the concrete stairs into the dim, cool air.
There, tucked behind a stack of old server racks and architectural blueprints, was a dusty cardboard box labeled in Elena's hurried, elegant handwriting: Botanical Sketches - Summer '21.
I pulled it out, blew a layer of dust off the cardboard, and carried it up to the kitchen island.
Inside were dozens of loose charcoal and watercolor studies—ferns, wildflowers, jagged oak leaves, and tiny, intricate sketches of ants crawling across garden soil. There, on the corner of a heavy sketch paper, was the original study for the painted rabbit that had once lived on our pantry baseboard.
Nana Bello walked in, drying her hands on a kitchen towel, and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the papers spread across the white marble.
"Oh, Mr. Cole," she whispered, her eyes shining with sudden moisture. "I thought Vivienne threw all of these out."
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"She threw out the ones in the attic," I said, tracing the charcoal lines with my thumb. "She never looked in the basement archives."
We spent the next two hours sorting through them, framing three of the most vibrant floral sketches in simple dark wood frames. By evening, they hung in the main hallway right where the abstract white canvases used to be, welcoming everyone who entered the house with a burst of real, living color.
